We only get out of sightseeing what we put into it. By Kerryn Goldsworthy.

IN 1980, the Australian writer Murray Bail published a wonderful novel called Homesickness, in which a group of Australian tourists travel round the world being more or less mystified by the endless succession of museums and other tourist attractions on their itinerary. The book is really about the way that, as with so many other things, we only get out of sightseeing what we put into it; about the way that you can’t learn from a new experience if you don’t know enough even to ask the right questions; about the ways that different kinds of knowledge can be focused and framed, this way or that, to manipulate perceptions, sympathies and beliefs.

At the end of the book the tourist group finds itself in a disused church in some unnamed country, where they pay their museum-entrance fees only to find, when they get inside, that the space contains nothing but dramatic lighting that casts their own shadows on the white wall; gradually they begin to realise what this room is for. “By watching, by contemplating, they could fill in and fit the details. Gradually, standing quietly, they began to see themselves. Possibilities included the past and the near future: it was possible to consider a sense of place ...”

I once had a comparable experience in the Jewish Museum in Vienna, where, after having been brought face to face with some unspeakable images and documents from history of the Holocaust, I then had to watch video footage that I hadn’t known was being shot, only minutes earlier, of my own reactions to the Nazi orders and records, to the photographs and masks of the dead.

What is tourism? Why do we travel? What is it that we hope to see or learn?

The river port of Goolwa near the mouth of the River Murray is a town that makes some of these questions rise in the mind, for there are many, almost too many, reasons why you might go there. It is the business of any tourist industry to package its attractions under various headings – wine tourism, heritage tourism, eco-tourism and so forth – but somehow Goolwa overflows all of these definitional boundaries, in several different directions. If you are interested in colonial architecture, surfing, river formation, Aboriginal narratives, sailing, trains, the building of wooden boats, the habits and habitat of the Superb Blue Wren, the social history of the colony in the mid-19th century, fishing, the River Murray’s paddle-steamer past or the imminent disaster of its future, then Goolwa is one of the places you need to go.

The Signal Point interpretive centre, the most impressive and extensive tourist information centre that I’ve seen in South Australia, covers many of these topics and even goes some way towards making connections between them. Signal Point is a large, cross-shaped complex of displays – videos and film footage, old photographs, maps, artefacts, re-creations, and games for kids – full of images and information about river trade, boat-building, geological formations, environmental issues and Aboriginal history.

A video narrated and partly produced by the Ngarrindjeri people, whose Dreaming it is, tells the story of Ngurunderi. This is a complex and much-disputed creation myth about the river system, the Murray mouth and the whole Encounter Bay coast, all formed in the course of Ngurunderi’s journey in pursuit of his two runaway wives. This story and various narrative variations and digressions from it were at the heart of the so-called Hindmarsh Island affair of the 1980s and 1990s, a prolonged four-way collision of Aboriginal culture, Western scholarship, financial interests and Federal politics that finally resulted in the building of a bridge from Goolwa to Hindmarsh Island and the opening-up of bitter, deep and permanent divisions in South Australian society.

In the Signal Point version, Ngurunderi lays about him with clubs and spears to form islands. He hurls his canoe into the sky where it becomes the Milky Way, and chases Ponde, the Murray Cod, downstream as the giant fish widens the river with his thrashing tail. Ngurunderi stocks the river with fish by cutting Ponde up, and naming each piece as he throws it back into the water: “You bony bream, you perch, you callop, you catfish.”

Like many Aboriginal stories, this one involves a cosmology that represents the human body and soul, the life of plants and animals, and the formations of the land and skyscape as all being intimately connected, along a spiritually grounded continuum of experience. It’s a world view quite alien to Western notions of owning animals or land, and it creates a specific and intimate sense of place.

The work of the region’s artists often has this integrated feel: the Porter Street Wildlife Gallery, the studio gallery of artists Kathleen Cain and Brenda Holden, is devoted largely to representations of the local landscape and creatures by these and other artists. The strangely charming life-sized galvanised-iron birds exhibited there by artist Brian Cufe can be seen in their real-life versions simply by walking out the front door and looking around.

Oddly enough, though, the British Empire’s colonial development of the area in the mid-19th century also contributed to the feeling you get in Goolwa and the Encounter Bay towns of its being an independently developed and cohesive region. Australia’s first-ever public iron railway was built between Goolwa and Port Elliot, as the overland link in a system of transporting goods and produce from the inland down the river and then across to the navigable harbour at Port Elliot. The line was later extended to Victor Harbor and is still used as the route for the Cockle Train, a scenic round-trip by steam train. Scenic trips in the other direction can be taken by boat, south-east along the lower Murray River and into Coorong National Park.

There are two kinds of tourism development: the kind that enhances and showcases the uniqueness of locality, that deepens your sense of being in a particular and unique place; and, by contrast, the kind that flattens out differences and ends up making every place look the same.

Most of the tourism development in Goolwa has been of the first variety, through conservation and preservation of the town’s unique qualities and rich history. Even getting there is part of that experience; the peaceful drive from Mt Barker down what has been called “the quiet side of the Fleurieu” falls into two neat halves at the hinge of Strathalbyn, where the lusher and hillier landscapes start to give way to wider, drier, more opened-out and long-distance views, and you can see the geography changing as you head south to Goolwa.

And finally there’s the beach, almost deserted, and breathtaking in the washed-out winter sunlight. It’s clear pale biscuit-coloured sand from horizon to horizon, punctuated every now and then by some benign living creature: a young stranger in a wetsuit, who says hello as he heads for the water at a brisk trot; a nice sixty-ish woman with rolled-up trousers and bare feet, who tells you breathlessly that she’s walked nearly all the way to Middleton and back; a small and ancient arthritic dog that totters a few steps back and forth and wags a feeble tail as though glad to be out and about for once and snuffling up the salty air. And ahead of you there’s the great Southern Ocean towards which both Ngurunderi and Captain Sturt journeyed downstream for so long and finally saw, crashing in from all the way south-west to Antarctica.