Edinburgh Napier University

  Think of ‘typical’ Australian scenes, and what springs to mind? Likely images include blond surfers on sun-drenched beaches, Indigenous faces patterned with paint, Sydney Opera House, cricket and rugby, dangerous wildlife and outback terrain, and curious marsupials. All of this is ‘true’ in that it does exist, and all of it is ‘authentic’ in that such images do lie (pun intended) in Australian history, popular culture, fauna and geography. But such images are also manufactured by the tourism industry and by social imaginaries, both inside and outside Australia. And when language education intersects strongly with tourism, as it does in the contexts discussed in this chapter, such images operate as a tyrannical ‘known’ that shapes the experiences that students imagine, and so expect, from their Australian sojourn. Language education providers are then under pressure to provide, indeed to manufacture, Australian ‘authenticity’ as this is imagined by cultural out-groups: the students and their friends and families back home, to whom the experience is displayed on social media. This chapter considers the impact of this on English language education in contexts particularly affected by this (imagined) ‘known’: language schools in Australian cities that are very much on tourism’s beaten path.