Tourists overlook Megalong Valley

Some of these lookouts do nothing for the view and landscape.. “Animal imagery seems their inevitable lot,” wrote the cultural critic Jonathan Culler. “They are said to move in droves, herds, swarms or flocks; they are as mindless and docile as sheep but as annoying as a plague of insects.” The appetite for self-delusion foreshadowed by the Claude Glass — for manipulating the object of the tourist gaze until it subscribes to preconceived desires — has become universalized. People converge on celebrated sites, taking turns to have their photo taken at the viewpoint, while out of shot a queue of other aspiring influencers await their turn. Whatever a traveler’s professed motives, she argued, they are more truthfully engaged in the most egocentric pursuit imaginable: escaping (or at least postponing) the “certainty of annihilation.” By removing us from the routine of domestic life, travel disguises the ineluctable fact of mortality “in a narrative about how you are doing many exciting and edifying things: you are experiencing, you are connecting, you are being transformed, and you have the trinkets and photos to prove it.”