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In 1815 the Blue Mountains were first identified as a unique landscape when Governor Macquarie took a tour over them and located the nineteenth century principles of the Sublime and Picturesque within its' landscape. Until this time the Blue Mountains were considered to be a hostile impenetrable barrier to the West. This paper examines some of the ways the Blue Mountains has been represented in the past, and has been identified as a tourist destination through interpretations imposed on the landscape by the tourist industry since that time. The areas covered deal with the heritage of British Colonialism as a way of forming opinions about the Australian landscape. Then, the theories of the Picturesque and Sublime are examined when applied to the Blue Mountains landscape. The final chapters in this paper deal with contemporary issues that have shaped the way the tourist industry is encouraged to encounter the Blue Mountains landscape / Master of Arts (Hons)

[Truncated abstract] Global tourism accounted for US$623 billion in 2004, representing 6% of the world's exports of goods and services (World Tourism Organisation, 2005). In the last decade, natural and man-made disasters have adversely affected the tourism industry. Consequently, the risk and uncertainty associated with travel have increased, potentially impacting on tourists' behaviour. However, while travel motivators have received a great deal of research attention, travel constraints have not been examined to the same degree. The present study explores risk and uncertainty and their roles in people's decisionmaking processes in a tourism context. In doing so, attempts were made to clarify the distinction between the risk and uncertainty constructs, which in prior research often have been used interchangeably, leading to some confusion about their roles. The distinction between the perceptual and attitudinal constructs also was clarified, as prior research into their differential impacts has been limited. To achieve these objectives, data were collected from online research panel members in Australia, the United States (USA), the United Kingdom (UK), New Zealand, South Korea, China and Japan, as part of a larger tourism study. While the majority of the country samples were drawn from the general population, the Japan sample constituted an international