Culture of Aborigines Attracts Tourists to the Great Outback : Australia: Visitors marvel at rock art carved into sun-baked slabs of red stone. Myths and legends of original populations gain new dimensions.

A pack of tourists follows the steps of Aborigine Robert Lerossignol through the hard, gritty outback of central Australia that has been home to his culture for 50,000 years.

He explains the significance of rock art carved into sun-baked slabs of red stone, sifts through ancient fossils in a dried-up seabed and shows how native plants nourished a daily diet and cultivated 1,000-year-old outback medicines.

This land where Lerossignol has grown up holds myths and legends which run deep in aboriginal culture, and which explain the outback’s harsh, ancient terrain and vast mysteries.

But the land is also at the center of a fast-growing trend in Australian tourism--aboriginal culture treks which lead tourists through outback plains and aboriginal communities once tucked far away from white Australia.

Such tours, often fully owned and operated by Aborigines, promise an economic lifeline for many impoverished aboriginal communities while satisfying escalating demand for more adventurous, authentic and educational travel experiences.

“Actually, tourism was our second choice,” explains Lerossignol, 51, who along with his wife Le-Ross, runs Oak Valley Tours about an hour’s drive south of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory. “We looked at farming ostriches at first.”

Tourism officials say travelers are growing more aware of the historic and emotional bond between Australia and its original inhabitants and are reaching out for tourism experiences which evoke that relationship.

“There is a demand from the Western world for different cultural experiences,” said Andrea Martin, aboriginal tourism officer in the Northern Territory, which has Australia’s largest aboriginal population.

There are now about 300,000 Aborigines, or 1.8% of the total population, from an estimated 2 million at the time of white settlement in 1788. About 25% of the current aboriginal population live in the Northern Territory.

“People in general are moving away from mass tourism to demanding something that provides a different perspective on the world,” said Martin.

The tours are as diverse as aboriginal communities themselves. Some offer day trips exploring lifestyle features such as hunting and food gathering techniques, traditional songs, paintings, dance and storytelling.

Others are more intense, immersion-style trips lasting several days, a week or even longer on aboriginal homelands.

“There is a very real desire in Australia to get know something of the culture of traditional people and people who are still living on the land,” said Diane James, a white Australian who began Desert Tracks, an aboriginal tour company, in 1988.

James said international and Australian tourism numbers have risen sharply in the past two years at Desert Tracks, which she describes as “lifestyle tours” consisting of three or four days camping with Aborigines and becoming immersed in their culture.

Desert Tracks is now wholly owned by Aborigines who run tours on a trial basis before becoming shareholders in the company, which is based near Uluru--the aboriginal name for the red monolith once officially known as Ayers Rock.

“It’s providing employment and a feasible business that uses as its base traditional knowledge rather than people having to be trained in a whole lot of other skills,” said James, 40, who speaks two of the local aboriginal languages.

The tours also reflect a curiosity for a culture that has been marginalized and discriminated against from the time British ships first arrived in the 18th Century.

Uluru, which reverted from Ayers Rock to its traditional name after being handed back to the Anangu community in 1985, is a focus for aboriginal creation stories and a magnet for tours.

The Northern Territory returned large swathes of land back to traditional aboriginal communities and families under federal land rights legislation in 1976, leading to a steady revival of traditional aboriginal lifestyle in some parts of the Territory.