THE YEAR 2005. AUSTRALIA WAS half a decade into the new millennium. John Howard was still prime minister and the country was basking in the afterglow of the Sydney 2000 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games, which helped put it on the map as an international tourist hub like never before. The term ‘glamping’ was coined and Airbnb, three years off launching, was still seven years away from Australian shores. A 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg had only just co-founded Facebook in his Harvard dorm room a year earlier and Instagram, which launched in 2010, was still a twinkle in its founders’ eyes. And Australian Traveller published its first issue on 26 May.
In the same month, a small fishing camp opened on Bremer Island in North East Arnhem Land in partnership with the local Yol u community. At its heart, a rustic Robinson Crusoe-style shack decorated with all manner of flotsam and jetsam washed up from near and far. In times past, Macassan traders visited these shores and traded with the Yol u. Since then, Banubanu Beach Retreat has evolved into a luxury island sanctuary thanks to the vision of its founders Helen Martin and Trevor Hosie, with five beachfront bungalows and a penthouse perched high on the sand dunes to take in the glittering expanse of the Arafura Sea, complemented by a restaurant, bar and pool. The original shack is now staff quarters that serves as a museum to the tides and passage of time – a whale’s backbone, a boat tiller, a life ring bearing the name Jakarta. Banubanu, like so much in Australia, has evolved since 2005.
Martin, an Arrernte woman, has steered the ship over the last 18 years as Banubanu’s managing director. But she is also a director on the Ikara Wilpena Enterprises board and, as chair of the Northern Territory Government Aboriginal Advisory Council for seven years, was instrumental in writing the Northern Territory’s 2030 Aboriginal Tourism Strategy, the first in two decades, which maps out a vision for the sector’s growth. When she and Hosie opened Banubanu, First Nations tourism in the Territory was still emerging. Some of the trailblazers, including Timmy Burarrwa a of Bawaka homeland in East Arnhem Land, Victor Cooper of Ayal Aboriginal Tours Kakadu, Nitmiluk Tours CEO Jane Runyu-Fordimail and Anangu leader
