084 | Bringing the Gap: Tourism, Agriculture and Community

In this episode of the Tourism Hub Podcast, host Despina Karatzias is on location at the 2025 ART Conference, one of Australia’s most important gatherings for regional tourism, sitting down with Yvette Myhill from Destination Riverina Murray. Yvette manages tourism across a region stretching from Kosciuszko to the South Australian border, working with 22 local governments, and she brings a grounded, no-filter perspective on what is actually happening in rural and regional Australia right now.

The conversation opens on a question that defined this year’s conference: What are we here for? To deliver exceptional visitor experiences, or to build sustainable communities? It sounds like a philosophical question, but it has real operational implications for how destination networks and operators are choosing to invest their time and resources. The social impact of tourism, its invisible benefits to rural communities, its role in keeping towns economically viable, its connection to everything from succession planning to renewable energy projects, was the thread running through the entire programme, and Yvette unpacks why this year felt different.

Agritourism is at the centre of a lot of that conversation. Yvette has been working on an agritourism development strategy for the Riverina Murray region, and she talks honestly about where the gap still sits: between an agricultural industry that understands farming and a tourism industry that understands visitors, yet neither fully speaks the other’s language. The farmers who have made it work are the mentors. The legislative reform is happening in the background. And the case for agritourism as a form of income diversification during drought is not aspirational; in some communities, it is already what keeps people on the land.

There is also a road trip. Yvette and her six-year-old son, Banjo, drove 10,000 kilometres across regional Australia over three weeks from the Victorian border to the Gulf of Queensland and back down the east coast. She stepped into the visitor’s shoes, stopping where she hadn’t planned to, asking locals what to do, and relying on Google Business profiles and reviews the way real visitors do. The opal fossicking experience she discovered in Quilpie, Queensland, set up by the local visitor centre using mine offcuts from a dumping site just outside of town, is one of the best examples of low-cost, place-connected experience design you will hear anywhere. Her son talked about it for three weeks.

The episode closes on data, specifically, how banking data is finally reaching smaller LGAs in New South Wales for the first time, giving communities access to visitor spending and demographic information that simply did not exist before. Yvette and Despina talk about where that intersects with AI’s growing capacity to make sense of regional visitor data at scale, and what that means for the rural communities that will be able to tell about their own visitor economies.

Timestamps

00:00  Welcome to the Tourism Hub Podcast

01:10  The social impact shift — what made this year’s ART Conference different

03:28  Agritourism in the Riverina Murray — the opportunity, the gap, and the farmers leading the way

08:37  10,000 kilometres with a six-year-old — what the road trip revealed about the visitor experience

11:18  Pre-booking vs discovering on arrival — how real visitors actually plan

12:13  Online reviews, Google Business profiles, and why they matter more than operators think

13:42  Industry training, mentoring programmes, and the Destination Inspiration programme

Guest

Yvette Myhill,  Destination Riverina Murray, New South Wales

Resources mentioned

2025 Australian Regional Tourism Convention

2026 Australian Regional Tourism Convention: https://regionaltourism.com.au/convention/

New South Wales Visitor Economy Strategy 2035

Destination Inspiration programme, Destination Riverina Murray in collaboration with its Victorian RTO counterpart

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Show hosted by Despina Karatzias and brought to you in association with the Institute of Excellence and the Australian Regional Tourism Network. 

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