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Sydney
The music is mysterious, swirling, evocative. Dusk is falling on the Australian Outback. An attractive couple dance barefoot beneath the boab trees: 'He arrived as Mr Lee, assistant finance manager. He departed as Lee Ming.'
Mr Lee and his unnamed love interest are the type of Asian visitors - young, affluent and adventurous - that Tourism Australia is hoping to attract to the sunburnt shores through its glitzy A$40 million (HK$213 million) 'Come Walkabout' campaign, being rolled out in 22 countries.
But the enigmatic commercials, devised to piggyback off the epic movie Australia starring Nicole Kidman  and Hugh Jackman,  have generated about as much derision as Baz Luhrmann's  lumbering, dust-and-jodhpurs fairy tale.
If the tourism industry hoped for a Luhrmann-led revival similar to the mania for New Zealand that followed Peter Jackson's   Lord of the Rings trilogy, they have been sorely misled.
Australia has been widely condemned by critics in New York, London and Sydney as the biggest turkey since Waterworld.
Kidman's depiction of English aristocrat Lady Sarah Ashley  has drawn the venom of the British press: Melanie Reid  called her acting 'frozen, brittle and vapid' in The Times,   while Germaine Greer   lambasted the movie as 'a fraudulent and misleading fantasy' that deliberately suppresses Australia's sordid past and its wicked treatment of Aborigines. The film will be released in Hong Kong next month.
'Whichever adman came up with the line, 'Where the bloody hell are you?' was prescient,' Sydney marketing writer Julian Lee  said, referring to the theme of Tourism Australia's previous campaign. 'International visitor figures continue to spiral downwards.'
Creating an entirely new international brand based on some lame poetry, a couple of boab trees and a sunset is certainly a high-risk strategy. Audiences will look in vain for images of Australia's established drawcards, such as the Sydney Opera House, the Great Barrier Reef or Bondi Beach.
Even someone with Luhrmann's chutzpah will struggle to make the Outback sexy -  fewer than 20,000 people a year trek out to the East Kimberley  region, where most of the commercials are set.
Luckily, most of these are not reckless enough to hold a dinner party near a crocodile-infested billabong - this part of northern Australia is also home to flash floods, cyclones and legions of spiders and snakes, including 35 species of deadly sea snakes, found along its rugged coastline.
The harsh reality is that most urbanites would rather hack off a limb  than venture into the Outback.   Domestic tourism fell 4 per cent in the 12 months to September as the number of Australians holidaying overseas continued to grow. 'The report confirms what we have known for some time,' Tourism Australia chief Geoff Buckley  says. 'That domestic tourism has been doing it tough.'
Hopes that Luhrmann might provide salvation for the troubled tourism sector are fading as quickly as the box-office receipts for Australia. Even the federal tourism minister, Martin Ferguson,  has conceded that the movie's lacklustre performance in America is  a problem - lower box-office numbers  would result in 'less bang' for the marketing campaign.
Tourism experts say that while the new commercials - directed by Luhrmann and starring Aboriginal child actor Brandon Walters -   are stylish and evocative, their message - that a holiday in Australia will give spiritual nourishment to stressed-out city types from Hong Kong - is as impenetrable as a desert sandstorm.
They argue that the  campaign fails to address Australia's  lack of new attractions, resorts and hotels or improved air links to growing markets in Asia.
'Without increased investment in tourism infrastructure by government, we are not planning for the future,' says Olivia Wirth,  executive director of the Tourism and Transport Forum.  'It's not about the next marketing campaign but about addressing some long-term issues.'
In the movie, Lady Sarah battles an inhospitable climate, Japanese bombs and unscrupulous cattle barons to win the man of her dreams and the child she has always wanted. Sadly, as Australia's struggling tourism industry is discovering, in real life, things rarely go so well to script.



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Like the film 'Australia', tourism adverts fail to draw the crowds