KUNUNURRA – It all started when Baz Luhrmann decided to come to the East Kimberley region in Western Austraia to film his epic movie ‘Australia’ and when, in September 2008, Nicole Kidman mentioned the “fertility waters of Kununurraâ€.
Now the Kununurra tourism industry is looking forward to an influx of couples hoping to fall pregnant as a result of swimming in and around Kununurra’s supposedly fertile waters
A collation of the year’s website statistics has shown that Nicole’s comment about Kununurra resulted in a 50 percent increase in the www.kununurratourism.com website page visitors and a 75 percent increase in the number of unique visitors to the site in September.
Narelle Brook, general manager of the Kununurra Visitor Centre, said, “Generally, we can expect 300-400 unique monthly visitors to our site, in September 2008 however, we received an incredible 12,600 visits. The page views went from an average of around 20,000 to 40,600.
“It really is quite amazing what effect one woman’s words can have right across the globe.â€
It seems that the Italians love Nicole Kidman the most as almost 55 percent of the website visitors found “Kununurra†via two Italian search engines.
As for their country of origin, 50.9 percent of hits were from Italy, 19.6 percent from Australia and eight percent from the United States.
