If you went to LinkedIn, or Central Casting, or even a robotics company, and asked them to come up with the perfect person to develop and promote Tourism Noosa’s ambitious sustainability and environmental agenda, someone exactly like Juanita Terry Bloomfield would walk through the door.
Fortunately for Noosa, we don’t have to. She’s already doing it, and she was born to the role. Since she answered an ad for a team leader to run Noosa’s tourist information centre (then a glorified bus shed) 14 years ago, this vibrant, energetic woman has served our local tourism authority in about seven or eight different management capacities, and helped introduce several game-changing programs, but since assuming the title of Head of Tourism Sustainability and Program Design, putting her front and centre in such diverse areas as Plastic Free Noosa, the Noosa Trail Network and Indigenous tourism, she has found her professional home.
Born in Innisfail, Far North Queensland, only child Juanita spent her toddler years in the idyllic setting of Oak Beach, just south of Port Douglas, where her dad, John, built a Besser block shack on the beachfront along from about half a dozen others, and where she learnt to amuse herself swimming and beachcombing on the beautiful crescent beach. At six, she was on the move again after John sold the shack to entertainer Peter Allen, enabling the family to travel around New Zealand for a year before re-establishing home base at Magnetic Island, where her adventurous parents had met, John a ten quid Pom, Suzanne a young backpacker making her way around the world.
On Magnetic, John took a job skippering a research vessel for the Australian Institute of Marine Science. Says Juanita: “We were there for the next seven years, so my primary school was all about bare feet and snorkeling, doing whatever we wanted. Just an amazing childhood. Then we moved to the Atherton Tableland. I could never quite forgive Dad for leaving Magnetic Island, but there were some good things about Atherton. My parents bought 48 acres. I was able to get a horse, ride a motor bike, drive myself to high school. I did some leadership camps, taught people to windsurf on the dams, all that sort of thing.”
The self-confessed tomboy finished high school in Atherton, thought about becoming a PE teacher, then fled for Sydney to live a little on the wild side with her “outrageous aunt” and became assistant manager at a major harbourside marina, furthering her passion for the sea and for boats. Having decided on a career in tourism and hospitality, next came a diploma of tourism management at the Cairns TAFE, followed by six years in hotel management. Says Juanita: “Then I decided it was time to follow my parents’ example and go backpacking around the world.”
This was where a real education in coalface travel and tourism began.
En route to London with a friend, Juanita decided to stop off and visit a friend who had had not a farm but a kombi in Africa. A two-week stay turned into the most amazing year of her young life, working for overland tour companies crossing war-torn Rwanda and seeing bloated bodies floating down the river as they crossed Lake Tanganyika, and later managing a backpacker hostel in Johannesburg during the euphoria of South Africa’s rugby World Cup victory at the start of the Mandela era, with blacks and whites celebrating together for the first time.
You can’t learn the emotional experience of travel like that in a classroom, and six months in hotel management in London seemed a little tame. Soon Juanita was off again, driving in a van with friends from North Carolina to South America, before finally flying home after three years of high adventure. More amazing trips were to follow, including sailing luxury yachts and working cruise ships around the exotic parts of the world, but she also expanded her experience by managing travel agencies in Australia for companies like STA and Flight Centre before getting that call from dad John to tell her he’d seen an ad in the Noosa local paper.
John and Suzanne Bloomfield had already made their new home in Noosa, and, as Juanita notes: “They’d never picked a bad location before.” She loved the place from the start, and her job marshalling the enthusiasm of more that 100 volunteers needed as the information centre stepped up from its original shed to its current Hastings Street position. From there she moved into membership building, almost doubling it to around 600, and then into industry development, helping introduce on-line booking systems for 150 members.
Next the board tasked her with leading the effort to get the Noosa tourism industry onto a customer service training program to combat the idea that Noosa was unwelcoming. Juanita recalls: “We wanted to make our program friendly and fun to do, so Welcome To Noosa was born, a 90-minute on-line professional service program that covered customer essentials, but the bulk of it was about selling the unique aspects of Noosa, the environment, the lifestyle and the history of why Noosa is the way it is. We launched that with gusto, and I think it really brought the town together from a tourism point of view and helped us get through the GFC.”
Out of that came Tourism Noosa’s first real foray into environmental issues, with Noosa Eco-Check, which kept the same breezy feel of the service program while rewarding levels of eco-compliance. When Version 2 was launched last year, 19 of Noosa’s best practice tourism operators were rewarded with video vignettes showing their eco initiatives.
Thus began a decade of growth of Tourism Noosa’s environmental and sustainability agenda, with Juanita orchestrating the interaction with environmental and community groups. These programs have been so successful, including Noosa piloting a national Plastic Free program, that our town is now seen as an exemplar nationwide. Even Tasmania, often regarded as the home of eco-tourism, last year invited Juanita to speak to 11 councils about how to get tourism working better with environmental groups and councils.
Among the many sustainability initiatives within Juanita’s portfolio, in addition to Plastic Free Noosa, are Zero Emissions Noosa, Waste Warriors (composting) and Trees for Tourism (helping plant new trees in the former state plantation forests of Yurol and Ringtail), but what most excites her is the potential for Noosa Trail Network and Indigenous tourism, both of which have major growth programs in train, subject to funding.
But delivering Tourism Noosa’s sustainable vision hasn’t always been easy, particularly in the tough times of the pandemic. She says: “We worked out pretty quickly that the way to people’s hearts is through their pockets. There had to be a compelling financial reward to adopting green practices, and of course there is, and most of our operators now share our vision.”
Somehow in the midst of all this, Juanita found time last year to tie the knot with longtime partner Guy Terry, fittingly at one of the country’s most highly regarded environmentally friendly resorts – Lady Elliot Island. Now she and Guy have their own “mini-resort” in Noosa offering eco-friendly stays, and she can practice what she preaches.
