Parallel to the rise of overtourism (and perhaps accelerated by it), there's an increasing desire for "authentic" experiences when traveling. Some of it is motivated by a sincere desire to learn about cultures, some in pursuit of bragging rights.

The travel industry has responded with varying degrees of success to this demand, in part because the very act of packaging authenticity presents a paradox. If it's an attraction designed for tourists' consumption, how genuine will it be?

In my experience, "authentic" experiences can range from cringey to profound. And most of the latter occurs when a supplier partners with a Native group or person and then steps back and lets the experience be designed and presented by locals.

At the World Travel & Tourism Council's Global Summit, held earlier this month in Perth, Australia, Indigenous culture took center stage multiple times in keynotes, panels and performances. Australia is putting resources behind Indigenous tourism, and with good results: As of June, visitor participation in Indigenous-focused activities is up 135% year over year (119% over the same period in 2019).

I had arrived in Perth a few days before the summit. Julie Earle-Levine, who heads an eponymous public relations firm, helped me coordinate with tourist-board-organized Discover Aboriginal Experiences to set up a few tours.

The first, with Steve Jacobs of the Noongar people, was a guided walk around the Cape Peron peninsula, part of the Shark Bay Unesco World Heritage Site.

Although the view from the peninsula's coast often includes industrial structures (there are significant mining and agricultural storage and processing facilities in the region), Jacobs still saw beauty. The land was very important to his ancestors, and our walk became a journey through time as he talked about, and demonstrated, certain rituals of the 60,000-year-old culture. He pointed out how the landscape we traversed was the result of various genesis, or "Dreamtime," stories, which he related to me.

He even succeeded where others have failed by teaching me how to throw a boomerang. The lessons were done standing on shore and throwing over water. I saw the logic of that quickly; when the boomerang didn't quite make it back to us, the waves returned it shortly.

The following day, at Mandoon Estate winery, I had two very different gastronomy experiences. The first was at its excellent Wild Swan restaurant and the other was in the estate's Maalinup Gallery, which sells Aboriginal art but also has a workshop room where Dale Tilbrook presented a "tucker talk and tasting."

Over two hours, she presented traditional foods -- fruit, herbs and spices -- that were important to her ancestors' diets. She spoke about how they were used, and in many cases, still are, for both nutrition and medicine.

And for my final Aboriginal-related experience, I took an art tour of the now-closed penitentiary in Fremantle, about 12 miles southwest of Perth.

It's not that the prison has been converted into a gallery; the prison is the gallery. The tour brings visitors to murals and imagery painted by convicts in the yards and cells. Some portray crude, lurid, murderous scenes. But others express now-recognized artistic visions that are so significant they contributed to Fremantle Prison's status as a Unesco World Heritage Site. Archivists have cataloged and protected the images.

Prison environments are, by definition, restrictive and, sometimes by design, cruel. I was absorbed by the narrative of my guide, Janine Della Bosca, who made real both the horrific conditions of the prison and the complex personalities of the artists.

Their stories encapsulated important components of Australian and Aboriginal history. Colonial administrators initially viewed the country as an enormous penal colony. They viewed the ancient Indigenous culture as an inconvenience to be suppressed.

The most interesting art in the prison was painted by an Aboriginal artist my guide referred to as Mr. Cameron, in deference to the Aboriginal taboo of saying a person's full name after they have died. His life story, along with his work, gave further context to references my other guides gave about the difficulties Aboriginals have faced.

Back in my room in Warders Hotel, a five-minute walk from the prison and also repurposed (it originally housed prison employees), I asked myself whether any of my experiences were truly "authentic." I didn't see sacred Aboriginal rites or join a walkabout or do a homestay in their neighborhood.

Unless one is willing to invest considerable time to gain the trust of a community, it's most likely that a visitor's presence alone erodes underlying authenticity. As with the observer effect in physics, witnesses impact outcomes.

I've come to appreciate that there is a reasonable amount of elasticity in "authenticity." My hosts were gracious and generous in sharing their culture.

In the end, what a casual tourist can, at best, hope to get out of an "authentic" experience is deeper insight into a culture, and hopefully the realization that it's more about comprehension than bragging rights.