China looks to Australia not only as a major source of its commodities needs but also as a key destination for thousands of Chinese tourists increasingly gravitating towards Australian cities as preferred leisure sites.

According to Tourism Australia, the country earned $3.8 billion from the tourism industry in 2011, with the sector increasing its revenue by 15 percent from the previous year's showings.

Notably, Tourism Australia managing director Andrew McEvoy said, Chinese tourists largely contributed to the huge earnings realised by the industry last year, making the country not only Australia's dominant partner on the mining sector but also in the tourism industry.

From the past 12 months leading to the end of January this year, some 558,600 Chinese tourists flocked to Australian destinations, McEvoy said, highlighting the huge promises that the sector could cultivate as China becomes richer, thus producing many more millionaires.

In a survey that Tourism Australia commissioned last year, adult Chinese travellers have expressed their intents to visit Australia soon, with many giving out specific reasons for the tour.

Scores would want to see first hand koalas and kangaroos while many also identified the Sydney Opera House and the Great Barrier Reef as likely the places they would visit once they set foot Down Under.

The survey participants, some 2800, disclosed average yearly earnings of at least $US25,000, McEvoy said.

Buoyed by the numbers reflected by the survey, McEvoy said his office is mulling for ways "to use these findings to help prioritise our marketing activities in China."

"Tourism Australia will make a further record investment in marketing resources in China in 2012, for the market is unprecedented in terms of its high growth and high value," the tourism executive was quoted by Agence France Presse (AFP) as saying on Monday.

Those investments will help the country's tourism sector to better grasp the behaviour and needs of potential Chinese tourists who potentially will fly in to Australia this year, McEvoy said.

Tourism Australia presently focuses on likely tourists coming from three Chinese mega cities - Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.

However, the soc-called secondary cities in China will be given due attention on succeeding marketing research, McEvoy said, where many more Chinese middle and upper classes with considerable disposable incomes were located.

The research identified these cities as Chongqing, Chengdu, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Qingdao, Shenyang, Shenzhen, Tianjin, Wuhan and Xiamen.

These cities, without doubt, hold higher population and "where the real China growth opportunities lie," McEvoy said.

It would be crucial for the country's tourism industry to develop an understanding of this huge customer base for the sector to at least anticipate travelling decisions that wealthy Chinese customers will make, the Tourism Australia chief said.