Book review: 'Travellers Tales' - Australians abroad confront the ‘other’

One of the refreshing aspects of Australian travel writing is the candour of Australian writers as they express the fear, discomfort, ill-health and neurosis many travellers feel when out of their familiar environments.

Not one of the thirty-three writers in the new Australian anthology Travellers’ Tales, published by the Central Queensland University Press and edited by Michael Wilding and David Myers, displays the false confidence or narrow world view of the brash American, or snobbish British colonist, while travelling.

No, these Australian writers are vulnerable, challenged, unsettled, humbled and downright scared as they travel to the exotic locations that are the focus of the anthology. The editors wanted to combine the talents of a group of gifted writers to “evoke the crazy challenges of exotic travel”, allowing readers to escape from the cage of humdrum daily routine and “encounter the shock of the unexpected and the other”.

This mostly conscious, but sometimes unconscious, awareness of the way the West often conceptualises the East as “other” is characteristic of Travellers’ Tales.

Edward Said uses the concept of “other” to support his massively influential concept of “Orientalism” in the book of the same name.

Orientalism is: “an enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage - and even produce - the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period”. Said’s concept of Orientalism includes stereotypical depictions of “Oriental” despotism, cruelty and sensuality. His theories have gained significant purchase in a world searching for answers post 9-11.

It’s clear from reading Travellers’ Tales that many Australian writers still view the East through a prism of Orientalism. But many of the writers in this collection are at least conscious about their “otherising” of the East and other exotic locations and perhaps more frank about this than many English or American scribes.

In his story about searching for Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk in Istanbul, Laurie Hergenhan feels an affinity with Istanbul “along with my conception of it as other”. His attempt to meet Pamuk has a quirky outcome, and along the way he is deeply moved by the citadels, flowering vines and rising orange moon of Istanbul.

John Dale’s fear of the East balloons into full-blown paranoia in Turkey where the delusional traveller is convinced he’s being followed and everyone eyes him suspiciously. He hooks up with a female traveller even more paranoid than he and they watch each others’ backs while sleeping. This portrayal of the East as a place of inherent danger is a minor theme of the book - perhaps that is part of the excitement of going to “exotic” places.

Dave Wellings is seriously "wierded out" during a trip on a rudimentary double-decker barge lashed to a river boat on the Nile. When Welling’s intrepid Dutch travelling companion disappears, he imagines the Dutchman was either accosted by Idi Amin’s “drunken baboons” in Uganda or eaten by crocodiles. Welling’s piece is pierced throughout by a sense of real and present danger.

There is no danger in Bolivia where Desmond O’Grady goes for a conference and writes about his vertigo, torpor and diuretic pills while staying in a high rise, nor does David Myers’ lecturer character ever feel unsafe during his lecturing tour of Japan, but both these stories are about Australians having the “Lost in Translation” experience.

What is refreshing about these accounts though, is that there are no comparisons with “the way we do things at home”. There is none of the “flexible, positional superiority” Edward Said accuses Western writers of indulging in when talking about the East. When confronted with sea urchin and orange caviar for lunch, a university chancellor who lightly grabs his balls by way of greeting, and a computerised toilet with a saluting lid, Myer’s Australian academic in Japan is taken aback, but makes no judgments.

Perhaps less conscious of how Western writers “otherise” and objectify the East for Western consumption is Christine Williams, who eroticises elephants and Ganesh in India, and Stephen Conlon with a clichéd tale of Australian travellers wasting themselves in his stereotypical portrayal of decadent Bangkok. Laurie Clancy’s focus on his stirring lust for pretty teenage Wanita, who wears a tight-fitting outfit “in a kind of soft red” while she serves him as a housemaid in Jakarta, is a textbook example of Western objectification of Eastern women (and boys) as sexual objects of their desire.

More thoughtful is a standout account by Nicholas Hasluck, describing how the site of the massacre of thousands of North Vietnamese has become a tacky tourist spot in Vietnam. Another standout piece is Inez Baranay’s meditation on being invited to a writer’s festival in Bali. Of all the writers in this collection, Baranay is perhaps the most visibly conscious of the clichés, otherising and delusional expectations many Western travellers bring to the East. Baranay remembers how years ago:

I was such a believer in the perfect society enchantment aspect of Bali, that that is what I found. Enchantment, magic, beauty, wonder. I wrote all of that and then later I wonder why we experience, or construct, Bali as a paradise. Now it’s a cliché to even talk about how that became a cliché.

Just how much the West constructed Bali as a peaceful paradise where all Australians are welcome has been graphically illustrated by the illusion-shattering Bali bombings.

While many of the stories in Traveller’s Tales are set in the East, there are also a handful about Australia, Europe, the Americas and other countries. Here too, many of the writers show a refreshing lack of sentimentality and willingness to be shaken to the core by their travels.

Luke Slattery’s search for antiquity as he retraces the journey of Odysseus in Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey is beautifully written, erudite, and rich with meaning about the impact of the classics on modern life. Strolling the coast of Kioni, Ithaca, he writes:

The pale seabed hereabouts is blue, and then to cobalt out where the lazy white Mediterranean cruise ships drift. The water that laps the island’s pebbled fringe, the first thing to cool the toes, is something else again: neat gin, martini on the rocks. Ithaca turns out to be a fine place to dip into Homer, then into sea, then back again, the island and the verses seem to collude with each other in awakening the senses. The fabulous epic is richly glossed with the beauty of the sea and seafaring, of banqueting and beguiling tales, of lust and lustrous women. Aside from Calypso, the “nymph with lovely braids”, who ravishes Odysseus while he pines for home, there is the “white-armed” princess Nausicaa, who catches sight of the shaggy hero at the river bathing. 'The Odyssey' is the most sensuous of works.

It’s mouth-watering writing and Slattery’s tale captures the classic traveller’s experience of coming to a place with expectations of finding something, and being disappointed by the reality, but finding rich, unanticipated treasures nonetheless.

Michael Wilding’s experience of Greece is very different and perhaps more readers will relate to it than can relate to Slattery’s uplifting journey. Wilding does not have classical literature in his head as his plane alights on a gorgeous Greek island, but the hangover of the past evening and the larger hangover of the “dull throb of the accumulated past”. On this island, Wilding and his partner seek peace and quiet but can’t find it in the din of chatty restaurateurs, unexplained bangs in the night, security fears and “microvia”, a Greek word for microbe which Wilding uses to describe his fellow Australian tourists on the island. It seems their holiday is all a bit disappointing really and you get the impression that two of the many pollutants of their much hoped for idyll are excess alcohol and emotional baggage. As I said, readers will relate.

Australian readers should relate to many of the experiences in Travellers’ Tales. Over-consumption of alcohol and drugs, just the right amount of Turkish coffee, brushes with the law, reheating of cooling desire (for one’s beloved or for potential new loves) in sexy countries like France, spiritual communion with architecture and alley cats, the glamour of an expensive African safari and disappointment when rose-coloured expectations are shattered by dirty, modern reality. It’s all in this collection. And there is a treat secreted in the anthology by the editors - a piece on Aboriginal Australians written by Mark Twain in 1897. Twain’s meditation on genocide (by the mercifully swift poisoned pudding or the “slow murder” of whiskey, poverty, robbery and humiliation) is as powerful and relevant today as it must have been when first published more than a century ago.

Travellers’ Tales is Volume Two of Best Stories under the Sun, an annual showcase of Australian writing. It succeeds, as did Volume One, in offering the Australian writer’s voice with many accents. The quality is uneven, but the series is providing a platform for Australian creative writing that is less and less available in the declining newspaper industry. The Queensland publisher makes sure writers from the Sunshine State get a decent look-in and provides a chance for up-and-coming writers to rub shoulders with established writers.

The editors’ strategy of slipping in a posthumous story by a famous international author like Twain (just as Volume One included a delicious piece of literary journalism by Jack London on a Sydney boxer’s last fight) provides an effective accompaniment to the raw and lesser known Australian writers. All in all, a rich and satisfying recipe.

If all the contributors to Travellers’ Tales, dead and alive, pulled up their chairs to one long table, it would be a damn good party. And there would be a damn good hangover afterwards. But I reckon it would be worth it.