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

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.