Promising the world: Juliette Hughes interviews Labor Shadow Environment Minister, Nick Bolkus.

The name of the game: Amanda Smith and Tim Stoney dissect Australian sport.

Literature under arms: John Sendy goes in search of Rolf Boldrewood.

Travel bent: Peter Steele reviews Holiday Business and Mediterranean Journeys in Time & Place.

Flash in the Pan: Reviews of the films Series 7; Moulin Rouge; Russian Doll; The House of Mirth; The Crimson Rivers and The Sacred Stones.

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It is sometimes difficult to go all the way with the French. Here, for instance, is Paul Valéry:

Our craving for fiction, for foreign travel, and for the extraordinary is due to a lack of visual imagination and an incapacity for thorough-going absences of mind. Yet it is enough to stare at anything at all for a few minutes and the known becomes the unknown, life a dream, the moment an eternity. The same holds good for mystical and metaphysical speculation.

‘Eating in fact was one of the activities people associated with guest-houses.’ Postcards from Holiday Business.

I don’t believe him—if I understand him correctly—in that last sentence, which sends a flicker of uncertainty through the rest. Yet Valéry himself can specialise in the visionary—as in, ‘The whole world breathes into a seed and makes of it a tree’—as well as in the flintily acute—as in, ‘Maxim for Persons in Authority. When a man is licking your boots, put your foot on him before he starts to bite you.’ He is usually on to matters of significance.

‘Fiction … foreign travel … the extraordinary’: often, they have been a trio in the history of writing. When Othello bewitched Desdemona with his traveller’s tales, with his ‘antres vast and deserts idle’, his ‘men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders’, he was already late in the day so far as yarning went. Sacred expeditionaries like Moses, secular venturers like Odysseus, and all those who went with them or after them, have been drawn by reports which blended the remarkable, the exotic, and enough varnishing to make the eyes grow round. The time came when the novel itself was to be the offspring of all this talked-up travel, as if Herodotus had been the godfather of Cervantes: later still, countless novels have looped back into the process, revisiting the old paths, rekindling old curiosities and hankerings. In a less obvious way, but to perhaps no less a degree, poetry has played a similar hand, both formally and by implication—‘The Waste Land’ is at least as esoteric as Moby Dick.

Notions such as these come to mind when one thinks of Holiday Business: Tourism in Australia since 1870 and Mediterranean Journeys in Time and Place: A Traveller’s Guide. The first, handsomely produced by Miegunyah Press, reflects, as its authors say, ‘a continuing conversation … about past and present Australia, and the imprint of travel and tourism on the landscape’; the second ‘does not pretend to be a scholarly work, but it does attempt to show how much more can be gained from a basic understanding of how geography and history have influenced each other over a very long time to produce what is on the ground today.’ The result in each case is a book which is informative, stimulating and illuminating. The authors of Holiday Business are professional historians, and those of Mediterranean Journeys professional geographers, and on that count alone each place touched on in the books is likely to be, in a sense, a place of the mind, having the ‘pitch’ appropriate to the discipline which is brought to bear upon it.

Both are sober works, but neither lacks vivacity.

Mediterranean Journeys assumes that the reader is travel-bent. It is ‘deliberately written to be used in association with a detailed travel guide for each region’, and for each of the nine territories addressed there is a section called ‘not to be missed’ and another on ‘practical matters’. The book is written out of many years of personal experience of the region and has the flavour arising from just that: ‘large areas of the Mediterranean are omitted, including the big cities, because so much has been written about them and we find them increasingly polluted, overcrowded and anonymous’. The areas addressed are in fact the island of Crete, the coasts and mountains of north-eastern Greece, the western coasts of Turkey, Andalucía in southern Spain, the Adriatic coasts of Croatia, the Amalfi peninsula, the island of Sicily, the coasts of eastern Liguria, and the hills and coasts around Nice.

Holiday Business (which has many illustrations, both in colour and in black and white), goes about its business under headings as various as: Origins; Messing About in Boats; The Rise and Fall of the Tourist Bureau; and Postscript: Tourism Über Alles.

Walter Pater, discussing travel, would speak of going ‘north of the Humber’, as if this were much like leaving the known world. But each of us has a Humber, or a collection of them—the borders of the familiar, the comprehended. Nobody draws a map these days and puts ‘here be monsters’ on it, but we all have appetites for, and often fear of, the monster-like. Hence the very possibility of tourism and the touristic, which is conducted on the supposition that our attention can be stretched without easily being snapped. Holiday Business is interested, among other things, in the ways in which the wondrous can be served up in manageable portions. Sometimes, it is thoughtfully rueful about the outcome. Its last paragraph, for instance, reads:

The cost of producing the movie Titanic, which fortunately for its backers became the highest-grossing movie of the twentieth century, was slightly more than the cost, inflation adjusted, of building the ship itself. That an infotainment product can cost more than the real thing is testament to a world where makebelieve or virtual experience seems to be valued more.

Such a conclusion has been foreshadowed in the book, and it would be odd if it had not been, given the very title. The busyness of being off-duty, the task of vacancy, the scurrying after dreams—it is a very deepset human aspiration, and it is none the less odd on that account. It is as if part of us wanted a jongleur to run the Stock Exchange, a Lord of Misrule to design the cathedrals. Shown the Humber, some will think of the Rubicon and some of white-water rafting, but either way it will stand for a ‘beyond’, a somewhere else. This, though potentially troubling both to the individual and to society, is just as well, since civilisation itself ‘plays its way up’, working with wild as well as tame cards, and embarking on enterprises which are, in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ words, ‘counter, original, spare, strange’. Tourism, with its constant gawping at marvels and flirting with the exotic, is really one expression of the mind’s normal conduct. ‘Where there is no vision the people perish’, and without, say, a tiny figure waving an alpenstock in the heart, or boarding a refractory camel, so does civilisation.

Not, to be sure, that playing the tourist is all fun and games, at least when some hard facts have been established. The Logans write, in Mediterranean Journeys:

Twenty-two kilometres east of Ioanina at the foot of Mt Tomaros is Dodoni, one of the oldest cities and oracles in Greece. Zeus, the father of all gods, was worshipped here from the earliest times, and the oracle which flourished until the fourth century AD attracted notable figures from all over Greece. It delivered advice through the rustling of the leaves in a sacred oak tree that was central to the cult of Zeus. Today Dodoni’s major visible heritage is a huge but elegant Greek theatre, capable of holding 18,000 and one of the best preserved from ancient Greece. It was built in the third century BC in the time of King Pyrrhus of Epiros, but was remodelled by the Romans. The Greeks used it for dramatic events, but the Romans introduced blood sports. To provide protection to the spectators from the savage animals they built a barrier between the seating and the orchestra, and also dug a channel around the orchestra to drain away the blood. There are remains of an acropolis located on a hillside with magnificent views.

‘A channel around the orchestra to drain away the blood’: it might be an emblem of our species’ proneness to match sophistication with savagery. But the passage also touches on eight elements likely to be found in the course of much travel writing, answering to experiences in travel itself. There is Zeus, embodiment and patron of the sacred, to which pilgrimages are by definition devoted, but which can also present itself in oblique forms to those with no overt expectation of it; there is the oracular communication, which might stand for those sought-out insights which were allegedly the rationale of the Grand Tour and remain so in many more plebeian adventures; there is the rustling of the leaves in the oak tree, which is something like the countless material processes and moments—the sway of palms, exotic sunsets—which are the boast of travel agents; there is the Greek theatre itself, emblem of ‘dramatic’ buildings, ancient and modern, the world over; there is the sequence of Greek-to-Roman, itself a form of drama, and an example of that possession/dispossession which is a feature of virtually all societies, given time; there is the orchestra, a token of art’s ubiquity, though here also of its ironies; there is the blood-channel, eloquent reminder of the violence upon violence which has been feared, ritualised, and very often endorsed by otherwise peaceable groups; and there is the hillside with views, easily appropriated by the spectator, of a nature which precedes and will succeed each of us.

When geography meets history, some such panoply is inevitable. Left to herself, though, Clio, muse of history, singles out the individual, the corporeal, and often the comical. Holiday Business has a good number of such moments. So, for example, when treating of that sometimes depressing subject, The Guest-house, its authors write:

Eating in fact was one of the activities people associated with guest-houses. ‘Rita is well and has got quite fat’, wrote someone back to Melbourne from Adelaide, as if with a sly smile; putting on a few pounds during a holiday was, until the 1960s, regarded as quite desirable. Indeed in Edwardian times to be seen as thin or ‘skinny’ (a word that has almost disappeared from the language) could excite sympathy—or derision. ‘There is one thing’, scrawled a youth on a postcard, ‘I eat a lot. I always have a soup plate of porridge for breakfast & then some meat or egg bender. I eat plenty of milk and cream.’ When they could, guest-houses boasted of having their own cows; the fare provided would then extend to fresh cream on home-made scones at afternoon tea.

At the risk of sounding like the nameless scrawler, I reflect that few things are more successful both at naming our common condition and marking out individuality than the topic of food. James Trager, in The Food Chronology (1995), discussing Neanderthal Man (c.75,000BC) among elephantine mammals and sabre-toothed tigers, remarks that ‘Like all other creatures on earth, he devotes virtually every waking hour to his quest for the food he needs to sustain life for himself and his family.’ Lamentably, there are still millions of human beings for whom something like this is true. But for those more fortunate, a sifting through the names of foods from abalone to zabaglione can be a reminder of the intimate association between cookery and peregrination. Black bean, biltong, bouillabaisse … gallimaufry, gazpacho, gefilte fish … pavlova, pemmican, pizza—each has a long, intricate trace of travel behind it. Two resources commended to the wandering English in the 18th century were Portable Soup and Travelling Sauce: and very likely, in his 20th-century guest-house, the gratified porridge-eater would have been offered simulations of these too. To see food as resource for a tour de horizon of mobile humanity is not its most obvious use, but can still take us a long way.

In the end, though, tours are about territory, and both Mediterranean Journeys and Holiday Business have it steadily in view. The first of these often enriches the account with strategic quotations from earlier authors—as for instance when, at the prospect of ruined Troy, the Logans quote from The Iliad:

And so their spirits soared as they took their positions down the passageways of battle all night long, and the watchfires blazed among them. Hundreds strong, as stars in the night sky glittering round the moon’s brilliant blaze in all their glory when the air falls to a sudden windless calm … all the lookout peaks stand out and the jutting cliffs and the steep ravines and down from the high heavens bursts the boundless bright air and all the stars shine clear and the shepherd’s heart exults …

This is of course a very specialised apprehension of the landscape, as the milieu of heroism, glory, and imminent death. But we know any territory, any scene, only as that which bears the imprint of awareness, of construal, and the Logans write with that in view. The same is true of Davidson and Spearritt—as in this passage:

Dismissive remarks about the Australian landscape are legendary. But as George Seddon has shown in relation to the area around Sydney, it could be dismissed—particularly in a time of scant rain—as poor country while, at another juncture, a visitor with an eye less focussed on economic appraisal might view the same tract of land as picturesque. It took a long time for Australians to develop a broadly inclusive response: different members of a band that camped near Healesville, Victoria, in 1881 likened the landscape with its fern glades to a gallery of old masters, to a museum, more aesthetically and fashionably to ‘a poem as perfect as the Faerie Queen’ and, in acknowledgement of its ‘lonely and silent’ character, to Pentridge gaol. The empty bush—as it was perceived—was a place that would bounce back the visitor’s preconceptions and preoccupations.

‘A single villa can mark a landscape’, said Ruskin, ‘and dethrone a dynasty of hills’, rightly enough. But at some level we all long to be housed, to find the world at least a lodging. The band encamped at Healesville made, in their several fashions, moves on behalf of the intellectual and imaginative triad which has kept human settlement valuable as well as feasible, and kept voluntary travel a coherent thing: they construed what they saw, they appropriated it to their own ends, and one way or another, they celebrated it. Not so dusty, as used to be said.

Peter Steele SJ has a personal chair at the University of Melbourne.