Title Page

In the Land of Oz

Howard Jacobson

Dedication

To all those who, knowing what we were about, spared no pains to ease our way – but especially to Geoff and Carole Gibbs, Ron Wise, Mayor Finlayson, Stanley Brown, Angela and Colin Davis, Leanne Cook, Judith Coleman, and Neil Batt – this book is affectionately dedicated.

Preface to the New Edition

Preface to the New Edition

It is hard to believe, fondly turning these pages again, that the journey it records – all around Australia and then up through the middle – was made twenty-five years ago. It was the adventure of my life, though in truth I took no risks in the sense that adventurers take risk; but I gave myself up to continuous discomfort, bad roads, the bullying babble of long-distance Australian bus drivers, the uncertainties of cheap motels, venomous spiders, the monologues of racists, and the difficulty of making sense of a country that was at one and the same time magnanimous and cruel, sophisticated and suspicious, self-righteous and free-spirited.

I fell for Australia when I first went there as a young man to teach at Sydney University. On the morning I left, three years later, I sat on a bench in a little park overlooking the Harbour and wept. My passion for the place returns the moment the sun comes out in England. At the first hint of warmth, I smell Australia and long to be back there. This journey, undertaken twenty years later, tried – unsuccessfully – to shake off some of that sentimentality, while endeavouring to broaden my interest in the country, which up until then had been Sydney-centred. The consequence was a fiercer passion still, this time for outback and small-town Australia, the thousand greens of the bush, the deep quiet of the desert, the skies filled with parrots, and the intense intimacies which Australians encourage at the very moment of meeting.

My companion for most of this journey was my then wife, Rosalin Sadler, an Australian herself, a perceptive, funny and indefatigable conversationalist, and the instigator of many of the more challenging treks we made, both of body and of mind. I am not an intrepid traveller. I cannot abide isolation. Nor can I abide silence. For me, to travel is to talk, and it would have been untrue to the journey not to have told what we talked about.

The book is not a history of Australia, nor is it an analysis of the Australian character, though it is impossible to travel in the far north or west of the country without walking straight into the heartbreak of white Australian/Aboriginal relations. Watching Ghostbusters on television in the Aboriginal community of Areyonga, a paradisal ruin 200 kilometres or so west of Alice Springs, was the funniest and saddest experience of the whole journey. Faced with the realities of Aboriginal squalor, you have no choice but to think politically.