Edition 37
Small World
- Published 4th September, 2012
- ISBN: 9781921922596
- Extent: 264 pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook
Affluence has made Australians more mobile than ever. The notion of travel as a recreational pursuit of the wealthy is long past. Last year, a third of the national population travelled abroad, joining almost a billion tourists in the air, on the road, on board ships and trains.
The statistics are mind-boggling, but the full meaning of this in terms of global engagement is more perplexing. Will this extraordinary movement of people aid understanding or exacerbate tensions?
Some of Australia’s best authors and journalists are featured, including an exclusive extract from Murray Bail’s forthcoming novel The Voyage.
Lonely Planet co-founder Tony Wheeler revisits some of the most troubled regions in the world, taking in Kinshasa, Jerusalem and Haiti; Melissa Lucashenko has a strange holiday in Cambodia; Stephanie Green finds herself an unwitting witness to history while visiting Egypt; and Jane Goodall reflects on the recovery of Bucharest.
Mark Dapin reports on the perils of travelling as a journalist; Kate Veitch explores our changing relationship with travel and photography as smart phones replace cumbersome cameras; and Joanna Kujawa presents a history of wanderlust.
Lesley Synge finds an earthly hell in an island paradise; Gayle Bryant reports from the frontlines of a terrorist attack on a luxury hotel; plus stories, poems and much more.
Small World opens a new window on how we live now.
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In this Edition
Nomadic tendencies
ON MY THIRTIETH birthday – a while ago – a friend showed me a cartoon parody of a high-school reunion. It depicted a group of thirtysomethings reuniting two decades after graduation. One of them boasted, 'I have a secure job, a spouse and a...
Bucharest in recovery
'WHAT YOU HAVE to consider is who visited Bucharest. Bucharest was the point of contact for trade unionists and politicians who were wary of going to Moscow.' This is Gough Whitlam speaking in response to questions at a Senate enquiry on 6 December 1999. 'Everybody...
Passengers of history
'The first feeling when writing other cultures...is a loss of authority.' – Eva Hornung'I met a traveller from an antique land...' – Percy Bysshe Shelley THE GARDEN CAFÉ was at the northern end of a grassy park along the Aswan Corniche, a rare green space...
Holiday in Cambodia
THE INVITATION HAD come, but did I really want to spend Christmas in Phnom Penh? An introvert's introvert, my idea of travel is a swim at an empty beach, a short walk and back in my own comfortable bed before midnight. The poverty, heat...
Travelling as a journalist
IN 2005, I LOST the ability to travel for pleasure. Until then, I would work until I'd banked about $30,000, then quit, leave the country and drift across the world until the money ran out and I took another job.Then I had my first...
I ♥ travel
...this European self has never been self-sufficient: it has always learned, borrowed, or stolen from elsewhere. We need to...to think of images, certainly, but to understand the process of their being made as negotiated – and It has long sometimes contested – in various ways.– Tropical Visions in an Age of...
Small eye
Photography, once a noble art, has become, thanks to the move to digital, a mental illness– Nigel Farndale I BOUGHT my first camera, a Kodak Instamatic, in 1973. I was eighteen and about to go travelling in South-East Asia, and the hippie trail was so fresh there wasn't...
A troubled world
‘AT LAST,' I think, as a boulder hurtles towards me.Go to Sicily and you expect to have a bag snatched by a passing scooter rider. On some pub night in Ireland you're bound to consume one too many pints of Guinness and regret it...
A kind of forgetting
SEVERAL YEARS AFTER she lost her first child, Peter – abducted by his father in early 1950, lost without trace – my mother met the man she would spend the rest of her life with, the man who would be my father. He too...
The cigarette seller of Addis Ababa
THE CIGARETTE SELLER of Addis Ababa works her corner, near the entrance to the compound. She buys her cigarettes by the packet at the wholesale shop a twenty-minute walk away, and sells them one by one to the men who pass by on the...
Fantastic nationality
'In dreams foreignness is absolutely pure, and this is the best thing for writing. Foreignness becomes a fantastic nationality.' – Hélène CixousMADLY IN LOVE with the city of Rome, I was certain I wouldn't be able to stay away from it for long. It...
Letters from Sarajevo
FROM OLIVERA Sarajevo, 2 December 2011'How are you?''Today, better than tomorrow.'This is a new, dark joke I heard in Bosnia. Once the reply to this question was 'Today, better than yesterday', but not anymore.Sarajevo has changed. There are many street beggars – mainly women...
The message of Al-Masudi
'He who stays at home beside his hearth and is content with the information he may acquire concerning his own region cannot be regarded in the same way as he who divides his lifespan between different lands and spends his days journeying in search...
Midsummer in Melanesia
THERE AREN'T THREE seats on the Solomon Airways flight to Honiara, the capital of the Solomon Islands, so I must fly out from Brisbane after Alaister and Flann. Before I leave, I ring a Drug and Alcohol Helpline. The counsellor advises, 'Look after your...
Cuong
I SUPPOSE HE was from the provinces, the heavily shelled country in the central highlands or further north, where Agent Orange left behind by the American military still seeps from the soil into waterways and poisons pregnant mothers. The result is tragic birth defects....
Indifference
It is late at night. I am driving alone from Nadzab airport to Lae. Large potholes crater the narrow road making it nearly impassable. Heavy rain obscures my vision. Lightning flashes illuminate fields of wind frenzied kunai grass. I can barely hear the Land...
Taking on the Mafia
SOME YEARS AGO in the Sicilian capital, Palermo, I stumbled across the Antimafia. Out walking one night I noticed two Carabinieri cars parked outside the Antica Focacceria San Francesco restaurant and assumed there was a VIP inside. I went to investigate and found that...
The Neon Boneyard
THE ROAD TO the Neon Boneyard is littered with evidence that even the glitz and wealth of Las Vegas is not immune to the economic downturn so evident in other American cities. Our cab driver, Bryan, is from Denver. A sardonic white man in...
Harpooned
AYUKAWA WAS PUT on the map when it was wiped off it. A little-known hamlet of rusting hulks and geriatrics, its location on the south-eastern tip of Honshu's Oshika Peninsula gave it the grim honour of being the closest community to the epicentre of...
Hotel hell
'IT WAS SHORTLY after 3 pm that our worst fears were realised. There was a loud banging on the door and the call for us to "come out, come out". We knew this was our moment of truth. They would get in and kill...
This too shall pass
KATHERINE LEFT EVERYTHING. She found a place where other devotees lived. They were French. They offered her a mattress in the corner of their room. On the first night she lay awake under her mosquito net listening to the breathing of sleepers and the...
The sewing woman
IN THE WINDOW on the other side of the narrow canal a woman sat sewing.Susan wished she'd stop, just for a few minutes, and lean out and turn her head to the left and see the pink light streaming out from the setting sun:...
Do I know you?
DELAGE HAD AN engineer's mentality, although he had no training or diploma in engineering, more an inventor's mentality, directed towards a single specific mechanism he had happened upon - the restless inventor attracts good fortune. He was a man who easily became engrossed; and,...
Sophia Street ghost stories
We sat beading on the couchnecklaces which would carry colourto our vegetarian cosmetic-free skin.No secret we lived in a morgue from Civil War daysand this south of the bloody Mason-Dixon lineso the patter of running feet that followed the soundof breaking glass didn't shock,...
Best little pub in Australia
The flies lazy on the bottle's rimand the unsuspecting fingeron the walls and tapsand looking at reflectionsin the dust-streaked mirror. The man drinks Victoria Bitter in the bright green cangrass is greenand water does flowand once there was a wifein Wagga. His mates laugh without himin...
Featured Contributors
Melissa Lucashenko
Melissa Lucashenko is an award-winning Goorie author of Bundjalung and European heritage. Her first novel, Steam Pigs, was published...
Patrick Holland
Patrick Holland is the author of five books including The Mary Smokes Boys which was shortlisted for the Age...
Maria Tumarkin
Maria Tumarkin is a writer and cultural historian. Her latest book is Axiomatic (Brow Books, 2018). She teaches in...
Tony Wheeler
Travelling across Asia on the ‘hippie trail' of the 1970s led Tony Wheeler and his wife Maureen to create...
