Lonely Planet

Despite the rhetoric of globalisation, it is impossible to buy an airline ticket online in the United States with a credit card issued abroad. When I needed a ticket from Boston to Washington last year, and after numerous unsuccessful arguments with airline websites and 1800 numbers, I dropped into the local Harvard travel agency. There was a welcome familiarity in discovering that it was a branch of STA, one of more than 400 branches operated around the world by the Australian-based company.

It had to be the black metaphor of the season. On Boxing Day, Radio National ran a short, sharp-edged conversation on Australia’s changing relations with the Pacific island-states. One contributor, Professor William Maley, said that the Australian government’s bribery of the destitute statelet of Nauru made him think of ‘the caddish squire seeking out the most wretched prostitute in the village’. Responding. Richard Ackland commented that those who devised the appalling Pacific Solution seemed extraordinarily unconscious of the connotations that still attend that word ‘solution’.

Last year, escaping the Olympics in Europe, I was amazed at the media coverage overseas, which always included Australian Indigenous motifs, art, dance and music. It seemed that, beyond Australia, its Indigenous people have a prominence and clout never realised at home. I hope that, in addition to the earnest German and Japanese backpackers who might use it, many Australians will read and employ this bargain of a book to discover some of the cultural wealth it encompasses.