Tourism

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.

Alice Garner asks us to ‘dip our toes’ into the history of the shifting shore of the Bassin d’Arcachon, but she is being coy. Her study of sea change and social conflict in the nineteenth century (for the most part) in this particular part of south-west France demands that we need to wade with her into the deep waters of exhaustive primary sources. As a research fellow in the History Department at the University of Melbourne, she is indefatigable and meticulous. This presumably well satisfies the requirements of academe, and shows her to be a fine historian, but it tends to dampen some of the liveliness that might have more easily seduced the general reader to the stories of ambition, progress, counter-attack and conflict that resulted in a resounding win for development and tourism in an age when industrialisation and railways, architectural conceits and money turned a coastal fishing and oyster-fishing area into a ‘bathing resort’.