Travel

Douglas Kennedy is one of that group of travel writers who are annoyingly good at getting an angle on a story but never really making a point. He whisks us around the world, in this case around the money markets of the world, observing, picking up quotable quotes, telling tidy anecdotes, and in the end, back home, he snaps the lid on his collected experience and calls it a day. Easy listening, but perhaps a bit too easy.

In the opening pages of Jewels and Ashes a man of eighty stands on a chair, his arms outstretched, describing the tree he remembers from his childhood. How beautiful and tall and wide it was, as it stood in the forest called Zwierziniec, on the outskirts of Bialystok, Poland. How strong his family was, how it branched and grew and prospered, in those years before 1939!

On page eleven of this book, Australians are called an engagingly innocent people ‘splendidly unthinking of anything but the simplicities of affluent living.’ On page twelve, they are called ‘lazy and uncreative’. On page 311, the author writes: ‘Yet in spite of a widespread belief (mainly self-generated) that we are a nation of yahoos, we have as much capacity for some unique kind of greatness as the people of any other race and nation.’

This is a small minor mini-pocket lexicon of how, where and when to travel abroad from Australia, starting with A (Add-on Holidays) and ending with Z (Zoos).

A nice idea, but only moderately successful. ‘Zoos’ tells· why – because in fact it tells so little. It appears to be there merely to complete the register and to allow Weg to contribute a final cartoon.