In the mid-’80s, English novelist Howard Jacobson was commissioned by his British publisher to write a book about Australia. Why Oz? Oztralia? It’s apparently an English thing. The book was not published in the U.S. — then came Kalooki Nights, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2006, followed by The Finkler Question, which won the Man Booker in 2010. Bloomsbury reissued In the Land of Oz for the U.S. the following year with a brief Preface by Jacobson, who had lived in Australia for several years in the mid-’60s, happily teaching literature in Sydney. But this trip was not to be a revisiting of old haunts. Quite the contrary. He set out with his then-wife, Rosalin Sandler, Perth-born and Catholic, on a journey that would eventually clock some 10,000 miles and scores of encounters — his aim was to experience Australia in a way most visitors don’t get to do. To be sure, there are views of World Heritage-like sites along the way and all manner of references to Australian fauna and food. But the meat of the book is Jacobson’s many encounters with ordinary Australians, among them, bus drivers, taxi drivers, hotel clerks, social service workers, teachers, waitresses, anyone willing to talk. And the talk? Primarily on white-aboriginal relations. Beginning in Darwin on the northern coast where tensions between the two are palpable — “The Aborigine himself somewhere between a petty problem and a pestilence” — we shadow Jacobson and “Ros” traveling counterclockwise around the coastal perimeter, headed to Perth on the southwestern tip — some 2,500 miles by bus — staying in modest hotels, making incursions inland, and everywhere Jacobson talking and questioning. Leaving Perth for Adelaide, again by bus — eastward, more than 1,600 miles — they soon head into the northern territories by camper to spend adventurous days among the aboriginal people of the central Australian desert. Despite Jacobson’s occasional throwing in some gratuitous and/or self-deprecating sentences about being a Jewish traveler, what emerges over more than 500 pages is Jacobson the unrelenting explorer of the realities behind appearances, his not-so sublimated outrage at the way Aboriginal lands have been taken over, and his moral indignation at the country’s embedded racism — “the hopeless intransigence of white attitudes to blacks.” At bottom, The Land of Oz is also a primer on how to experience any country beyond the standard guidebook sites: discounting the hyperbole, Jacobson writes, “I actually didn’t see anything unless I was talking. Or listening. There is of course no world that is purely and objectively out there. Every voyager paints and peoples his own landscape … I journeyed to the centre of dialogue; where it was I thought I’d been. I’d never in fact set a foot outside conversation.”
Related Content
- Reading List: Howard Jacobson
- Essays on Wandering Jews
- Down Under by Sonia Tatz
- A Sense of Direction by Gideon Lewis-Kraus
- Everything Is Going to Be Great by Rachel Shukert
