Now and Then: Two Views on Australia
to the Alice and then public transport back to Sydney, all at a pace much more relaxed than Horwitz.
Spinifex Walkabout is an old book, and will be hard to find. It's written prosaically essentially documentary and a little speculative though it has its own slightly archaic and proper humour. It's littered with wildly interesting pictures of the times that reveal not only the country but the fashion of the times, the dress, the hair, the cars ... all rather romantic almost 50 years on. There's no map included and a good atlas on hand makes the reading that much more vivid somehow.
One of the Road is a much more recent work, somewhat easier to find in libraries and used book stores. Not least of all because it's an American publication where Spinifex Walkabout is an Australian publication. It's got just the one rather rustic picture of a barefooted Horwitz sitting by the side of highway with a Bourke sign. It's a nice and easy read, light text, not wallowing in details and with much more flowing humour than Spinifex Walkabout, a sign of its times, and its author. For all that Horwitz is well read in Australian history and reflects often upon the paths of his predecessors, the early Australian explorers. It includes a very good map to help follow the voyage, marking every little waterhole Horwitz spent more than a half hour in ...
I could recommend One for the Road for a bit of entertainment without reservation. Spinifex Walkabout, would only be worth the chase I expect if you had a serious interest in Western Australia and its history, for which it is a really beautiful source.
Full tracing details for the ardent reader:
Spinifex Walkabout: Hitch-hiking in Remote North Australia
Coralie and Leslie Rees
The Australian Publishing Company, Sydney, 1953
Predates ISBN Numbers
One for the Road: Hitchhiking Through the Australian outback
Tony Horwitz
Harper and Row (Australasia), Sydney, 1987
Vintage Departures, New York, 1988
ISBN: 0-394-75817-X
Footnote: The Spinifex is a type of prickly grass bush growing in much of Northern Australia, and characteristic of the region. Walkabout is used in Australia to describe the predisposed wanderings of Aboriginal folk. The title conjures immediate images in the Australian mind that it may not do in others.
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