LADY PACKER ON TOUR

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31119, 23 July 1966, Page 4

LADY PACKER ON TOUR

The World is a Proud Place. By Joy Packer. Eyre and Spottiswoode. With illustrations and maps. 254 pp. Being an admirer of Lady Packer’s earlier books—to name two, “Pack and Follow” and “Grey Mistress”—this reviewer is reluctant to admit a certain degree of disappointment with this, her latest. Bright, vivid and personal though it is, and attractively got up with coloured dust cover, maps and splendid illustrations, some in colour, it tends in places to induce a feeling that it is a diary favouring the travel agencies.

Yet that is not to condemn it: for it has some very cogent observations on the things she sees and hears, especially—coming from a South Africanborn—on the racial conflict. And it is fair to say that, in spite of the travelogue impression, it is still a very lively recital of an extensive round-the-world tour by a practised observer and her friend Elspeth Rhodes. Untroubled, it would seem, by a sordid need to economise in their expenditure, they tour Western Australia (where LadyPacker’s doctor son and his family live) and New South Wales, concentrating mainly on the Outback, its peculiar problems, heroic endeavours and scenic and pastoral distinctions; and later Hawaii and the United States, from San Francisco to New York, and back to the nostalgic delights of England in the summer, with the soothing friendliness of country cottages and lanes, the permeating presence of traditions—and growing hostility against the presence of coloured immigrants expressed in the burning of fiery crosses! Lady Packer lards her descriptions with history, long past and recent, compares conditions and attitudes with those in South Africa, and adds her own comments. She is highly impressed by the work of the Flying Doctor Service and School of the Air after personal investigation of their work in both Western Australia and New South Wales among families otherwise isolated in the Far Outback. She sees kangaroos bounding away—“like the giraffes of South African game sanctuaries, they are unforgettable”—and in the Australian hinterland she finds much that reminds her of parts of South Africa and its early efforts at settlement. Lady Packer pays a visit to West Australia’s Hamersley Range, meets the pastoralist-prospector Langley Hancock and sees his mountain of iron. Hancock looks to a future in which Japan will supply the capital for the development of the ore which it badly needs. “This is an Asian continent occupied by whites,” he says. “I found that rather a chilling reflection,” Lady Packer

writes. Too close to home! What of the South African continent?” In America, as in Australia, she is struck by the ready friendliness and by the stupendous scenery; she explores the poetry and philosophy of the breath-taking Grand Canyon and compares it with the soulless commercialism of the gambling industry in Las Vegas. She writes of Red Indians and their treatment and of Negroes and their treatment. In New York she asks her taxi-driver to take her into Harlem “it would be interesting.” “Could be interesting!” he says. “. . . The black man’s in a bad mood these days. I wouldn’t go in there for any money. If a coloured man calls my cab I don’t see him.” “Why?” “I been stuck up twice. . . . A gun in my back while they wait for me to hand over my money. And they don’t wait

long. They’re killers in there.” Later on, at a party, she says she thinks the Civil Rights Law will triumph. “Only 60 years ago women medical students weren’t allowed info dissecting rooms; they were stoned in the streets outside Edinburgh University. Nobody despises a woman doctor these days on the grounds that she’s the wrong sex for her job. It’ll be the same with your blacks—easier in the long run because social integration will lead to intermarriage. A snuff-coloured nation.” Asked what would happen if they tried integration in South Africa, she answers: “We’re a white minority. We'd lose our country in less than 10 years and find ourselves with no place to go. We’re not English, Portuguese, Belgian or French with a homeland to run to if we’re kicked out of Africa.”