HAPPY TRAVELLER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 513, 22 April 1949, Page 16

HAPPY TRAVELLER

Robert Gibbings in the South Seas

) A talk by DR

J. W.

DAVID

SON in the BBC's Third Programme

Happy is he who journeys everywhere, Like to Ulysses, or him who won the Fleece, Then, full of worldly lore, returns in POACS 365% 0 HESE lines of the French poet, Du Bellay, sum up the classical attitude to travel. They define something that is true in the experience of all good travellers-the pleasures of travel and those of coming home. Yet they leave much unsaid; for, at least to the great traveller, travel is itself a series of home comings. The traveller doesn’t remain an outsider, an observer of curious things; Re becomes a part of the society in which, for the time being, he has taken up his abode. And almost everywhere he finds something to which his personality can respond with a particular completeness. The differing standards of values among diverse communities enable him to give fuller expression than before to some interest or some capacity in himself. So that, as he travels, he continually thinks: my life has been a journey in search of this place which I have now found, Mr. Gibbings is such a traveller. The further he goes, the more he seems at home. In earlier books he has _ introduced us to unexpected, and charming, company in England and Ireland. On this occasion* he takes us on a leisurely journey through Polynesia-ffom Tonga to Samoa, to the Cook Islands, to\Tahiti and Moorea, to the Tuamotu Archipelago. Always we are among friends, and at the end we agree readily enough *"Over the Reefs," by Robert Gibbings. With woodcuts by the author. J. M. Dent and Sons. Enelish price. 15 /-.

with his clesing words. They are quoted from a Tahitian woman who was looking back on her trip to Europe: "Often," she said, "I think of all those people who are sad because they have not any food to eat, and here in the Islands we have so very much for everyone, and so much happiness."