Italia e Spagna nel turismo del secondo dopoguerra: società, politiche, istituzioni ed economia

Abstract

and Safroni-Middleton were Englishmen, who were born and died in England, where they wrote their travel books. Both men spent time in Australia, but their non-Australian nationalities are evident from the useful biographical Appendix Halter provides, which reveals that, beneath their Australian disguise, many of Halter’s travelling white men and women were actually English, or Scots or Irish, or simply of ‘unknown background’. That is the real historical circumstance of Pacific travellers, of course, but it does somewhat undercut Halter’s pursuit of the authentically and distinctively Australian perspective on the South Seas. Halter is more a cultural-historian than a literary-historian, although he is perforce and dutifully both, and his chapters survey and document many depictions of the islanders and their white visitors. As he demonstrates, Australian religious, commercial and political concerns shaped the Australian national relationship with the islands. The Australian steamship and trading company Burns Philp opened many island shops. The Australian missions (Anglican, Presbyterian and even Catholic) added their (competing) strengths to the English, Scots and French evangelical forces. Meanwhile, the tourism competition took shape between the rival Edenic islands. ‘Tahiti is special’, according to an advertisement. ‘The Tahitians make sure it will always be so. They want their island to be truly Polynesian. They won’t worry if Tahiti gets less tourists than Hawaii. They will reserve Tahiti for the connoisseurs who will enjoy their wide sandy beaches ...with a special possessive pleasure. Discover Tahiti!’ Tahiti not Hawaii, that is. An accompanying photograph of a garlanded, grass-skirted, dancing island girl illustrates the ‘special possessive pleasure’ that awaits the tourists who will follow the eighteenth and nineteenthcentury travellers – and ‘discover’ Tahiti. The wide range of travellers and the variety of writings Halter has surveyed provide ample and credible evidence of the historical and cultural concerns of the Australian nation as it formed its own national identity while criss-crossing the South Sea islands. His Australian Travellers in the South Seas does succeed in demarcating a distinctively Australian relation to the Pacific Islands, although not all his travellers – some of them Anglo-Australian, some cosmopolitan men and women of the world – were actually Australian. They were international in their backgrounds as well as in their voyaging. His travel writers were also readers, of course, and they read internationally – the writings of American Melville and Scottish Stevenson, for example, who had already seen and imagined those factual and fictional islands.