AustLit

'In 1955, a year after our graduation from university, m y friend Robert Brain and I set out for Europe. It was the traditional pilgrimage, in that era, for young Australians. W e were returning to a home we had never seen, to the cultural Blessed Isles. The numbers who made this grand tour were very small, then. There was no economy jet travel; w e embarked on a cheap Italian ship that would take five weeks to reach Genoa. Nor had the general phenomenon of Australian and Western youth touring the world on the cheap really begun. The simplest way I can convey this is to say that when we reached Europe and began hitch-hiking we had no trouble in being picked up, because drivers found us a novelty. They also thought us adventurous; and as w e passed farm gates, walking the highways of Italy and Germany, people would ask us in for a glass of wine. That was still the era when Greek peasants, finding foreigners passing their fields, would come out bringing gifts of food — the traditional hospitality to the wayfarer. They don't do it now; the hippies came through in the 1960s like a plague of locusts, living off that hospitality.' (Introduction)