Adelaide, the pleasure of provincial life

I found this fabulous book in the library that was given to Nishi by my old high school teacher in 2002. It has heaps of brilliant colour photos of Australia, but when you read the text it is quite disturbingly anti-promotional. For example, I will tell you what the author chose as the closing paragraph on Adelaide entitled much as my blog entry today (which forewarns the reader not to expect much praise in a very sneaky way indeed);

"But there are no skyscrapers, traffic, crowds or nightlife to speak of here. One or two dubious places stay open until midnight in Hindley Sreet. The Mall only gets crowded on Thursday evenings, when the shops stay open for late-night shopping. The Festival Centre, a fine example of modern architecture decorated with Aboriginal wall-paintings, only makes proper use of its facilities as a mulitmedia complex every other year for the Adelaide Arts Festival."

Yikes. I know a lot of people have something against Adelaide's generally quiet nightlife, but it isn't as though there is nothing to do! They make it sound like the art centre sits under a shroud of cobwebs until we dust it off at Fringe time once in a blue moon. And I am fairly certain I have had some very successful all nighters without going anywhere near Hindley St. But the author's somewhat bitter description of Australian cities isn't limited to Adelaide. The pages on Sydney are entitled "Sydney, beautiful, cultured, single-minded." and Brisbane is the best; "Surfboards and oriental faces." and continues on to make barely disguised snide remarks about Japanese tourists lining up to get photos with koalas.

So perhaps this book is telling the truth, and in all liklihood it is the type of book you might expect to result if I wrote a travel guide, but it doesn't feel right here. If you are going to give a book to someone overseas and they are going to place it in a public place as a source of information for those who are perhaps considering visiting your country, you might consider giving it a quick read first to establish if it is selling your country as a great place to visit, or if it is pointing out all the flaws. We should focus on selling the Good Stuff, then once they are in the country they can discover the Bad Stuff for themselves. It's called culture shock and who are we to deprive any traveller of it?