This book is so much more than a travel memoir. Writer Christopher Koch weaves in history from both Australia and Ireland, descriptions of both lands, tales about folk singers and folk songs and his own family's heritage. Although Koch is new to me as a writer I loved the movie made from his book The Year of Living Dangerously. Given how much I enjoyed this book I will be looking for more written by him.

Koch grew up in Tasmania which, when it was Van Dieman's Land, was the place to which many convicts were transported in the 1800s. One of his great-great-grandmothers came out to Tasmania from Ireland of her free will but another great-great-grandmother was a convict sent from Ireland for theft. Certainly the second one was the more colourful but Koch's own mother denied that they had any convicts in their past. The Irish heritage was a source of fascination for Koch and he was well-read on Ireland's history. Although he had spent a few days in Dublin during the 1950s it wasn't until 2000 that he travelled there with his friend, Brian Mooney. Mooney had lived in Ireland for some time and plied his trade as a musician with some of the great Irish folk singers. Through Mooney Koch was able to discover many places not known to the regular tourist. One of Mooney's singing pals was Bobby Clancy (one of the famous Clancy Brothers) and Bobby and his wife took Mooney and Koch to Dungarvan, a town on the coast in Waterford County. Koch wrote this about the area:
At our backs, enclosing the northern side of the bay, is a distant stone sea wall with rows of guesthouses behind, and an old square church tower, small on a promontory. In front of us, as we walk, out on the horizon beyond the esplanade, is another promontory, enclosing the bay in the south. Very long and low under the big sky, it extends for many miles, ending in a lion-shaped headland on the Atlantic. It's a place of far, coloured fields and trees: a promontory of dreaming beauty. A second neck of land extends from it towards us: treeless, sandy, and like a yellow ribbon....But it's the main, distant promontory that holds my gaze, with its patchwork of fields in every shade of green and tawny yellow, and the microscopic trees on its top almost black, stamped against the sky. It glows behind sea-mist and the hazes of afternoon; it dreams outside modern Ireland, and is surely much farther from Dungarvan and its bars and patisseries than can be measured in miles or kilometres.

After reading this I yearn to go back to Ireland. It's been over 20 years since I was there but I remember those landscapes. ( )

Culture and its erosion, along with poetic sensibility, are examined through descriptions of Ireland, the author's family history and his experience of the Irish heritage in Australia.

The opening chapters cover Koch's background and early life in Tasmania. One of his maternal great-great-grandmothers was an Irish Protestant of patrician Ascendancy stock (he will ultimately find her old family mansion in ruins, its name having been given to a new housing estate). Another was a convict: he recounts her passage to the new country, and her and spirited life there, and speculates on the unknown details. In the next section, he describes how the harsh legacy of Irish Catholicism flavoured his schooling with the Christian Brothers. But he was also in touch with his Protestant heritage, and later, at university, he discovers the stories of gentlemanly Irish rebels exiled to Tasmania after 1848.

He visited Ireland in his youth, but the book is mainly about his subsequent trip, in mature years, with a musician friend in the year 2000.

By this stage we have already encountered his aversion to manufactured mass culture - the "torment of piped music on buses" for example. It is most clearly epitomised in the pathetic scene with obese children during a stop-over in Dubai. "The enclosed suburban shopping malls of the West have evolved and flowered on the equator into whole hermetic citadels", a "machine-chilled hive" that "resounds with American pop music, piped through loud-speakers: here as everywhere on earth... the inescapable accompaniment to life in a public space".

Dublin on his first trip in the 1950s had been a place of "strange echoing lanes that ran into the dark nineteenth century... urchins in braces and waistcoats and quiet, mysterious little bars" - filled with the spirt of James Joyce, though this books were frowned on and hard to obtain. In today's city, he discovers that James Joyce features everywhere - in cardboard cutouts, displays with Ulysses maps of Dublin: a "tourist logo" in a city which his spirit no longer inhabits.

Traditional Ireland, especially in the west, is a besieged bastion against such cultural impoverishment. People in traditional west Ireland pubs "simply sing when the spirit moves them, and are listened to respectfully. This is how it must have been once in England and Australia, until somewhere in the mid-nineteenth century. Then it was lost, as the oral culture was lost." Such singing in an Australian bar lounge "would cause laughter or embarrassment or both."

Ireland also borders, at many points, on Faery. Sometimes even in Dublin itself. "The tide is out; black flats of mud extend below the wall, and the seagulls wheel and squabble there... birds that always seem the same birds, birds that exist outside Time."

"High, very high, Atlantic gulls wheel in the air above the ridge, and their cold, hungry cries come down to me... here are the territories of the Sidhe. Looking ahead up the road I recognise them immediately." Certain landscapes seen in Tasmania were "its heralds: its distant, imperfect variations... Now, here is the true rise, and its grass grows with an uncanny tinge of gold... Ireland has a legendary frontier. There, where the real world ends, the four other worlds begin: the world of the Sidhe, the Many-Coloured Land, the Land of Wonder, and the Land of Promise. Here at Howth, I have come to the no-man's-land between. I know better, though, than to try and cross it."

But TV, radio and technology seal this frontier, offering instead "the knowledge and pseudo-knowledge and vices and despair of Dublin, London and New York. And the Danaan voices fade."

"This post-Christian era in the West, despite its desertion of rationalism and its automatic reverence for alien religions, is not one that's open to Faery, as Yeats and his circle were; as Keats was, and Coleridge, and Shakespeare. The idea of Faery has become absurd: an infantile whimsy, of little interest even to the juveniles of the computer age, who are preoccupied instead by pseudo-legendary warriors fighting and maiming in those screen-bound computer games... Legend, exploited and reinvented in the animation studios Hollywood and Tokyo, is supremely fashionable, and makes money. But not Faery; not those spirits in trees and streams and hills that the Greeks knew, and the Elizabethans, and even the Victorians." Faery is linked to Beauty, which "as a grail to be pursued is a notion that's absent from the West's postmodern salons, and even from poetry, since Beauty and studied irony make poor companions".

Sidhe is Gaelic for both 'faery' and 'wind'. He quotes Yeats:

The host is riding from Knocknarea
And over the grave of Clooth-na-Bare;
Caoilte tossing his burning hair,
And Niamh calling Away, come away:
Empty your heart of its mortal dream.

"I'd always imagined that the Irish bogs would be dreary," he writes. "The reverse is true. They're very beautiful; or rather, they're beautiful if your spirit is of a kind to be drawn by open, lonely moorland or by waste places that retreat into inscrutable distance. Such places resonate with a high, single note of mystery: a singing that's only just audible, like wind in a wire. Their melancholy quiet is filled with waiting; with the nearby presence of something remarkable, just beyond the reach of the eye and the mind. Here on the edge of the boglands, I understand why a knowledge of the Otherworld was always so strong among the Irish." But it is "now in danger of being lost - withered and stunted by the rays of our video machines, and the babble of the global culture." ( )