Happy Sad Land

by Mark Mc Crum (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1995

  $3.43

• Used

  Paperback
  2000

  $3.43

  Knowing nothing of Australia except the lager-ad cliches of sun and surf, ockers and sheilas, kangaroos and didgeridoos, Mark McCrum arrives Down Under. Hitching, flying, by Greyhound and by train, he makes his picaresque way around the vast brown land. From royalist hippies to republican cattle-ranchers, from Queensland jillaroos to Indo-Chinese immigrants, from Perth millionaires to desert Aboriginals, he meets modern Aussies of every kind. 'Infused with the spirit of Australia: breezy, accepting, humorous' The Times

• Used

  Hardcover
  1994

  $3.43

  In 1977, at the age of 18, Mark McCrum went to Southern Africa to wash dishes and teach English at a new multi-racial school in the fledgling republic of Botswana. He found his hitch-hiking trips round neighbouring South Africa - then at the height of the apartheid regime - profoundly affecting and confusing. 15 years later he returns. The all-white Referendum has just taken place, transition to black Government is being negotiated, Boipatong is yet to happen. McCrum embarks on a journey that is to take him from Crossroads township to the splendours of Johannesburg's Northern Suburbs. On the way he meets people as diverse as a Cape Town down-and-out and Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi. He returns to a Botswana which has chnaged almost beyond recognition and where his ex-pupils have developed in a variety of surprising ways. South Africa is often considered a subject too complex for comprehension. In this personal account, McCrum provides a slice-of-life view of a country in the throes of an historic and irreversible transition.