Dubious cultural exchanges

Press, 29 March 1980, Page 17

Dubious cultural exchanges

Valid for All Countries. By Desmond O’Grady. University of Queensland Press, 1979. 207 pp. $5.95 (paperback). (Reviewed by Diane Prout) This cosmopolitan collection of short stories by Australian-born Desmond O’Grady provides the reader with a passport to some of the more exotic countries of the world. The social encounters experienced by his heterogeneous travellers are told with a wry and often jaundiced view of the benefits of the cultural exchange. A n American anthropologist investigating the attitude of New Guinea tribesmen to sacraments, is deprived of his academic scoop of a life-time when his prize subject, steals his tape-recorder containing priceless

research material and buries it in the local cemetery as an offering to the spirits, there to have it consumed by the virulent insect-life below ground. A vulnerable, middle-aged woman tourist seeks inner peace in Bangkok after the death of her husband, only to be hustled by a charming young Thai guide. A holidaying journalist becomes inadvertently involved in a revolution while attempting to • photograph witch’s-hat minarets in Damascus. The most entertaining story by far is the wickedly irreverent “Life, Debts and Miracles of F.X. Horgan,” an Australian Jesuit priest witrr a compulsive gambling streak, whose “heavenly voices” guide him in his selection of the day’s best bets. Desmond O’Grady writes with fluency and occasional vividness, yet his stvle is basically reportorial. Tne eye-of-the-camera technique admits little feeling of a mind which tries to interpret or understand the seeming randomness of events. There is- seldom anv highlighting of beauty or squalor, pathos or disenchantment. Taken as a whole, these stories present a montage of life, each frame glimpsed briefly and then lost to memory.