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In 1943, Frank Clune was granted permission to leave Australia to fly to India. War was breaking out, so this was perhaps not as simple as it sounds. As an author, he was planning to write a book to ‘explain' India. His audience - common Australians. This was to be a broad reaching book - while many Australians had the urge to travel, the time was not right, and it is likely knowledge of India at this time would have been relatively light.
So while we are quickly reminded that long distance travel by plane at that time meant lots of stopping for refuelling (it too him about six flights to get to Perth from Sydney), it seems that this book is attempting more than a travel story.
As an Australian in British controlled India, Clune is welcomed and genuinely treated well. Australians in the military had (and continue to have) an excellent reputation, and Clune was able to trade on that to gain access to high ranking personnel and officials. From these contacts he made others, with letters of recommendation and the like, so that as he travelled throughout India he was welcomed, accommodated and entertained. And therefore much of this book is about the web of people who he met, and who provided that experience for him. Each person of note gets a short biography, and each place of residence (they were not merely houses, most of the time) earned a description.
Included also, of course, is an explanation of the historical events of India, the rulers, their lineage, their achievements, various statistics on population, information on industry, farming and production and of course any Australian he encounters gets a full write up.
As such, this book is a lot less about the travel, and more about those things outlined above. There is obviously an issue with the ageing of this writing (or more likely the issue is with reading it in current times) - most of the people contained within are now a part of history - and there are a lot of people mentioned. For this reason, I struggled to maintain focus, and it lacked some of the aspects I have enjoyed in the other book of his I read.
This is not to say that someone more interested in the history of the time, military and Australians in India, as well as how India was involved in the commencement of the war, would not enjoy this more.
3 stars.
