TRAVELLERS AND strangers to all parts of Australia, especially away from the coast, can expect wonderful hospitality. The country has its faults, as any country does, but lack of hospitality is certainly not one of them. Only when hospitality is little more than an excessive informality, when an entire nation breaks into premature smiling and all-teeth, small-talk mode – which betrays an absence of philosophical foundations – does it appear as nothing more than an awkward type of lightness.
The more isolated and hostile the terrain, the more authentic the hospitality. In their falsity the travellers are made to feel at home. Desert people are renowned for sharing with strangers their last handful of dates and puddle of used coffee, often without saying a word. There is a courtesy here – without naivety. The world is inhospitable; the cold earth. Assist another person if encountered on its surface. The instinct is a basic one. In modern times it can be as minor as changing someone’s flat tyre by the side of the road. In a poor farm or village in Spain or somewhere it is common for a crust of bread and a lump of cheese to be wrapped in cloth and given to the traveller about to continue the journey. It is unsmiling hospitality. Other places are known to share their women with travellers.
At first glance you would think that the psychoanalytical person would understand hospitality, and be hospitable, whilst the philosophical person would remain distant to the point of turning away. The opposite happens to be the case. The psychoanalytical person plumps up the pillows and leaves it at that. To extend hospitality to another person subdivides aspects of their difficult, hidden self. And any suggestions of a food offering acting as a language is brushed aside: for it could only reduce the amount of language available to describe their own attention-requiring state of mind.
But then it could hardly be said the philosophers have set a cracking pace in generosity to strangers either. Almost to a man they practise in their daily lives a specific remoteness, a behaviour verging on abstraction. Et cetera, et cetera. Oh, yes.