 Book Reviews
with Robin Osborne
The Boy In The Green Suit
Robert Hillman
Scribe, $30.00
 Robert Hillman was anything but a full-time writer when, at the age of 18, he fled an unhappy, rural Victorian background on a Greek ship that he hoped would carry him to tropical islands where bare-breasted maidens awaited young white males, even one with just a few pounds in the pocket of a daggy green suit.
Now, four decades later, his year-in-the-life account has bagged him $20,000 for winning the National Biography Award.
By page 68, the future university lecturer is bedding down in a forest in Kosovo: 'It seemed unlikely that I would get another ride that night, so I wandered into the scrub with my suitcase and unpacked two woolly blue blankets that I'd stolen from the ship.'
Next morning, 'I brushed off my green suit, put on my shoes and tie, then hunkered down with my typewriter on the grassy floor of the forest.'
Although none of the manuscript from those days still exists physically, this memoir is an entertaining and historically interesting recollection of that time.
In Greece he was given the choice of repatriation to Australia or working as a dishwasher in a youth hostel; in Turkey, 'joyless and dull', the virginal lad envied the casual sex that befell other backpackers; in Kuwait he almost sold his body to a groping general, while in Iran, then under the Shah, he was jailed on immigration charges and witnessed the appalling treatment meted out to clerics and leftists persecuted by the US-backed regime.
In the Iranian desert the down-at-heel teenager swapped his green suit jacket for a bowl of bean paste, yet 'never for a second felt that I was anything other than a tourist.'
He recalls, 'My thoughts penetrated far enough into the lives of the people around me to register if they were rich or poor or very poor, and no further. I was an Australian on an adventure - ill-conceived though it was.'
He was ever mindful of the long shadow cast by his faraway (in both senses) father: 'It occurs to me now that both the burdens I carried around the world - the need to keep my little pink hands from staying too clean; the need to make it big with dusky women - were strapped across my shoulders by my father.
'He could have made things a lot easier for me if he'd just taken the time to say, 'Best thing, have fun.'
- Books reviewed are available at Book Warehouse, Keen Street, Lismore.
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