 Book
Reviews
with Robin Osborne
Land of a Thousand Eyes
By Peter Olszewski
Allen & Unwin $24.95
Locals find it hard to travel, except into permanent exile, from the Southeast Asian nation of Burma - forget 'Myanmar' - while visitors on short visas react badly to the deadening hand of Burmese-style socialism and the ruthlessness of the military rulers.
British writer and Burmese speaker, Emma Larkin, recently met with a range of Burmese dissidents who had avoided prison or in some cases just been released. Combining these conversations with her passion for the author George Orwell, she penned Secret Histories - Finding George Orwell in a Burmese Teashop, picking up on a grim local joke about Orwell not only describing the country in Burmese Days but predicting its future in the political satires Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, which educated Burmese regard as a 'trilogy' about their land.
Australian journalist Peter Olszewski's account of his stint training journalists for the English-language Myanmar Times is a further reminder of the country's Orwellian leanings.
'Censorship at the Times is absolute and total,' he discovered. 'All articles selected for possible publication are faxed to Military Intelligence and are either accepted in their totality, completely rejected, or partly censored, with words, paragraphs and sections removed.'
If the authorities had known Olszewski's background as a former editor of Australian Playboy and the author, as 'JJ McRoach', of the cult classic Dozen Dopey Yarns: Tales from the Pot Prohibition, they may well have denied him a visa - and they surely will after this book, despite its gorgeous cover and, at first glance, innocuous title.
Indeed, his last visit to Burma, more than two decades earlier, had resulted in expulsion for 'possessing foreign newspapers.' Now, he was back to 'train young locals in the ancient art of the foreign newspaper.' It was hardly surprising that his stay turned out to be an odd one.
In hospital with an acute gall bladder and secondary bowel infection, he noted, 'A stoic Buddhist attitude of toughing it out is expected of patients, and medication containing opiates is unavailable in Yangon [Rangoon], a strange anomaly considering the country's dubious status as the world's second largest illicit opium-producing nation.'
He survived, as, albeit barely, does Burma, concluding that, 'The Myanmar military can really only accomplish one thing effectively. They can engender paranoia, and they do this extremely well.'
Finally he falls in love with a local woman who emigrates to Australia to join him - proof that at least something can happily come out of Burma.
- Books available at Book Warehouse, Keen Street, Lismore and at Lismore Shopping
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