Travelling in antique lands

The past was still living in the present during Frank Hurley’s wartime journey.

Detail from Frank Hurley's Fishermen on the Sea of Galilee, Palestine (c.1940–46). Picture: National Library of Australia

Modern tourism has become a huge, indeed a monstrous industry, trampling sensitive environments both natural and cultural, and, together with modern media and information technology, rapidly and inexorably flattening the differences between the lives and cultures of different peoples all over the world.

The more people visit a place, in effect, the less distinctive and thus the less interesting it becomes to visit; the place itself is gradually adapted to the needs of the tourists and its people are increasingly employed, directly or indirectly, in serving and providing for them. Farmers and fishermen become waiters and drivers, doormen and cleaners. There is more money, but there is also increasing resentment or at the very least, jaded ­impatience.

Mass tourism is the most harmful because of its sheer scale, but also because of its obtuse and superficial engagement with the places it visits. Cruise ships in the Mediterranean represent the dregs of this kind of travel: crowds flood into coastal cities, glance at the most obvious tourist sites one after the other, take photographs, buy an ice cream and then return to their vessels. There is very little economic benefit to the places they visit.

The other disastrous category in the Mediterranean and elsewhere is cheap package tourism: groups who check into a seaside hotel and, like the British in Malta or the Russians in Cyprus, spend a week or two gorging themselves on buffets, growing ever fatter and more sunburned, often barely aware of the history and culture of the land they have come to visit, and again bringing very little economic benefit to the local community beyond the resort.

Wealthier travellers are more beneficial to local communities, because they stay in better and often smaller hotels, eat out in a variety of restaurants, buy the products of artisans and ­designers, and thus help to support businesses and skilled crafts and traditions of various kinds. But even so, they can be part of the relentless process of turning a once spontaneously picturesque town into a kitsch commercial version of itself.

Hurley's Giant Water Wheel, Hama, Syria (c. 1940–46). Picture: National Library of Australia.

The worst aspect of middle-class travel is the compulsion to collect destinations. Travel articles in the media are always telling readers of places they must see or, even more ludicrously, that they must see before they die — as though it will be any consolation, at the end of your life, to recall that you went on a tour to some site in Africa or South America with which you have no possible cultural connection.

The advertising of tourism has always held out the mirage of escape into another world, an exotic alternative to the dull world of our routines at home, even if in practice tourists still demand all the comforts of home at their foreign destination. But contemporary culture particularly fetishises individual experience, implying that my personal feelings before the pyramids, the Parthenon, or a gothic cathedral, are significant even if I have no idea of the history or cultural meaning of these monuments.

As a traveller and someone who has spent many years abroad, and now as someone professionally involved with boutique travel, I have always felt that the interest of travel is ­directly proportionate to the engagement we have with the people, the history and the culture of the place that we are visiting. To visit a place without such connection simply in order to tick it off a list of must-see places, or in the hope of some nebulous “experience” or perhaps just an Instagram illusion of an experience, is at best futile.

Detail from Hurley's The Farmer with Her Sickle (c.1940–46). Picture: National Library of Australia

One of the greatest pleasures of travel, which is the reward for making an effort to understand the reality of other people, is to glimpse the simultaneity of the present and the past — as I have observed before, it is also what a good travel writer like Peter Robb does in books like Midnight in Sicily (1996) and Street Fight in Naples (2010): the ancient, baroque and contemporary lives of these places seem for a moment to become simultaneously visible, as in a palimpsest.

It was much easier to see the past living in the present when Frank Hurley visited the Middle East during World War II, for so little had changed in these countries for centuries, and some aspects of life seemed hardly to have evolved since antiquity. Consequently Hurley, best known for his dramatic images of World War I as a young man, although meant to be documenting the new war, became increasingly drawn to the everyday life that surrounded him. His picture of Fishermen on the Sea of Galilee is like a re-­enactment of the story of the Miraculous Draught of Fishes, of which two versions exist in the gospels of Luke and John, and which has been painted again and again by artists from Duccio to Raphael. Hurley was famous or notorious both for his use of staging in composing a picture and of darkroom manipulation in enhancing drama, but the fact remains that these fishermen were hardly different in either costume or equipment from those of biblical times.

Similarly, his Farmer with her sickle, holding a handful of grain, reminds us of Ruth, who gleaned in the field of Boaz ­before becoming his wife — except that this woman is too old. And one cannot look at Salt formations, South end, Dead Sea, without thinking of the subject of the ancient Hebrew scapegoat, or of Holman Hunt’s famous painting of the same subject. Hurley has certainly designed his composition with great care to recall the painting, prompting us to imagine the missing beast.

Frank Hurley's Cameleers in Front of the Pyramids of Gizeh (1943). Picture:

Another reference to Holman Hunt, this time explicit, is in the title of The Light of the World, which recalls the most famous of all of Hunt’s paintings and shows light pouring down from the high windows between the columns of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, originally built by Constantine and reconstructed in its present form by the Emperor Justinian in the 6th century.

At the start of the exhibition is a picture of Hurley himself and his assistant, standing on the top of a hill and surveying the Kidron Valley below the old city of Jerusalem. Nearby is a map of his travels, which extended from Libya and Egypt through Palestine to Jordan, Iraq and Iran. There is a display case too, full of related documents: his passport, various army ID cards, together with leaflets and booklets on various archeological sites and guides to holy places.

The collection includes a guide to The Sites of the Crucifixion and Resurrection, and even a certificate of pilgrimage, just like those that were issued to pilgrims in the Middle Ages, for the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. This was one of the holy sites which the Crusaders saw it as their sacred duty to liberate and to protect. Hurley’s certificate is signed by the Archimandrite Kyriakos, guardian of the church, dated October 1, 1945, and duly stamped, and yet Hurley’s name has not been filled in.

Among so many archeological papers and recollections of two millennia of pilgrimage, there is one little pamphlet, cheaply produced, titled A Trip through Upper Galilee, by Dorothy Kahn Bar-Adon. But this is not a tourist brochure: it is published by the Palestine Pioneer Library and has an image of two young people working a field on the cover, an image no doubt of life on a kibbutz, and a reminder that only a few years later, in 1948, the state of Israel would be founded, followed immediately by an unsuccessful military onslaught by the neighbouring Arabs.

Frank Hurley's British War Cemetery, El Alamein.

Everything was about to change, and this adds extra poignancy to Hurley’s images of Jerusalem. There is a shot of Jews at the Western Wall, for example, but the city’s old bazaar, winding through narrow streets with architecture that could go back to the Crusader kingdom of Jerusalem or even beyond, is still crowded with Arabs with their white keffiyeh headscarves. This was the city where my grandmother lived in 1940-41 while my grandfather commanded Australian troops against the Italians in Libya, the Germans in Greece and the Vichy French in Syria. And after the war, with their sons, my grandparents settled in a Cairo ,which was also exactly as Hurley represents it.

There are remarkable shots of austere landscapes, including En route to Petra, where he evokes the tiny human figures picking their way through the deep mountain pass that leads to the extraordinary temple of Petra. In other cases, it is the ancient archeological sites themselves that are the subject, as with The Ruins of ancient Byblos, Syria. But Hurley particularly likes the drama of combining human figures with archeological sites, as in Cameleers in front of the Pyramids of Gizeh, with one camel in the left foreground as a repoussoir device, while a row of smaller ones passes in front of the pyramids in the distance, reminding us of the caravan as perennial image of the passing of time and life.

One particularly intriguing image is Giant water wheel, Hama, Syria. This is one of the so-called norias in the Syrian city of Hama, on the Orontes River. The noria is a waterwheel used to raise water from a river, whose flow also powers the turning of the wheel, up to the level of an elevated aqueduct, which then carries the water into town or into the fields for irrigation. The design seems to have been developed in Hellenistic times and improved by the Romans, who attached ceramic pots to the wheels.

The ones at Hama were originally constructed during the Byzantine period and then restored or rebuilt during the Islamic centuries, before the Mongol conquest in the 13th century. As they are made of timber, they have no doubt been frequently repaired since then, although they are no longer used for collecting water. Remarkably, it seems they have so far survived the destruction caused by the civil war in Syria, which among other places damaged the great Crusader castle known as the Krak des Chevaliers.

In spite of his interest in archeology, the age-old lives of the local people and the haunting evocation of biblical times, Hurley did find time to record some aspects of the war. One image, Dawn at El Alamein, Tanks waiting to advance, evokes the tension before Montgomery’s great victory over Rommel in 1942 that Churchill famously called “not the end, not even the beginning of the end, but perhaps the end of the beginning”.

In a second photograph, British war cemetery, El Alamein, Hurley is surprisingly low-key and unemphatic: a young man kneels, painting the name of a dead soldier on a cross that he leans against another cross already planted in the ground. Here, the cost of victory is plain enough to see without any rhetorical emphasis.

Pilgrimage: Hurley in the Middle East

National Library of Australia, until August 25