The vast, forbidding Australian Outback… the grandeur of Ayers Rock… legendary Alice Springs… the Great Barrier Reef… the primal beauty of Cape Tribulation… Two women, from different continents, with different values, collide with spectacular results… UNDER THE SOUTHERN CROSS. American Lee Paynter has built her Small travel agency into an international tour company. Brash, confident, openly lesbian, her great love is her business. Women? They’re to enjoy and let go. Alexandra Findlay is pursuing a career in Australian tourism with quiet focus and determination, convinced that her career is the best she can hope for in her arid, closeted emotional existence. Now Alex has been assigned to accompany Lee on the American woman’s visit Down Under, to win Lee’s company over to Australian tourism. Suddenly Alex’s quiet life explodes… And Lee is challenged by a woman unlike any she has ever known.

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How do people come to need products they never even knew they wanted? How, for example, did indigenous Zimbabweans of the 1940s begin to believe that they required Lifebuoy soap? Offering a glimpse into the intimate workings of modern colonialism and global capitalism, Timothy Burke takes up these questions in Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women, a study of post-World War II commodity culture in Zimbabwe. With particular attention to cosmetic products and the contrast between colonial and pre-colonial ideas of cleanliness, Burke examines the role played by commodity culture, changing patterns of consumption, and the spread of advertising in the making of modern Zimbabwe. His work combines history, anthropology, and political economy to show how the development of commodification in the region relates to the social history of hygiene. Within this framework, and drawing on a wide variety of historical sources, Burke explores dense interactions between commodity culture and embodied aspects of race, gender, sexuality, domesticity, health, and aesthetics in a colonial society. Rather than viewing the production of needs simply as an imposition from above, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women shows what heterogeneous and complex processes, involving the aims and histories of both colonizers and colonized, produced these changes in Zimbabwean society. Integrating political economy, cultural studies, and a wide range of the social sciences, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women will find readers among scholars of colonialism, African history, and ethnography as well those for whom the problem of commodification is a significant theoretical issue.

Excerpt from Pastels Under the Southern Cross It an error to suppose that a person who has only spent a few months in a country must necessarily have nothing to say about it which is worth saying. Once people put too much faith in the Man who had been there. Now, if we wish to pass for intelligent, we sometimes fall into the Opposite error. For it may often happen that though the inhabitant knows most, the visitor sees most. He sees those broad outlines which eyes necessarily riveted on details, end by losing. And a visitor is there to see. In places where we live our energies are largely spent in doing. A visitor is freed from cares and occupations. All his mental energies, all such knowledge of life and powers of observation as he may have acquired elsewhere, are focused on the country and people with which he is making acquaintance. Although myself an Oxonian of long standing, I have often found articles on Oxford by foreigners who had spent but a short time there, illuminating, even when many of their facts were wrong or misapprehended. As to scenery, without doubt those characteristics of a landscape which differentiate it from other landscapes are more obvious to strange than to accustomed eyes, however much these latter may miss of its intimate secrets. There are not a great many far-off places in the world which are worth visiting solely for the beauty of their scenery. To begin with, the sense of beauty may be feasted high within the. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

"This is the story of two Canadian naturalist observers enjoying the birds, beasts, weather and stars in New Zealand and Australia in the 1950s. While traveling by motorcycle and camping rough, they meet Kiwis and Aussies and try various temporary jobs in order to keep alive and healthy"--Publisher's description.