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Home Journeys to Justice
Journeys To Justice

Book CoverThe book "Journeys to Justice," was published by Harper Collins in 1995. The complete book appears here and there are some stories of further journeys after 1995 when I was working in the Middle East and Eastern Europe region of World Vision International.

The Back Cover Notes

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Journeys to Justice

Philip Hunt has found himself on the pillion seat of the leader of Mozambique's terrorist army, dodging rocks and rubber bullets on the Gaza Strip, and introducing Bob Hawke to Somali war lords.

Journeys to Justice is the story of Philip Hunt's journey. It is a lively and fast-paced travelogue through some of the world's unique places - not usual tourist fare. But this is a book which offers insights into more than geography and culture - it also tracks an inner journey. The journey 'towards justice' within Hunt himself. Hunt writes with flair and clarity about the challenges we face in making real a vision for a better world.

Philip Hunt is a former Brisbane disk jockey who joined World Vision Australia in its communications department and later became the chief executive of this $100 million agency.

After Journeys to Justice was published I continued to journal my travels. Some of these are collected here as "More Journeys".

 

1 - An Indian Train Story

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The Smell of Human Air
The Chinese have a name for it. Yahn-hey. Human Air.
The aroma of people is the most enduring memory of that first time I arrived in Bombay. It would be unkind, and wrong, to call it a smell. Although you could certainly smell it. But the odour was not the coarse, acrid unpleasantness of body odour. It was the sweet, fetid, warm, thick smell of people. Many people. Very many people.
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2 - The Road To The Airport

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Radio And Before Radio
I had come to World Vision from radio. I was a disk jockey. The station I worked for, 4BK Brisbane, was on the third floor of Newspaper House, Queen Street, Brisbane. In the heart of the city.
Today, only the facade of the building remains. A huge arcade has been built behind the preserved faces.
The same can be said of 4BK. Owned by Queensland Newspapers, the publishers of The Courier-Mail, Queensland's most popular newspaper, it was sold and converted to FM. No traces of my old haunts remain.
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3 - Discovering The World

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1978-87
My first encounters with the world, as the following stories from Korea, Kenya, Uganda and Somalia show, concentrated on my discovery of just how different the world was from home.
I discovered that there is such a thing as a ‘world view' -- a way of looking at the world.
Sometimes, as in Korea, I discovered that this world view is part of cultural difference. It touches matters such as how one negotiates and how one deals with conflict and criticism.
In Kenya I discovered that people have different priorities. They give value to things, events and experiences in ways that I found diferent and unexpected. Finding myself again in India, I discovered that words mean different things in diferent places.
My journey plumbed new depths of discovery in Uganda where I ran up against new and disturbing realities. By that I mean that what was considered the real world by Idi Amin and his government was quite different from how I experienced it. It seemed to me that they had constructed a world of macabre and unreal rules, values and beliefs. Yet it seemed not at all unreal to them. This was hard to understand.
In Somalia I found that I carried stereotypes in my head about Africa and Africans. Looking back, much of these recollections reveal my gaucheness and naive. In my diaries I find I concentrated on differences, treating these differences as bizarre and amusing.
In Somalia, too, I first began to flesh out the complex reality of the aid business I had joined. I had intellectual theories about it; now I discovered that the real world of aid was even more complex and chaotic.
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4 - Looking Out

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South Africa 1985
 
Evil flourishes when good people do nothing. This always seemed a reasonable proposition. However, my journey to South Africa began to teach me that it is not always easy for good people to recognise evil -- especially good people who are born, grow up and live in a society which systematically shapes values and belief. This was the case in South Africa. For the first time I recognised the awesome power of social engineering. And also the insidious invisibility of the process for those being engineered. It takes impressive courage and insight to recognise what is being done to you and to stand against it. For many, it costs everything.
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