by Tony Kevin
María Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: how Muslims, Jews, and Christians created a culture of tolerance in medieval Spain, Back Bay Books, Little, Brown, New York, 2002 (paperback)
Antony Beevor, The Spanish Civil War, Cassell Military Paperbacks, London, 1999
Easy Learning Spanish Dictionary and Easy Learning Spanish Grammar, Collins, London, latest reprints 2005
Berlitz Spanish Phrase Book and Dictionary, Spain 1998
Michelin roadmaps, 1:400,000 Orange Series, ‘Regional — España’: 578 Andalucia, 576 Extremadura, 571 Galicia.
The poetry by Federico García Lorca quoted on pp 66–7 is reproduced with the publisher’s kind permission from ‘Romance de la pena negra’ (‘Ballad of Black Pain’), pp 564–5, from The Gypsy Ballads, 1924–1927, translated by Will Kirkland and Christopher Maurer, in Collected Poems (rev. bilingual edn), Farrer Straus Giroux, New York, 1991, rev. edn 2002. The poem (in Galician) on p 251 and the English translation on pp 252–3 are taken from the same book.
My dedication of this book to Amy Banson requires some explanation. Amy is a student in her early twenties at the Catholic University of Canberra. She walked 1463 kilometres over two months, all the way from Brisbane to Canberra, at around the same time as I was walking in Spain. Amy walked to honour the memory of Clea Rose, another Canberra university student, aged twenty-one, who died after an irrecoverable brain injury that was caused when she was knocked down soon after midnight on 30 July 2005 by a speeding stolen car, driven by a fourteen-year-old boy, which was being pursued by a police car through a pedestrians-only area of Canberra City. Neither car stopped after Clea was hit. Amy was one of the first people on the scene. She comforted Clea, a young woman whom she did not know, and tried to help her. Clea never regained consciousness. After three weeks in hospital in a coma, Clea died.
Clea Rose’s tragic and pointless death has haunted me ever since. To me, it symbolises the callous cruelty and indifference to human life of our aggressive, machine-driven, and speed-obsessed age. Amy’s walk, which she called ‘Walk with a Rose’, was sponsored by many Canberra businesses. It attracted huge community support along the way from Brisbane to Canberra. It also raised a lot of money for the National Brain Injury Foundation, which seeks to raise awareness of the plight of people with an acquired brain injury.
I learned from newspapers about Amy’s walk, and I phoned her in its final days as she was nearing Canberra, not long after my return home from Spain. It was a privilege to be invited by Amy to walk for a day with her. I cannot think of anyone more appropriate than this inspirational young woman to whom to dedicate this book. Amy Banson is the truest of pilgrims, and young people like her offer hope for a better world.