AustLit

Two broad forces contribute to the shaping of the problematic category, 'Australian travel writing'. First the ambiguities of Australia's 'post-colonial' status can be seen as leading to the development of three distinct traditions of travel writing: Australians writing about the outside world, the outside world writing about Australia, and Australians writing about Australia. But travel writing produced in and about Australia also responds to the pressures of the land itself, where cultures of mobility - 'travelling cultures' - compete with cultures of settlement. (Author abstract)

One of the most influential travel books about colonial Australasia, Savage Life and Scenes, was written by George French Angas, a well-to-do traveller with all the privileges of mobility. Angas made good use of his wealthy father's contacts in two British colonies - South Australia and New Zealand - where he had direct access to the colonial experience of a number of settlers, many of whom had expert knowledge of indigenous people and information on an evolving history of contact and conflict. One of the sources for Angas's representations of indigenous Australians in South Australia was a battling colonial schoolteacher, William Anderson Cawthorne (1824-1897). Angas made use of Cawthorne's work and writings without full acknowledgement. Without access to the writing and experience of travelling companions and knowledgeable intermediaries like Cawthorne, Savage Life and Scenes could not have been written. The discovery of the collective colonial experience that underpins such an important text is a reminder that often travel books reflect rather more than the unique experiences of a solitary traveller, especially when the traveller in question is wealthy and well-connected. (Author abstract)

This article explores the travel writing of bushwalking chemist, William Mogford Hamlet. In 'Pictures of Travel', a set of sixteen newspaper articles recounting his long distance Australian walking tours, Hamlet successfully brought together two seemingly contradictory impulses, a Romantic literary heritage that celebrated the freedom of the open road and a scientific mindset that insisted on the need for planning, measurement and routine. Negotiating the terrain between Romanticism and progressivism, Hamlet carved out a distinctive place in Australian writing about walking. At the same time, in moving between his British past and his Australian present, his walking and his writing became a means through which he developed a sense of national identification with his adopted home and made a crucial contribution to the development of bushwalking as a distinctively Australian leisure pursuit. (Author abstract)

This paper examines an aspect of Australian-born photographer and film maker Frank Hurley's media repertoire that has to date received little attention: his travel writing; but it does so in the context of its relations with other media he used at the same time. In the 1910s and 1920s, travel writing was closely connected with other media, especially photography, lantern slide projection and early cinema. Like his photographs and films, Hurley's writing was never meant to have a singular or definitive form: it was modular and mobile, created for the purpose of being used in a variety of forms, whether by Hurley himself or by other media personnel, and often in the service of other media. (Author abstract)

A ficto-critical essay, this narrative of a journey also presents an argument about time, modernity and indigenous versus colonial perceptions of place. The place in question is Gulaga, Mt. Dromedary, on the South Coast of New South Wales to which the author and his family went on a trip. This is the site on the Australian mainland first sighted and named by Captain Cook's party in 1770. The article performs the idea of multiple travels and stories/histories; this particular site sees Cook's account intersect with and contradict that of the local Aboriginal people, the Yuin. Neither is given more authority, nor are the Aborigines confined to ancient or timeless tradition. The fictocritical style tries to avoid the tendency to monologism of conventional scholarship and historical accounts. The author brings texts with him on his trip: Cook, the anthropologist Debbie Rose, and new characters met are woven into the script as they function to illustrate indigenous, romantic and spiritual positions. The eternal place of the mountain is set against the ephemera of empire(s) and the New World Order, setting up unresolved contradictions as other strange contingencies are included in the narrative. (Author abstract)