AustLit

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)