Travel writing | ABC Radio National Book Show | Ramona Koval is joined by travel writer and editor Tom Swick and travel historian Richard White
- Ramona Koval: Tom, in your piece from the Columbia Journalism Review, it's an old piece from 2001, 'The Roads Not Taken', you talk about the travel section in some kinds of journalism, but there's a funny bit about the typical travel piece. Can you remember what you said about the kinds of things you find in a piece? And you almost could say fill in the dots, it doesn't actually matter where it's going to be, it's about someone and their marvellous travelling companion usually, isn't it.
- Tom Swick: Right, it's the writer and the companion and they're basically the only people you meet in the piece, and they always have a very nice time and they always are in picturesque places and they stay in very comely hotels and they always vow to return someday. It's kind of like living happily ever after, and there's never anything terribly real about it. You don't get a sense that they really experience the place in an authentic way.
- Ramona Koval: And the land is always a land of contrasts...
- Tom Swick: Yes, that's one of the biggest clichés of travel writing.
I miss some things about Australia. The living is much easier in Sydney than it is in New York. I remember the bleak February Sunday when The New York Times came out with an article by Ray Bonner on the pools cemented to headlands on Sydney beaches. Bewitching photos. Glorious photos. The phone rang all day. ‘Are they real?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Are they private? Gated communities?’ ‘No. Public. For everyone.’ ‘Why are you living here then!?!’
I gave up Australian beaches and those swimming pools, but what I gained was best expressed by the magnificent travel writer Freya Stark: ‘Only with long experience and the opening of his wares on many a beach where his language is not spoken, will the merchant come to know the worth of what he carries and what is parochial and what is universal in his choice’. I gained another kind of beach altogether.
— “Expatriate” Australian author Kate Jennings delivers the 2010 Ray Mathew Lecture.Laurence Sterne’s list of travellers
Idle Travellers
Inquisitive Travellers
Lying Travellers
Proud Travellers,
Vain Travellers,
Splenetic Travellers,
Then follow
The Travellers of Necessity,
The delinquent and felonious Traveller,
The unfortunate and innocent Traveller,
The Simple Traveller,
And last of all (if you please) The Sentimental Traveller
(meaning thereby myself) …
From A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, 1927
Questions of Travel, by Elizabeth Bishop
There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams
hurry too rapidly down to the sea,
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.
—For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,
aren’t waterfalls yet,
in a quick age or so, as ages go here,
they probably will be.
But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,
slime-hung and barnacled.
Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
What childishness is it that while there’s a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?
But surely it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road,
really exaggerated in their beauty,
not to have seen them gesturing
like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.
—Not to have had to stop for gas and heard
the sad, two-noted, wooden tune
of disparate wooden clogs
carelessly clacking over
a grease-stained filling-station floor.
(In another country the clogs would all be tested.
Each pair there would have identical pitch.)
—A pity not to have heard
the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird
who sings above the broken gasoline pump
in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:
three towers, five silver crosses.
—Yes, a pity not to have pondered,
blurr’dly and inconclusively,
on what connection can exist for centuries
between the crudest wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden cages.
—Never to have studied history in
the weak calligraphy of songbirds’ cages.
—And never to have had to listen to rain
so much like politicians’ speeches:
two hours of unrelenting oratory
and then a sudden golden silence
in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:
“Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one’s room?
Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there … No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?”
Every afternoon, away in far Australia, there comes over us all a half-past-two-in-the-afternoon feeling, an intolerable ennui, a sense of emptiness and discontent, a longing for something large and full that cannot be exhausted. Men, and women, and boys, and girls all know the feeling. … Even the busiest man and woman is overcome with this ennui at times. Half-past-two in the afternoon is the most fatal hour, because then one becomes conscious that there is nothing to do but to repeat the morning.
It is our remoteness that pains us. We are so far, far off. Our veins run warm with English blood, and London calls, calls, and we are there a whole world away. That is the meaning of the half-past-two-in-the-afternoon feeling. It is a sudden sense of our great distance from the full intellectual life of the old world, from music and art.
I had it often. I lost it when I came to London. At half-past two in the afternoon now there rolls over one a great, gorgeous wave of intense happiness. All the things I can see flash over me. In vivid succession there rush through the brain Turner’s watercolours downstairs under the National Gallery…; the strange sky and sun outside; … the shops, unending; the people, never to be wearied of; big music, that never comes to an end, that does not come to us for a brief visit then fly away.
… Oh London, London! how did I ever live without you? … I no longer say to myself, “You’re in London.” I accept it at last, and surrender to the spell of the City of Mists.
— Sydney poet and writer Louise Mack, An Australian Girl in London, 1902.“She was one of tens of thousands of Australian women who were drawn to and resided in their imperial metropolis between 1870 and 1940,” writes Angela Woollacott (To Try Her Fortune in London). “Because departing for London was a recognised cultural ritual in Australia, women could undertake this huge step without being condemned for transgressing femininity through being overly ambitious, despite contemporary cultural limitations on women’s claims to the public domain. … Colonial expectations for the trajectory of success thus naturalised the voyage to London and mitigated against the constraints of femininity.”
Selected list of Australian travellers
Wanderers
Explorers
Convicts
Fortune-seekers
Squatters
Drovers
Shearers
Swagmen
Miners
Speculators
Missionaries
Soldiers (“Diggers”)
Returning soldiers
“Ten-Pound Poms”
Migrants
Exiles
Expatriates
Second-wave migrants
Cosmopolites
Commuters
Tourists
Backpackers
“Grey nomads”
Working Holiday Visas
New Zealanders
Scholars (Rhodes, Fulbright, Commonwealth)
Third-wave migrants
Asylum seekers
