Reluctant Wandering: New Mobilities in Contemporary Australian Travel Writing

Reluctant Wandering: New Mobilities in Contemporary Australian Travel Writing

Travel has always been an important trope of settler literature, central not only to colonial displacement and dispossession but to postcolonial reimaginings of identity, gender, and place. However, it was not until the early twentieth century, after the rise of literary nationalism, that a more nativist form of travel writing emerged in Australia. In the first decade of the 1900s, travel narratives were essentially naturalist assemblages of specific regions that purposefully resisted an earlier urge to romanticise the land or reduce it to either a volatile antagonist or a haphazardous backdrop. Ted Banfield’s Confessions of a Beachcomber (1908) is a frank account of the author’s attempt to ‘set down in plain language the sobriety of everyday occurrences’ on Dunk Island, his remote Queensland home on the Barrier Reef (4). His contemporary, Charles Barrett, also published several travel books, including The Bush Ramblers (1907), a short, illustrated story about a young Australian family who leave their home in the ‘great city’ of Melbourne to live in the ‘big, lonely bush’ (5-6). The book, which was initially published domestically – a rare occurrence for the time – helped popularise the outback for young Australians. Like Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians (1894), the work was extolled for its portrayal of ‘authentic’ Australian children rather than transplanted British ones. Jeannie Gunn, who also wrote for children, is better known for her autobiographical novel, We of the Never-Never (1908), a recount of her brief stint as the station manager’s wife at the old Elsey Homestead on Rope River. These works, though principally concerned with Western notions of travel, signalled a rejection of Antipodean inversion and the crude tendency to view Australia as a place that was upside-down and inside-out, a topsy-turvy land that was either ‘absurdly comic or downright dangerous’ (White and Greenwood 406). For the first time, in the immediate aftermath of Federation, travel writing penned by Australians, about Australia, gained a significant readership.

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