Please note: Ros Pesman will not be able to present his paper at "Snapshots from Abroad."
Since the advent of mass tourism, Australians have been among the world's most enthusiastic travellers, particularly remarkable when we consider that the tyranny of distance ensured that any foreign travel was expensive and time-consuming, and that the favoured destination, for most of the last two hundred years, was as far away from Australia as it was possible to go.
This paper seeks to skim a vast national travel diary (Australian travel books would number almost 1000 by 1970), which has for the most part lain forgotten, and to make some very sweeping generalizations about dominant trends in Australian travel writing about Europe. In documenting the "unknown," many travel writers are also involved in a colonizing project. But in Europe Australians are more likely to be the colonist than the colonizing, exploring the known rather than the unknown. It is a paradox that Randolph Bedford exploits in his title, Explorations in Civilisation.
The dilemma for travellers to the center is to say something new and fresh about worlds that are extremely well-known, where the scope for surprising the reader is so much less. Not only are these worlds known in a factual sense, studied at school, read about in newspapers; they are also intensely familiar as imaginative constructions. Time and time again travellers write of how a heritage of European literature had created their experience for them before they had even arrived. The most common Australian metaphor for the experience of travel into the old world was that it was like entering some sort of pre-existing imaginative world, a dream, a painting, a novel, a film.
While not a peculiarly Australian dilemma, it is a problem that characterizes a great deal of Australian travel writing. How can yet another discovery of familiar places, be justified? The tendency in Australia has been to emphasize one of the two extremes of the spectrum from the social to the personal. Many quite ordinary travellers engaged in the very social analysis that Barthes sees as being normally precluded by tourism. At its best, social criticism was the product of a deeply-offended sense of social justice. At its worst and most basic, it sprang from an obsession with dirt as a supreme test of social efficiency, the traveller a disdainful visitor running a superior finger through the dust on a window sill.
The alternative was to escape into the personal, with a more romantic focus on the subjective response of the writer. It is at this point that travel writing so readily merges into fiction. In the typical autobiography of a bourgeois Australian the critical rite of passage, the supreme test of one's courage or identity, the moment of epiphany or the occasion that the veil falls from one's eyes so very often happens in Europe. The two most common models Australians have used to describe their travel experiences, particularly of Europe, are two older forms of travel: the pilgrimage and the Grand Tour. Australians have long construed their travels as pilgrimage and the voyage "Home" acquired the rich associations of a mythic journey for Australians. Complete spiritual fulfillment could only occur on the other side of the world. But it was the Grand Tour that provided the most fitting metaphor for a great deal of Australian travel, at least in Europe, despite its being identified with young gentlemen of the eighteenth century. What killed the old Grand Tour of the eighteenth century British aristocracy was that travel became more democratic (open to families, women, the middle classes and the middle-aged), Europe became more accessible for shorter, cheaper holiday jaunts and the tourists lost the conviction that they would be improved by living elsewhere for a time.
None of these applied to Australia until the arrival of the Jumbo jet in 1970, and even then a kind of Grand Tour remained a dominant strand in the history of Australian travel. Young Australians continued to purposefully plod the same well-worn track through Europe, of necessity taking a long time over it, often experiencing their first break with the moral constraints of home, imagining it as a rite of passage that was doing them good, and always, religiously, keeping their diary. Only then would they return to "settle down," confident they had acquired a sophistication and knowledge that only an overseas trip could bestow on a provincial Australian.
If we are to accept the Grand Tour as a model for Australian travel, two qualifications need to be made. Women were numerically the more enthusiastic travellers to Europe and indeed the notion of England as "Home" drew heavily on Victorian notions of separate spheres, picturing England as domestic and feminine and the rest of the world, including Australia, as "the outside world" and hence the preserve of men. Clearly then, any understanding of Australian travel as Grand Tour would have to include and even give priority to women. Similarly, in an Australia where class boundaries were insecure and status depended on adopted customs, behavior and wealth more than breeding, the habit of a Grand Tour was soon taken up by the middle class, many of whom could do it in style. And even before the 1950s sport, soldiering, seafaring, circuses, vaudeville and the international activities of feminists, trade unionists, politicians, temperance advocates and religious organizations, as well as mere vagabondage, all offered means to travel to Australians who otherwise could not afford to go.
In all classes Australians brought an earnest belief in travel as improving the mind and enormous value was placed on having first hand experience of the world. Paradoxically their earnestness sits alongside a marked casualness in how the tale is told. Impressions, glimpses, jottings, sketches, snapshots, notes, diaries and letters recur in various combinations in the titles, implying writing that was done on the spot, in haste, with a certain improvisation. In describing their first impressions, Australian travellers could combine the moral seriousness of a cultural elite with the casualness of a democrat. Ultimately the paradox of a casual seriousness springs from a conviction that the real meaning of life is somewhere "out there," but Australians, uncertain of their social and geographical status, could not possibly be the primary interpreters of it.
NOTE: Ros Pesman will be unable to attend the conference.
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