Ros Pesman

In our postmodern age, when everything travels and travel is a metaphor for everything, travel and travel writing have become the subject of intense scholarly interest and debate. Travel, once largely the domain of geographers, and travel writing, previously relegated to the status of a sub-literary genre, now engage attention from literary studies, history, anthropology, ethnography, and, most fruitfully, from gender and postcolonial studies. Conferences and publications abound.

From the earliest days of white settlement, Australians have made the voyage to Britain. Many stayed for long periods and some forever. Prominent among the more permanent residents were writers, prominent not only in terms of numbers but also because it was they who in large part created the stories and legends of Australians abroad. Some left without regret, lambasting their local world as ‘suburban’, hostile to originality and creativity. But Australian writers were not only denizens of a small, narrow society. They also lived in an English-speaking imperial world constructed in terms of metropolises and provinces. Thus Australian writers went to Britain in search of better opportunities for publication, wider markets for their wares, and to become part of a critical mass of writers, critics, intellectuals in a more complex, variegated society. When nationalist fervour was strong, local attitudes to expatriates could be ambivalent if not hostile. In 1967 Christina Stead was named by the Britannica Australia Award for Literature Committee as ‘the outstanding novelist of this day’ but was not given the prize because it was noted that she had not lived in Australia for forty years and that her contribution to literature had little reference to Australia.

From the mid-nineteenth century, the city of Florence and its surrounding hills were home to a large expatriate community in which the British were both prominent and visible – in the English tearooms and English pharmacy, in the waiting rooms of the English doctors and bankers, in the pews of the English Church. The foreigners came to live in a better climate and at less expense, to discover the world and themselves, to write, paint, collect, to escape the restraints – or the failures – of home, and to live unorthodox and unconventional lives. Aldous Huxley, whose enthusiasm for Florence was brief, wrote of this cultural mecca as ‘a third-rate provincial town, colonized by English sodomites and middle-aged Lesbians’. Despite, or because of, Huxley’s view, this English colony and its denizens, who more than adequately memorialised themselves, continue, like Bloomsbury, to be a popular and marketable publishing commodity. In his recent contribution on Florence to The Writer and the City series, David Leavitt suggested that Florence was unusual in that its most famous citizens for at least the past one hundred and fifty years have been foreigners. He then went on to make the foreigners the subject of his biography of the city, Florence: A Delicate Case (2002).

This book, My Other World, is in Margaret Whitlam’s words, ‘the story of my travels as the leader of group study tours around the world’ in the 1990s. It is also another episode in the life journey of a remarkable woman who has the capacity and the vitality to go on inventing new lives. Previously a swimming champion, social worker, suburban mother, prime minister’s and ambassador’s consort, advocate for adult education, Margaret Whitlam in her seventies embarked upon a new career as a travel guide, leading her companions not only into Britain, France and Italy, but also into China and Central America and the Russia and Siberia of the early 1990s. Now in her eighties, she has begun another life, writing her first book.