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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Travel Writing

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Travel Writing by Alasdair Pettinger LAST REVIEWED: 26 July 2018 LAST MODIFIED: 31 July 2019 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199846719-0119

A minimal definition of travel writing might be any account of a journey or description of a place that is based on firsthand experience. As such, it may be found in many different kinds of text: diaries, letters, postcards, newspaper and magazine articles, blogs, essays, official reports, promotional brochures, and ethnographies, as well as travel books. Travel writing is often distinguished from guidebooks on the one hand and imaginative fiction, drama, and poetry on the other, but the term may sometimes include them, especially when discussing writings from before the 19th century, when such distinctions would have carried less weight with authors and readers. While it has long served as a vital source material by historians and biographers, travel writing rarely, even in those cultural histories documenting the “images” of or “attitudes” toward “other” races or nationalities that proliferated in the 1960s and 1970s, attracted the kind of close critical attention commonly given to literary fiction until the 1980s, coinciding with several related developments. First, there was an increasingly politicized self-questioning within literary studies and anthropology, combined with an interdisciplinary theoretical sophistication. Second, beyond the academy, there was a surge in popularity of literary travel writing, associated with authors such as Bruce Chatwin, Jonathan Raban, Paul Theroux, Colin Thubron, and others, promoted especially in the English-speaking world by Granta magazine. Within two decades, travel-writing studies could claim to be an academic discipline in its own right, with dedicated journals, textbooks, research centers, and conferences. If most of the influential early studies were dominated by anglophone critics studying anglophone texts, the field has since broadened significantly. Nevertheless, many studies of travel writing, without announcing it in their titles, continue to be largely concerned with English-speaking authors, often British. The reasons for restricting their scope in this way are rarely explicitly addressed; it is as if this is a default position for the scholars concerned rather than because “British and Irish travel writing” is a coherent object of study as such. As in many other fields, “British” is often used when “English” would be more accurate, and “English” sometimes silently includes texts that might be better described as Scottish, Welsh, or Irish.

The growth of travel-writing studies as an academic discipline has generated a number of general introductions to the subject aimed at students, typically offering a combination of historical overviews and discussions of key topics such as genre, techniques of representation, narrative organization, the relationship with the reader, and the treatment of race, nation, and gender. Blanton 1997 , Gannier 2001 , and Thompson 2011 provide the most-approachable introductions, while Hulme and Youngs 2002 , Youngs 2013 , Thompson 2015 , and Das and Youngs 2019 survey the field in more depth and reflect its shifting preoccupations. Most of these works acknowledge the difficulty in defining “travel writing.” Borm 2004 makes a case for a broad definition that includes fictional as well as nonfictional writing, but the decision made in Youngs 2013 to restrict it to “predominantly factual, first-person prose accounts that have been undertaken by the author-narrator” (p. 3) is more typical.

Blanton, Casey. Travel Writing: The Self and the World . Studies in Literary Themes and Genres 15. New York: Twayne, 1997.

Short historical overview, focusing on “the modern travel book,” with close readings of texts by James Boswell, Mary Kingsley, Graham Greene, Peter Matthiessen, V. S. Naipaul, Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux, and Roland Barthes. Includes useful list of recommended titles and a survey of critical scholarship.

Borm, Jan. “Defining Travel: On the Travel Book, Travel Writing and Terminology.” In Perspectives on Travel Writing . Edited by Glenn Hooper and Tim Youngs, 13–26. Studies in European Cultural Transition 19. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004.

Argues for a broad definition of “travel writing” (or “travel literature”) to include “texts both predominantly fictional and non-fictional whose main theme is travel” (p. 13), while restricting the terms “travel book” or “travelogue” to predominantly nonfictional narratives.

Das, Nandini, and Tim Youngs, eds. The Cambridge History of Travel Writing . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

The thirty-six essays here collectively showcase the latest scholarship on the genre, exhibiting historical depth and a truly global reach, extending well beyond North American and Western European authors. Includes sections that examine writings about different kinds of places, analyze a wide range of literary forms, and profile a selection of critical approaches.

Gannier, Odile. La littérature de voyage . Thèmes & Études. Paris: Ellipses, 2001.

Short introduction, drawing on mainly francophone examples but tackling general issues such as the definition of travel writing, the relationship between author and reader, representation, language, and tourism.

Hulme, Peter, and Tim Youngs, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing . Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Fifteen essays by leading scholars in the field, arranged in three sections dealing with particular historical periods, key geographical regions, and general topics (gender, ethnography, and theory). Includes useful chronology and extensive guide to further reading.

Thompson, Carl. Travel Writing . New Critical Idiom. New York: Routledge, 2011.

DOI: 10.4324/9780203816240

A concise introduction that offers a broad historical overview and discussions of major topics such as the definition of the genre, authority and veracity, representation of the self and the other, and gender. Close readings of a small group of texts by representative authors from William Dampier to Bill Bryson.

Thompson, Carl, ed. The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing . Routledge Literature Companions. London: Routledge, 2015.

Forty-two essays that approach the subject from a wide range of historical, geographical, theoretical, thematic, and stylistic perspectives. Especially important for its coverage of themes (ethics, corporeality) and subgenres (guidebooks, blogs, dark tourism) that are relatively new areas of interest to travel-writing scholars.

Youngs, Tim. The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing . Cambridge Introductions to Literature. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

An impressive condensation of a wide range of scholarship, illustrated by insightful readings of representative primary texts from the Middle Ages to the early 21st century. Reflects more-recent trends with its attention to travel writers of non-European descent and closes by identifying some emerging developments that are likely to be important in the coming decades.

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English Travel Writing from Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations pp 150–178 Cite as

Postcolonial Travel Writing in the Twentieth Century

  • Barbara Korte  

63 Accesses

The postcolonial world has been affected by travel in many respects: the countries in question were ‘discovered’, explored, conquered or settled by people who came to them from Europe. Displacement is an experience particularly associated with the postcolonial condition, which, for many individuals, entails a history of transportation, migration, expatriation, diaspora or exile. If travel is of special pertinence to Britain’s former colonies, the travel writing produced in these parts of the world has been practically ignored by scholars until recently — with the prominent exception of V.S. Naipaul. The number of travel writers from the ‘Commonwealth’ seems small indeed if compared to the mass of travel writers from the British Isles. Nevertheless, the colonial world formerly travelled by Britons is increasingly travelling itself, and its modes of travel writing deserve to be examined in their own right.

[ 1 ] When more than twenty years ago I began to travel as a writer, I was uneasy and uncertain. … I was glamoured by the idea of the long journey, but I had no idea how I might set about looking at a place in a way that would be of value to other people. … When it came to the writing, I was uncertain about the value I should give to the traveller’s ‘I’ …. In 1960 I was still a colonial, travelling to far-off places that were still colonies, in a world still more or less ruled by colonial ideas. In Surinam in 1961, in a banana plantation … the Indian official who — with a Dutch technical expert in attendance — was showing me around broke off to say in a semi-conspiratorial way, ‘You are the first one of us to come out on a mission like this.’ To travel was glamorous. But travel also made unsuspected demands on me as a man and a writer, and perhaps for that reason it soon became a necessary stimulus for me. It broadened my world view; it showed me a changing world and took me out of my own colonial shell; it became the substitute for the mature social experience — the deepening knowledge of a society — which my background and the nature of my life denied me. … And I learned to look in my own way. (V. S. Naipaul, Finding the Centre , 1984, pp. 10–11)
[ 2 ] As I was coming out of Canterbury Cathedral I observed a little English boy of about six sitting on the grass and looking at me with an intense gaze, like a lion cub watching a distant zebra. When I came near him he began to rise slowly on his knees, and while still half kneeling raised his arm, pointed a finger at me, and cried out in his sharp treble, ‘You’re from Africa!’ … I shouted back, ‘No, from India!’ The boy dropped on the grass and kept his eye fixed on it I thought he had been abashed, but when I met him in another part of the dose the mischievous little fellow again piped out, ‘You’re from Africa!’ He clearly felt that he had succeeded in teasing me . (Nirad Chaudhuri, A Passage to England , 1959, pp. 125–6)
[ 3 ] The Sikh did not know that ‘British citizens of Asian origin’ needed a visa to enter Kenya . ‘Always visa. Wherever I go it’s visa this and visa that. What is a man to do?’ He wrung his hands. ‘What is wrong with my passport? A British citizen is a British citizen.’ The Immigration Officer remained unmoved. ‘Stand aside, bwana. You’re holding up the queue.’ The two English girls were next in line. He glanced cursorily at their passports. They were stamped and returned with a smile. ‘Enjoy your stay and welcome to Kenya.’ … It was my turn. I did not need a visa, being a citizen not of the United Kingdom but of Trinidad and Tobago. He worked through my passport carefully, page by page. ‘Where’s your visa?’ I said the Kenya High Commission in London had told me that I would not need one. ‘They told you that, did they?’ He squinted at me. ‘Is Trinidad and Tobago a member of the Commonwealth?’ ‘It is.’ Again he squinted at me. He consulted a booklet. ‘You’re right,’ he said, as if surprised to confirm the truth of what I had told him. He studied me. ‘You were born there?’ ‘I was.’ (Shiva Naipaul, North of South , 1978, pp. 28–9)
[ 4 ] The Imam turned away and laughed scornfully. ‘He’s lying,’ he said to the crowd. ‘They don’t burn their dead in the West. They’re not an ignorant people. They’re advanced, they’re educated, they have science, they have guns and tanks and bombs.’ Suddenly something seemed to boil over in my head, dilemmas and arguments I could no longer contain within myself. ‘We have them too!’ I shouted back at him. ‘In my country [India] we have all those things too; we have guns and tanks and bombs. And they’re better than anything you’ve got in Egypt — we’re a long way ahead of you.’ … It was about then, I think, that Khamees appeared at my side and led me away, or else we would probably have stood there a good while longer, the Imam and I: delegates from two superseded civilizations, vying with each other to establish a prior claim to the technology of modern violence. At that moment, despite the vast gap that lay between us, we understood each other perfectly. We were both travelling, he and I: we were travelling in the West. The only difference was that I had actually been there, in person: I could have told him a great deal about it, seen at first hand, its libraries, its museums, its theatres, but it wouldn’t have mattered. We would have known, both of us, that all that was mere fluff: in the end, for millions and millions of people on the landmasses around us, the West meant only this — science and tanks and guns and bombs. (Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land , 1992, pp. 235–6)

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It should also be remembered that long before the first moves towards decolonization, colonized people wrote about their travel experiences, both enforced and voluntary. Excerpts from eighteenth-century accounts of enslaved Africans from the Caribbean are collected in Edwards and Dabydeen (1991). The most famous of these accounts, by Olaudah Equiano, is also available in a separate edition, as is the well-known book of a Black Victorian traveller, Mary Seacole. Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures (1857) is discussed by Gikandi (1996, pp. 125–43), who emphasizes Seacole’s attempt to inscribe herself, as a black woman from the West Indies, into the dominant discourse of Englishness.

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For Australian travel books which similarly emphasize the injustice to the aboriginals, see Robyn Davidson’s Tracks (1980), or

Barry Hill’s The Rock (1994).

Nixon (1992, p. 55), quoting from Charles Michener, ‘The Dark Visions of V. S. Naipaul’, Newsweek , 16 November 1981, pp. 104–15.

For other contemporary accounts of domestic travel in Canada see, for example, David McFadden’s Trips Around the Great Lakes (1980–8),

George Gait’s Whistlestop: A Journey Across Canada (1987),

Marian Botsworth Fraser’s Walking the Line (1989) and

Stuart McLean’s Welcome Home (1992).

A relatively secure sense of belonging marks domestic travel writing from India, such as Narayan’s The Emerald Route (1977) or, more recently,

Royina Grewal’s In Rajasthan (1997) — even though the vastness of India also leaves much to discover for its home tourists.

Breytenbach’s account of a return visit to South Africa before his imprisonment, A Season in Paradise , was originally written in Afrikaans and published in an English translation in 1980. Other accounts of return travels to South Africa with a strong political interest are David Robbins’s The 29th Parallel (1986) and Justin Cartwright’s Nor Yet Home (1996).

Dan Jacobson’s The Electronic Elephant: A Southern African Journey (1994), by contrast, is less focused on contemporary politics as on the region’s colonial history.

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Korte, B. (2000). Postcolonial Travel Writing in the Twentieth Century. In: English Travel Writing from Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-62471-3_9

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Travel writing is changing in the 21st century. Here's what it looks like

Having travelled the world to interview some of the greatest names in travel writing, academic and author tim hannigan reflects on how the genre is changing in the 21st century..

The need for travel books to provide solid, practical information about far-off destinations has probably passed ...

The need for travel books to provide solid, practical information about far-off destinations has probably passed in this era of mass information. But what a sensitive travel writer can still do is to provide space for the voices of the people they meet along the way.

Having researched historical travel books, what are your thoughts on traditional travel writing?  

I can’t think of any other literary genre as potentially contentious as travel writing. Historically, it’s been dominated by privileged male authors — often Etonian-educated — representing other countries and other cultures sometimes in decidedly colonialist terms. It’s little surprise that postcolonial scholars have given the genre a bit of a hard time. By its very nature, travel writing is always going to have the potential to stir up controversy, and anyone writing — or reading — travel books need to be sensitive to that. But as it becomes more diffuse and diverse, I think we’re beginning to move away from the idea that, ethically, there might be something fundamentally wrong with travel writing.

Can or should travel writing be a force for good?

Although travel writing has often been criticised for its complicity with colonialism and for reproducing outdated stereotypes, I think its basic impulse is a positive one: to encounter other peoples, find out about other places. In recent decades, a lot of British travel writing has had a domestic focus, with much blurring of the distinction between travel and nature writing. There’s nothing wrong with that, but in a way it mirrors a political and cultural turn away from the wider world. Surely a genre that travels beyond our own shores, seeks international connections, is a force for good — even if it makes some mistakes along the way.

Is it a writer’s responsibility to exercise restraint on exoticisation, or could doing so perhaps ignore the potential for the sense of wonder inherent in good travel writing?

The great challenge for a responsible travel writer is finding the right balance. Wanting to experience the atmosphere of a foreign land is one of the reasons people read travel books, and conjuring up that atmosphere is part of the writer’s job. But we should always remember that what’s ‘exotic’ to the writer and their audience is simply ‘home’ to someone else.

Read more: Enter the National Geographic Traveller (UK) Travel Writing Competition

What did you learn from reading the diaries of some of the great travel writers of the 19 th and 20 th centuries?

When I started digging around in the archives of the great explorer Wilfred Thesiger I was expecting to find a tight connection between his raw travel journals and the finished books. But it soon became clear that his writing process had been fraught and complex, and his crafted literary narratives had travelled a long way from the strictly factual details recorded in the diaries.

Where does the frontier between fact and fiction lie in travel writing?

Perhaps the thorniest of all questions about travel writing is ‘where does the frontier between fact and fiction lie?’ Many writers insist they make nothing up; others openly embrace elements of fictionalisation. But when you start digging a bit deeper, that clear distinction quickly breaks down, and it turns out that almost everyone rejigs chronology, shifts characters around, creates composites. You could say the frontier between fact and fiction is crossed the moment a travel writer sits down at their desk and starts typing.

With information about destinations so easy to find, which elements of well-known places should travel writers be communicating?

The need for travel books to provide solid, practical information about far-off destinations has probably passed in this era of mass information. But what a sensitive travel writer can still do is to provide space for the voices of the people they meet along the way — those that scholars sometimes call ‘the travellee’. That’s something you’ll never get from Wikipedia and Tripadvisor.

Who excites you most in the world of travel writing at the moment?

Travel writing has opened up and branched out over the past couple of decades. Writers like Kapka Kassabova, Noo Saro-Wiwa and Monisha Rajesh complicate what it means to be an ‘insider’ or an ‘outsider’. Others such as Taran Khan and Samanth Subramanian have shaken up outdated notions about travel writers invariably starting out from the old imperial power centres. There’s a greater diversity of voices and perspectives in the genre than there used to be, and that’s really exciting for a reader like me. But at the moment, I’m particularly looking forward to the new book from a grand veteran — Colin Thubron’s The Amur River , out in September. In some ways, Thubron is the archetype of the traditional elite traveller — an actual Old Etonian. But his books have always been far more sensitive and self-reflective than the most simplistic critiques of the genre would suggest.

Are you optimistic about the future of travel writing?

Travel writing has existed for far longer than the novel, and it turns up in virtually every literary culture around the world. It’s universal and flexible. That gives me confidence that travel writing of some kind will be around forever.

Did researching your book make you question your love of travel writing?

I set out on my own journey in search of travel writing with a sense of trepidation, an ethical unease. Was there something fundamentally wrong with travel writing? And would my own love of the genre as a reader survive? But it was all OK in the end. I’ve come away with a greater appreciation for its challenges and its complexity, and for its rich heritage — and that has only deepened my love for it.

Tim Hannigan is the author of  The Travel Writing Tribe: Journeys in Search of a Genre  (Hurst, £20).

Published in the October 2021 issue of National Geographic Traveller (UK)

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Ten Icons Of British Travel Literature You Should Read

British Literature

Britain has a long history of travel writing with roots dating back to the early explorers. In recognition of these veterans, we present a list of 10 of the best modern British travel writers, who have taught us a thing or two about anthropology, geography, history and travel.

Britain has a long history of travel writing with roots dating back to the early explorers

Freya Stark

Stark is known for her extensive travels around the Middle East and her position as one of the first Westerners to venture to some of the most dangerous areas in southern Arabia and western Iran . She wrote many books on her travels, including T he Valleys of the Assassins (1934), and is revered as a true explorer. As one of the first Western writers to travel so widely and extensively, she was not only famed for her adventurous attitude but her writings themselves, which create a vivid picture of the people and places she encountered. Her writings reveal to us new cultures and carry us with her, and this desire to experience new places is after all, why we read travel literature.

The Valleys Of The Assasins

An Anglo-Welsh writer, poet and naturalist, Thomas passed away in 1917 during the Battle of Arras at just 39. His poetry, written from 1914 onwards, focuses on his time as a soldier in World War I and he is regarded as one of the greatest British poets of the 20th century. He wrote directly about travel in 1914 with In Pursuit of Spring . This book follows Thomas as he travels from London to Somerset in his search for this elusive season. A sign of what was to come later in his career, the book is incredibly poetic in style and deals with the complex existence of man within nature. As he steadily delves further into the natural countryside, it becomes increasingly difficult to discern between reality and imagination within the novel.

In Persuit Of Spring

Robert MacFarlane

MacFarlane is another writer inspired by nature. He released his first book in 2003 ( Mountains of the Mind ) and has since gone on to become one of the most respected British travel writers alive today. His writings on nature and landscapes deal with man’s encounter with his surroundings. His writings convey an interest to improve the connection between mankind and the natural world, and his ‘trilogy’ of books, from his first in 2003 to The Wild Places (2007) and The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (2012), all grapple with this notion, highlighting how people and landscapes are altered through the ever-increasing industrialisation of the countryside.

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Mountains of The Mind

Sara Wheeler

Notable for her travels across both Poles, Wheeler began writing about her adventures to Chile and Euboea, which resulted in Evica: Travels on an Undiscovered Greek Island (1992) and Chile: Travels in a Thin Country (1994). The success of these written works enabled her to depart for a seven-month trip to Antarctica, during which time she took influences from writings about the 1912 Terra Nova Expedition. Although most renowned for her travels in the North and South Poles, she has travelled extensively across Europe , Canada and America and her writings are exquisitely detailed narratives providing facts on history, anthology and geography.

Patrick Leigh Fermor

Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor was a distinguished scholar and writer, who took part in the Cretan resistance in World War II. His reputation as an academic, writer, maverick and free spirit has led him to be regarded as one of the greatest British travel writers of all time. His 1977 book A Time of Gifts covers the author’s travels on foot across parts of Europe, which he undertook between 1933 and 1934. During this time he would sleep in shelters and barns, and it is while he was in Europe that he built up much of his extensive knowledge about the cultures and societies he encountered within the time building up to World War II. His knowledgeable works span across the subjects of art, history and anthropology.

A Time Of Gifts

Bruce Chatwin

A writer of remarkable geniality, Bruce Chatwin’s dominant writings focus around Europe, Australia , Afghanistan , and South America , in addition to conveying his passion for the Islamic world. As a young intellectual, he worked for the revered auction house Sotheby’s, where he spent 10 years as an art specialist. His time here helped shape his written works and his incredibly acute attention to detail, the concise nature of which he applied to his writings. While the reliability of some of his content has been questioned, his writings remain completely original and unique. His modest collection of just five written works relative to his position as a household name in travel writing are evidence to the power with which his words leap off of the page.

Graham Greene

Born in Berkhamsted in the South of England , Graham Greene was both a travel writer and a writer of fiction, often addressing the problems with the moral code of contemporary society. His travel writings in particular discuss his trips outside England, into Europe and beyond. His first travel book, Journey Without Maps (1936) tackles the ever-popular way of travelling and writing: through walking. Greene took a 350-mile walk over four weeks, within the country of Liberia in 1935. These writings open up the rough reality of jungle trekking, and show Greene’s love of remote places while exposing the writer’s feelings toward his first trip outside of Europe. His books uncover secrets about the author himself, and enable the reader to learn a few things about themselves along the way.

Journey Without Maps

Roger Deakin

Born in Watford, Hertfordshire, Roger Deakin published just one written work in his lifetime, Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain (1999). The book records his incredible journey through the British Isles, which he records down with incredible depth and intimacy. His 1996 swimming trip led to some close shaves and humorous anecdotes, and provide a very unique viewpoint on modern Britain. His writings cross the boundaries of travel writing, autobiography, cultural and natural history. A great lover of nature, Deakin produced documentaries on the English countryside, in addition to actively working to preserve the woodland in Suffolk. Though only having one work published, his archive of notes is extensive.

Christina Dodwell

Founder of the Dodwell Trust, a charity involved in improving the lives of locals and the environment in Madagascar , Christina Dodwell has travelled more than most, including trips across Africa, Turkey , China, Siberia, and Papua New Guinea . Her journeys across the world span over 20 years, and her nine written works have been translated into five different languages. Recognised for her major achievements, she has been awarded the Mungo Park Medal. She is known for her courageous use of different transport methods, and her eventful trip to Africa in 1975 which resulted in her first book Travels with Fortune (1979). She has visited over 80 countries, and her writings provide an exciting look into her incredible life.

Travels With Fortune

Jan Morris is a Welsh writer specialising in history and travel writing, and is known for her in-depth prose describing individual cities. In her early life she was famous for covering the expedition undertaken by John Hunt to Mount Everest in 1953 as a correspondent for The Times , and thus became one of Britain’s most well-known journalists. Using these skills, she has written thorough works on some of the world’s greatest cities, from Sydney to Hong Kong and Venice, in addition to incredible coverage of the French Air Force, with regards to their invasion of Egypt in 1956. She has a collection of essays titled Destinations (1980), which cover her travels over various destinations which serve as evidence of her wit and intellect.

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Australian travel writing, 1900–1960.

  • Anna Johnston Anna Johnston University of Queensland
  • https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.312
  • Published online: 28 June 2017

Travel writing has been an important form through which Australians learned about their own culture and their place in the world. Indigenous cultures of place and travel, geographic distance from the imperial metropole, and a long history of immigration have each made travel a particularly influential cultural practice. Nonfictional prose narratives, based on actual journeys, have enabled travelers in Australia and from Australia abroad to explore what was distinctive and what was shared with other cultures. These are accessible texts that were widely read, and that sought to educate and entertain their audience. The period from the inauguration of the Australian nation in 1901 to 1960, when distance shrank because of technological innovation and new forms of identity gained ascendance, shows the complex ways in which Australians defined their country and its global contribution. Writing about travel to Britain and other European locations helped authors to refine the Anglophone inheritance and a sense that Britain was Home. Northern-hemisphere travels also made some writers intensely feel their national identity. Participation in global conflicts during this period shifted Australian allegiances, both personal and governmental. At the same time, a new tourist industry encouraged Australians to travel at home, in order to learn more about remote areas and the Asia-Pacific region. Travel writing both abroad and at home reveals how particular forms of emotional allegiance and national identity were forged, reinforced, and maintained. This has been a particularly influential genre for a nation based on colonial migration and indigenous displacement, in which travel and mobility have been crucial.

  • travel writing
  • print culture
  • colonial literature
  • World War I
  • World War II

Writing Australia: Place, Travel, and Mobility

Australia is uniquely defined by the experience of travel. Home to a diverse range of indigenous peoples—among the oldest of continuous world cultures, with a 40,000-year history—the largest island continent was marked by deep attachments to place that were formed in relation to traditional forms of internal travel: the “songlines” that mark the land with stories of culture and mobility. Ocean travel enabled both near neighbors and distant voyagers to connect with land-based indigenous groups. Trade across the northern seas opened links to Indonesia, Japan, and the archipelago of islands that link northern Australia and the Pacific region. Portuguese, Dutch, French, and English voyagers crossed the beaches from the 17th-century onward, and from 1788 new colonial populations arrived after long sea voyages. Early convict ships transported Britons, and others caught up in the intense mobility of the British Empire. Both penal and settler communities regularly traversed the 19th-century Australian and New Zealand colonies, the Pacific and Asian regions, and the British world. British travelers flocked to the antipodean settler colonies, and on return, their travel accounts flooded the periodical press and book publishers. 1 The British appetite for information about the Australian colonies was intense: prospective emigrants were eager to learn which colony was the most welcoming, and what to bring. Broader political and cultural questions about the future of the British Empire came to occupy much attention, and many travelers, including James Froude, sought to “correct [their] impressions” by spending time in the settler colonies. 2 Print cultures were, as James Belich suggests, “the nervous system of Greater Britain, and . . . they could carry identity as well as information.” 3 With this history of travel, it is unsurprising that Australians are among the highest international travelers globally, and that writing about travel has been instrumental to how Australians have come to understand themselves and their place in the world.

In the period 1900 to 1960 , travel writing negotiated key modern social and cultural matters. With federation in 1901 , the interlinked but formally discrete Australian colonies became a nation (with New Zealand choosing to remain separate), and Australians sought to consolidate their distinctive national identity and their relationship both to the Asia-Pacific region and their historical ties to Britain. Having been the focus of British and other overseas travel itineraries since colonization, Australian readers were sensitively attuned to the perception of their country, customs, and nascent identity by outside commentators. As Kathleen Lambert lamented in her travel account The Golden South ( 1890 ), “too many young men, when they go out from England, have an idea their mission is to teach colonials, and to show feelings of contempt for them . . . [W]hen they find how mistaken they have been . . . in the worst spirit possible [they] set about to malign them. This class of traveller is well known, and their accounts are certainly unreliable.” 4 Settler Australians were quick to condemn hasty or unflattering representations of Australia by short-term visitors, and refuted erroneous opinions of their country. They also sought to take charge of their own image.

At home and abroad, then, Australians have been shaped by travel and writing, as intertwined cultural practices. Outsiders’ views of Australia have been highly influential, if contested. Through travel, Australians sought to form their own perspectives on global culture and to understand their local environments in comparison with world cultures. Australians are “intricately enmeshed with the world, bound by ties of allegiance and affinity, intellect and imagination.” 5 Mapping the period 1900–1960 by tracing the journeys and writings of Australians discovering the world, and discovering their own homeland, explores the ways in which travel writing both domesticates the foreign, and makes the local unfamiliar. In 1960 , changes in transport had democratized access to travel and also changed the understanding of distance “as a sensory experience.” 6 Travel writing appeared in a variety of forms (letters, magazine articles, and books) linked by their nonfictional prose style, based in the actual experience of travel for a variety of purposes, which may include leisure, art, or work, revealing the dense textual environment through which Australians learned to feel at home in the modern world.

Traveling to Home: Australian Travelers Abroad

Many Australians traveled to Britain and Europe and wrote accounts in the early decades of the 20th century: some traveled to make their mark on London’s literary scene, or used London as a base for travel and writing. 7 Patrick White, arguably Australia’s most important writer, was educated in England (as was common for many elite pastoral families from the colonial period onward), and found in 1930s London and New York, and 1940s Lebanon and Greece, alternative homelands that nurtured his artistic vision of Australia. 8 Artists were drawn to European landscapes, training, and milieu. Tom Roberts and Hilda Rix Nicholas trained in Paris, William Dobell went to the Slade School of Art in London from 1929 to 1939 , Roy de Maistre was in London from the 1920s, and Sidney Nolan was based there from 1953 . These expatriate arts communities provided important social connections for short-term visitors too. Both white and indigenous Australians traveled as soldiers, either for Britain or for Australia, and war provided many with access to international travel for the first time, especially during WW1. 9 Politics drew others, whether radical or conservative. Suffragists and feminists such as Vida Goldstein and Jessie Street formed worldwide links through their travels. So too did trade union leaders, Communist party members such as Katharine Susannah Prichard, and Aboriginal activists such as A. M. Fernando and, later, Faith Bandler. 10 Travel often spurred writing: letters (private and public), lectures and speaking engagements, magazine or newspaper articles, and books. Some of these Australian travelers never returned, reversing the 19th-century migration pattern from Britain to Australia. 11 They wrote about both their birthplace and their adopted country with an expatriate’s intensity and a traveler’s curiosity. Yet many more spent a significant sojourn overseas before returning. Many, particularly artists and intellectuals, spent their lives moving between at least two locations that felt like home.

London Calling: Australian Travelers in Britain

Travel to the United Kingdom was an essential rite of passage for many white Australians in the 20th century, and a travel book about England, Ireland, Scotland, and/or Wales was the writer’s equivalent. Given the strength of Anglo-Australian ties prior to WWII, Britain was felt to be Home for many, and a journey there was believed to provide a kind of finishing school for the individual and an affirmation of settler heritage. Since the 1840s, Richard White argues, the symbolic value of Britain as “Home” became evident in the common use of the term, capitalized and/or in inverted commas: for many settler Australians, it was Britain that felt like “Home” rather than Australia. 12 London was a particular drawcard, especially for women pursuing artistic or other professional pursuits. 13 Louise Mack moved to London, where her autobiographical novel An Australian Girl in London ( 1902 ) launched her European career as a journalist, reviewer, and traveler: her later book A Woman’s Experiences in the Great War ( 1915 ) joined other travel narratives generated by the two world wars. By 1911 , there were 13,000 “Australian girls” living in England and Wales: so many, one journalist noted in 1930 , that “we meet ourselves everywhere.” 14 Nancy Phelan wrote rapturously of her time in London in the late 1930s: “London was poetry, history, romance, mists and bare trees, lamplight on wet pavements, daffodil buds in the square. Its anonymity did not oppress me, on the contrary there was a sense of belonging to something enormous and man-made.” 15 Other parts of Britain, however, bore the traces of postwar deprivation and the Depression: “The people we saw in the Wolverhampton shop were all poor and threadbare and none too clean . . . England suddenly seemed a sad grey country full of sad grey people. This was being poor, not at all the same as being hard-up. Hard-upness passed; poverty stayed.” 16 Phelan’s work in Britain revealed to her (and her readers) parts of British life that were more confronting than romanticized images of Home.

Nina Murdoch noticed none of the poverty and suffering, and suffered none of the usual travelers’ complaints. Her “joyful discovery of Europe” was hyperbolic:

For my part, I was scarcely sane, I think the year that I found Europe!—I had slipped, it seemed, into a fourth dimension where, disembodied and exalted, I flowed from one enchantment to another—sublimated and adoring, humble and triumphant altogether; not knowing whether I wanted more to laugh or weep, so intense was the satisfaction of making contact with the beauty and graciousness of an old civilization. 17

Such enthusiasm carries her throughout Seventh Heaven ( 1930 ), from Italy, Belgium, Amsterdam, England, and France. It also made her critical of Australia: “When I came home I was able a little to see ourselves as others see us.” She concludes: “I am not of those who can contentedly say: ‘Australia’s good enough for us.’” 18 She finds sentiment sadly lacking in the Australian character, and the book demonstrates her affective mode of engagement and writing.

Ethel Turner’s Ports and Happy Havens ( 1911 ) followed her trip to London and Europe, and built upon her reputation as author of the classic Australian children’s novel Seven Little Australians ( 1894 ). Turner’s ebullient if ironic touristic persona provides great detail of her travels in Holland, France, and Italy, but Britain attracts only a very brief account, despite forming a significant part of her trip. Richard White suggests that Australian writers were often disempowered by their familiarity: “Travel to Britain was the necessary validation of the known rather than the discovery of the unknown,” and as such failed to stimulate the adventure expected of travel writing. 19 A review in The Athenaeum condemned the book’s slightness and ease, suggesting that Turner’s travel writing merely repeated tourist clichés, and damned with faint praise its agreeable writing style: “It is so easy to write a book of this sort; so difficult to write a ‘Reisebilder.’” Evoking Heinrich Heine’s classic Reisebilder ( Travel Pictures ; 1826–1831 ), the reviewer clearly made distinctions between high-quality literary journalism and popular or middlebrow forms. 20 Indeed, such judgements tended to marginalize travel writing in both national and international literary spheres.

Travel writing is a versatile genre that accommodates professional and amateur writers (which made it attractive to women writers and readers, but also contributed to its critical marginalization); it often has a dual commercial and educational focus; and its contribution to literature is “collective and incremental rather than singular and aesthetic.” 21 In the early- to mid-20th century, travel technologies, new cultural forms reflecting the interests of burgeoning middle classes, and commercial mass publication coalesced. Travel writing, published in both books and magazines, Faye Hammill and Michelle Smith argue, was “instrumental in forging a link between geographical mobility and upward mobility.” 22 Book and magazine publishers increasingly used travel as a status symbol that could be achieved by their readers and used narratives of travel to encourage the desire for travel and to educate readers about a set of acceptable practices based around tourism. 23 Middle-class patterns of consumption brought together reading, leisure, and tourism, all of which were featured in travel writing and which, in magazines, often featured vibrant and engaging text and images.

Australian travel writing about Britain and Europe both displayed and encouraged middle-class tourist practices. While Anglophile nostalgia encouraged highbrow pursuits of history, heritage, and culture, London was also one of the great centers of modernity. New and more broadly available technologies of travel opened up various itineraries for visitors. Some Australians followed the popular English writer H. V. Morton’s In Search of England ( 1927 ) and took the advice of the British-Australasian magazine to undertake self-drive explorations farther than London and the standard tourist route. 24 Others preferred an Australian guide, and the prolific writer Frank Clune provided Land of Hope and Glory ( 1949 ), graced by the same cheerful vernacular tone that typified his Australian travel books.

Traveling to and living in Britain often made Australians acutely aware of their nationality. Despite their Anglophilia, travelers often found themselves patronized, quickly derided as “colonials,” and excluded from the class system. Even Nina Murdoch noted that her nationality invoked British curiosity only in “what mark of savagery I bore.” 25 So too expatriates were acute critics of the ways in which their country performed Australian-ness in Britain. Writing a “London Letter” for the important cultural magazine Meanjin in 1951 , the writer, reviewer, and editor Florence James was mortified at the representation of Australians in political circles, on Australia Day, and on radio. She critiqued the “partial and sentimental” broadcast of Catherine Helen King, a visiting West Australian broadcaster who had spoken to 3 million radio listeners on BBC Woman’s Hour: “One is familiar with the pattern: traditions of England and ‘Home’ cherished in Australia, brought up on nostalgic and literary recreations of the English countryside and seasons, nourished on English poetry, and at last the great trip.” 26 James tartly concluded that King would return to Australia with a permanently cricked neck “through trying to keep her eyes turned backwards towards England.” 27 A. A. Phillips’s 1950 influential Meanjin essay “The Cultural Cringe” had reached London, and Phillips’s diagnosis of the colonial mentality—its sense of inferiority and “assumption that the domestic cultural product will be worse than the imported article”—was acute. 28 Australia’s insecure self-representations, James suggested, resulted in a cultural vacuum, neither fully British nor unapologetically Australian.

Traveling Outside Britain

While London and the United Kingdom more broadly provided many Australians with working holidays and ways to understand the Anglophone tradition, it also provided a familiar departure point for more exotic locations. Doughty travelers such as Mary Gaunt conducted wide-ranging travel to China, Africa, and Jamaica from her London base in the early 1900s, even if the independence of the “woman alone” of her titles is exaggerated, downplaying the local guides who enabled her travel, as David Walker notes. 29 Nina Murdoch echoed the travel trope for her breathless title She Travelled Alone in Spain ( 1935 ). Murdoch finds herself the frequent object of attention, in a reversal of the tourist gaze. 30 Spanish women have little sympathy for Murdoch’s independence, and the only “Spanish woman with charm” she encounters in her three-month visit is the maid at a family pensione in Madrid. 31 Undermining the traditional Grand Tour, at Prado Murdoch happily confesses her dislike of Goya, whose work over-emphasized “everything in the Spanish character that is commonplace and in bad taste.” 32 By the 1960s, much had changed. Colin Simpson’s avowed motivation for Take Me to Spain ( 1964 ) was to write the book he could not find in London (“and also the kind that could take me to Spain if the only way I could go was by armchair”). 33 He noted, “We do not travel Spain any more, as Borrow and Ford did: we tour it.” 34 He advocates party tours, and enthusiastically writes as a tourist, though noting “a writer has to travel the tourist track intensively, and then do a lot of homework.” 35 Writers such as Simpson celebrated midcentury modes of travel and created a popular style of travel writing explicitly designed for tourists. They were stridently democratic. Richard White suggests that for Frank Clune and Simpson being “a tourist was simply being Australian: ordinary, egalitarian, unpretentious.” 36 Through such modes of travel, types of national identity were formed and privileged. 37

European locations also attracted semi-permanent expatriates. Charmian Clift and her husband and fellow writer George Johnston had moved to London in the early 1950s to work on Fleet Street, but by 1954 they had moved to the Greek island of Kálimnos. Surrounded by a vibrant but challenging local culture, and gathering around her a mobile community of artists, Clift wrote her part-autobiographical account of expatriate life on Kálimnos ( Mermaid Singing [ 1956 ]). Her popular travel book Peel Me a Lotus ( 1959 ) accounted for the family’s move to Hydra (Ídhra) with a newly born son. A newspaper columnist, script writer, and essayist, Clift’s rich evocation of idyllic island landscapes—together with her struggles to maintain independence and her vocation for writing amongst a young family and competing artistic careers in the marriage—proved popular with readers, especially women. Different struggles faced Patrick White and his partner Manoly Lascaris after meeting during WWII: Australia seemed to offer Lascaris freedom from the judgment of his family and the conservative morality of Greece and Alexandria, while White felt the lure of permanent expatriation. Ambivalently, both couples eventually returned to Australia. 38

Other travelers explicitly sought a political pilgrimage, especially to the Soviet Union, to affirm their progressive ideologies. 39 This was another kind of international “home” to the one sought by nostalgic Anglophile travelers, but no less imbued with sentiment. Significantly, though, these were visits in search of a progressive future, and they brought left-leaning Australian writers into connection with a rich international milieu. 40 If in Britain, Dymphna Cusack found that “Time Runs Backwards” ( 1950 ), in the Soviet Union travelers such as Frank Hardy made a Journey into the Future ( 1952 ). 41 Katharine Susannah Prichard’s The Real Russia ( 1934 ) provides a rapturous picture, inspired by the writer’s 1933 visit across 30,000 miles of Soviet Russia and Siberia: “I want to write about [Soviet places and peoples] in splashes of colour, gouts of phrases as Walt Whitman would have, or Mayakovski; paint them after the manner of the French symbolists, images seething and swarming over each other, as they lie in my mind.” 42 Like many “fellow travellers,” Prichard now stands accused of over-dependence on the government agencies that controlled travelers’ itineraries and interlocutors (and in so doing sanitizing the suffering under the Communist regime), and she disclosed little of this influence in her account: “The criticism is sometimes made that people who visit . . . under the auspices of the Intourist Agency are not free to go about as they wish. But all the tourists I spoke to, said that this was not so.” 43 P. L. Travers (author of Mary Poppins ) was disparaging about the role of official guides: “I wish one could go about Russia along. Being with a party and in charge of a guide is most demoralizing. One becomes lean and humble, and for one so entirely uneducated as myself the constant infliction of culture can be very tiring.” Travers laments that “The real Russia . . . is as carefully concealed from the vulgar eye of the tourist as were the contents of the sacred Ark from the ordinary Israelite.” 44 Certainly Prichard masks the extent of her reliance upon translators, and her keen enthusiasm for the cause results in a hyperbolic account of a Communist utopia. In contrast to the shocked accounts by many Australian writers about the British poor, Prichard approvingly quotes her Russian informant Tanya who claims, “Is there anywhere else in the world where young people of the working class could look so healthy, happy—and ready to defend the future for their children?” Prichard agrees: despite the hardship, suffering, and sacrifice (“the miracles of self-abnegation and fortitude”) of the older generation under the Five Year Plan, the next generation of young Soviets “will surpass all others in fitness and physical beauty.” 45 Other Australian travelers were less sanguine, even if politically sympathetic. Betty Roland, traveling with her lover Guido Baracchi in the Soviet Union in the same year, noted more disturbing signs of Soviet society, deplored the hardship and lack of wholesome food, and the horrific communal toilets, even as she extolled the 1933 May Day celebration as “the most stupendous spectacle on earth.” 46 She also chronicles her impression of Prichard, a friend of Baracchi’s whom she had first met in Australia en route to Europe, then again in Moscow: Prichard is “tremulous with happiness” in Russia, finding “the fulfilment of her dreams.” 47 Yet she also records Prichard’s discomfort with the level of personal self-advancement evident in the Communist bureaucracy. 48 Significantly, Prichard’s boosterish account was published immediately in 1934 , while Roland’s more personal and reflexive travel writing was not published until 1979 , and later revised. 49 The historian Manning Clarke’s Meeting Soviet Man ( 1960 ) provided another, more philosophical, and less personal consideration of what the Soviet Union offered: he aimed “to persuade people in Australia to take Soviet Man seriously,” although he returned home with a nostalgia for “the tragic grandeur of Russia—and for Russians.” 50

Traveling Abroad to Travel Home

Randolph Bedford’s travels to Britain and Europe show a revealing recursive trajectory. A mining speculator, Bedford sought finance in London to float a major mining project in 1901–1904 , and his travel notes were published at the time in the Bulletin magazine (a key site of Australian identity formation from the late 19th century onward) and later in book form. Like many Australians, Bedford encountered Asia en route to London, and was astonished by the color and beauty of Sri Lanka (then Ceylon): “I cannot forget the rapture of that first knowledge of this new world . . . The atmosphere and color are so new and different that any new comer with any imagination must see it all the time. The color is more the color of the litterateur than of the painter.” 51 Yet Bedford’s first vision of England is the dirty grey of the white cliffs of Dover, far from the often eulogized vision of arrival by sea. This chromographic contrast colors his impression of London: he finds the city fog-bound, depressing, and full of pretension. Misled by a variety of dishonest speculators, Bedford’s commentary on the people and the environment is caustic. An interested and unpretentious investigator, Bedford talks to wealthy (and otherwise) investors, street vendors, and expatriate Australians. He is shocked by the disparity between decadent wealth and abject poverty: he considers that the environment corrupts people, and that society is hidebound by privilege and class. He makes two important reversals of classic colonial stereotypes. Two Australian women “who have become English [l]oafed in fluffy tea gowns in a heated sitting-room where the air was unnatural as chiffon. I was so depressed by the change from healthy women to demoralised dummies that I left the house feeling the shame of a cat going home in the dawn.” 52 Here, currency lasses (native-born white Australians) have been corrupted not by colonial society and environment—as was feared in the early to mid-19th century—but by their exposure to England. Mining interests lure him to Italy, which he adores. He makes repeated trips, finding Europe in general much more appealing than London: in Pisa, he extolls “my luck that had sent me from the fog of the antipodes of Australia into an imitation of my own land.” 53 (In 1922 , Martin Boyd experienced a similar transformative attachment to Pisa). 54 London is reconfigured here as the aberrant opposite of Australia, and Pisa as the appealing imitation. This is a strategic reconfiguration of the world from a southern-hemisphere perspective, and it drives Bedford homewards with renewed appreciation:

I had thought that having once felt the beauty of the art of Italy that never again should I be satisfied with a country that is sordid in many ways. But art merely imitates the beauty of primitiveness; and my land is beautiful in its every rock and tree—even if only because of its illimitable spaces. And all are of equal value in their kind; Ghiberti’s doors and Freeling Heights; Giotto’s tower and Pichi Pichi Pass, the brown walls of Florence and the hills at Patsy’s Springs; Fowler’s Gap and the Simplon Arch that dominates Milan. 55

London disappointed and demoralized travelers such as Bedford, and made them feel proudly Australian. European experience shows him new ways to understand Australian cities as cosmopolitan places; but the real Australia, for Bedford, is found “somewhere near the centre of the continent—north of Lake Frome.” 56

Traveling at Home

From the 1930s onward, a concerted effort was made to encourage Australians to travel home, that is, to understand their own country, especially its remote areas, and its proximity to the Asia-Pacific region. Influential advocates such as the Australian National Travel Association sponsored Walkabout magazine, which across 1934–1974 published many of the nation’s best writers, featuring particular regions, historical tours, and distinctly Australian peoples and cultures. 57 Aboriginal, Torres Strait, and Pacific Island cultures were central to the picture of Australia presented to readers. The magazine provides important insights into debates about Australian identity during the mid-20th century, and the ways in which these were played out in accessible forms. Key to these debates were settler Australian attachments to place. Walkabout provides insights into the ways in which white Australians negotiated their relationships to landscapes, both literal and emotional, including those marked by Aboriginal occupation and belonging. The magazine’s title invokes Australian Aboriginal travel within country for customary, religious, and practical purposes. Deborah Bird Rose defines the Aboriginal concept of country as “a living entity with a yesterday, today and tomorrow, with a consciousness, and a will toward life.” 58 “Walkabout” was an Anglicized term for indigenous practices, and understood by settlers from early colonial times as a form of travel specific to Aborigines. The term was often used derogatively to indicate irresponsibility, particularly in labor relationships, as part of a generalized discourse about presumed “nomadism” that could be used strategically to deny Aboriginal claims to land and to facilitate settler possession. 59 The use of the term to brand the 1930s travel magazine marks both increased interest in, and positive valuation of, Aboriginal culture by some settler Australians of the time; yet it was also, arguably, an appropriation. 60

Walkabout circulated internationally through government agencies to encourage emigration and travel. It was the preeminent travel magazine, fulfilling a similar function as National Geographic in the United States. 61 A raft of similar, mainstream magazines began in the 1920s and 1930s, which as Victoria Kuttainen notes predated most literary journals and a strong local book-publishing industry. 62 Magazines such as MAN and BP Quarterly regularly used travel as a theme for their fiction and published some travel writing. 63 These magazines collectively provided an important opportunity for writers, and their efforts to define Australian writing. 64 A group of midcentury writers used journalism, magazines, and new media forms to create innovative travel-writing careers, creating and cultivating enthusiastic readerships. These writers published a substantial body of travel writing across the 1930s to 1960s.

Many focused on remote Australia. Ernestine Hill published short newspaper travel pieces, and longer magazine articles in Walkabout , and brought these together into important travel books such as The Great Australian Loneliness ( 1937 ) and The Territory ( 1951 ). Hill characterizes herself as a “wandering ‘copy-boy’ with swag and typewriter, to find what lay beyond the railway lines,” and her books thrill with romance and love of country: “Australia is like its own unique and glorious jewel, the opal. A great jagged square of colourless crystal, you must hold it up to the light to catch the flashing fires of romance.” 65 Despite upholding the idea of a white Australia, Hill records a rich multicultural community in the northwest. During her visit to Darwin’s central court, Hill describes the week’s sessions: Japanese divers, Chinese jewel and gold traders, white miners, opium addicts, and tribal murderers. Although she rails against miscegenation, Hill records a case in which a white man is charged for procuring alcohol for his Aboriginal wife. Hill’s writing evoked these communities for both urban Australian and overseas readers, encouraging travel, migration, and reflection. A keen and curious reader herself, Hill connected Australian colonial mythologies to other countries: “Covered-wagon pioneers of America travelled like the Children of Israel in a great community pilgrimage of caravans together, roads and railways soon to follow. Pioneers of Australia rode along, or with wife and babies in a spring-cart, out of the world’s ken.” 66 Hill wrote travel into the core of Australian identity, concluding her ambitious history of the northern territory with the hallucinatory voices of white bushmen that evoke Cortés, the Armada, and Fontainebleau, alongside the bush poets Henry Lawson and A. B. (“Banjo”) Paterson. For Hill, these “knightly figures” are the erudite, philosophical elite: “if you seek intellectual converse in Australia, you will find it, not in cities, where they are obsessed with petty commerce, shows, racehorses and the daily gossip of each other, but out in the haze of the opal hills of the Centre, or by an unknown river of the north.” 67

Hill’s Australian travel writing proved popular internationally. The New York Times gave the American edition of The Great Australian Loneliness a full-page review (by Hartley Grattan); so too the Herald Tribune . The reviews were very gratifying: Hill mused that “they are making Australia, through my little book—a wonderful story.” 68 Grattan praised Hill’s reportage: “Probably no Australian writer has better conveyed to armchair readers just what kind of men and women give the Australian frontier a ‘go’ and keep alive the extremities of a continental economy.” He did express reservations about her vivid speculations and enthusiasm for future development, especially in the harsh and remote Northern Territory. 69 The Pacific Review (Washington, DC) praised the “travelling knowledges” Hill embodied: “The descriptive parts of Mrs Hill’s book are as good as anything written on the subject. She spent five years travelling fifty thousand miles over some of the world’s worst land to get the material for her book.” But her judgments are “much too emotional . . . It will take more than an injection of the warmth Mrs Hill bears for the few thousand hardy characters who populate this vast desolation to give life to the Dead Heart of Australia.” 70 Yet this affective appeal mobilized the imaginations of readers and encouraged an international and domestic tourist market.

The Australian interior was a resonant image for the nation and its identity, as we have seen evoked by Randolph Bedford and Ernestine Hill. Frank Clune wrote a series of cheerfully adventurous travel accounts of Australia in the 1930s. Try Anything Once ( 1933 ) recalled his youthful travels at sea, as a soldier in both the American cavalry and for the Australian Imperial Forces at Gallipoli in World War I, and diverse experiences both overseas and in Australia. A series of books followed Clune “rolling down” important Australian rivers or “roaming around” particular regions. 71 Ion Idriess—another prolific writer of travel and adventure fiction—wrote of his 1934 experience in Broome and Derby in far Western Australia in One Wet Season ( 1949 ). He eulogizes the rugged pioneering life of men in the Kimberley back country, cataloguing a wide variety of regional industries from cattle droving to gold and opal mining to feral donkey mustering to remote police patrols. 72 These narratives of industry accompany the constant traveling within country undertaken by itinerant workers, and also by Idriess as a writer. Like Hill, he considered his writing important as a testimony of a vanishing phase of (white) Australian life, and he developed many resonant legends of Australian identity. 73 But the outback is also a modernizing culture, such that in Across the Nullarbor: A Modern Argosy ( 1951 ), Idriess drily represents himself as a strategically incompetent innocent who must be chaperoned by car enthusiasts who pillory his determined resistance to automobile travel. And in all his books, Idriess effortlessly demonstrates that these are regions where settler and Aboriginal Australians work in daily intimacy, which despite political asymmetry is characterized by profound familiarity and mutual accommodation. For MAN magazine, too, Idriess edited an “Australasiana” section for many years, cultivating a range of writers focused on outback and Pacific themes. For these authors, travel writing became a form in which to record the stories and cultures of the colonial past, which appeared to be fast vanishing in the modern era. These were often ideologically conservative stories that sought to stave off new ideas by invoking colonial stereotypes of race and nation. 74

Some writers, such as Arthur Groom in I Saw a Strange Land ( 1950 ), reflected thoughtfully and with concern for remote Aboriginal communities. Groom links his experience working on a large cattle station on the Northern Territory–Queensland border between 1922 and 1925 —when he experienced groups of remote desert people “coming in” to rural settlements for the first time, as well as foolhardy settlers taking sheep out west for new pastoral experiments—to his return visit in 1946 . Cast in the contemporary (now dated) language of Aboriginal “protection,” which dominated midcentury government policy, Groom’s investigations nevertheless sought to reveal the effect of modernization in the interior for indigenous people and the landscape. Staying at the Hermannsburg Mission presided over by Reverend F. W. Albrecht, Groom had his expectations confounded: “This was no dying race—there were too many children.” 75 Such forms of travel writing are far from radical critiques of colonization, but they do reveal the attention paid by commentators during this period to race relations, and the engagement of the general public with accessible writing that considered some of the complexities and contradictions of settler colonialism. 76 Such writing also reveals the longevity of imperial travel traditions and their influence upon 20th-century modes of mass travel and communication: as Anthony Carrigan suggests, contemporary “mass travel practices frequently exploit uneven distributions of wealth, remapping colonial travel patterns.” 77

Travel Technologies and Environmental Writing

New travel technologies opened up the country for both actual and armchair travelers. The novelist Eleanor Dark wrote about the new long-distance tourist coaches who made outback Australia accessible, lamenting their speed, which introduced a “jarring note”:

A landscape in which [the traveler] should be still to feel its stillness is branded forever on his memory as a straight ribbon of road endlessly unrolling, and on either side of it a whizzing streak of colour in which the aboriginal reds, browns and ochres of the earth and the dull greens of the low-growing vegetation run together in a blur. 78

Here Dark provides the antidote to Florence James’s critique of attitudes that “Australia is a continent that one flies over but scarcely lives in.” 79 Recognizing her fortune to travel differently in this distinctive landscape, Dark considers Central Australia “not only the geographical heart of the country” but also of great spiritual significance. 80 Many midcentury writers shared her feelings, making interior pilgrimages. These mostly sought to reimagine what had been coined The Dead Heart of Australia ( 1909 ) by geologist, explorer, and prolific writer J. W. Gregory. Books such as H. H. Finlayson’s The Red Centre: Man and Beast in the Heart of Australia ( 1935 ) and anthropologist C. P. Mountford’s Brown Men and Red Sand ( 1948 ) changed Australian understandings of the center. Mountford’s four-month expedition from Ernabella to Uluru in 1940 —with his wife Bessie, Lauri Sheard, and the cameleer Tommy Dodd—led to a detailed survey of the art and mythology of Uluru and the Olgas, with photographic exhibitions and a prize-winning 1940 film from which the book’s title and subject matter were drawn. 81 Typical of the “modular and portable” nature of travel writing, film, and lecture tours during this period, the films Mountford made in Central Australia led to a lecture tour to the United States in 1945 , which eventually resulted in the American-Australian Arnhem Land Scientific Expedition ( 1948 ). 82 Mountford’s writing, among others of the period, prefigured later studies such as T. G. H. Strehlow’s Journey to Horseshoe Bend ( 1969 ) and arguably augured in late-20th-century classics such as Stephen Muecke, Krim Benterrak, and Paddy Roe’s Reading the Country: Introduction to Nomadology ( 1984 ) in which travel becomes explicitly a collaborative, cross-cultural exploration of settler, immigrant, and Aboriginal participants and perspectives.

20th-century travel modes impacted in a variety of ways Australian domestic travel and writing. On the one hand, coaches, trains, and motor cars enabled more people to travel more broadly, and this underpinned the new tourist industry. 83 This was particularly important given the sheer distance and size of the continent, highlighted by writers such as E. J. Brady in Australia Unlimited ( 1918 ). Even the endurance cyclist Francis Birtles, who had published Lonely Lands: Through the Heart of Australia ( 1909 ) about his extraordinary interior trip by bicycle, later turned to the motor car. Companies sponsored popular travel writers to write about journeys using the new technologies: Ford sponsored and distributed Birtles’s 3,500 Miles across Australia in a Ford Car: From the Gulf of Carpentaria to Port Phillip Bay ( 1913 ). Frank Clune was notorious for his deals with airlines, mining companies, and other industries, as well as government departments, agencies, and colonial administrations. As John Tebbutt notes, effectively Clune “was a propagandist for businesses, selling an early form of ‘product placement’ by providing favourable mentions of supporting companies in his books and articles.” 84 Even Ernestine Hill—herself not adverse to publicity—expressed scepticism at what Robert Dixon calls “The Frank Clune Industry,” when she learned of Clune’s sponsorship by car maker Holden for the book Land of Australia: Roaming in a Holden ( 1953 ):

Clune dashed off with a new Holden free and all his petrol from C.O.R. [Commonwealth Oil Refineries], probably a good little nest-egg too, on a Round Australia in 100 Days Along turn-out. He sent for his son on the Nullabor Plain, made streamer-advertisements in Perth, then darted spectacularly off [. . .] and came back. “A good bushman never turns back.” He’s gone up the Queensland coast—bitumen all the way—I hear. 85

Mirroring Eleanor Dark’s qualms about the effect of coach travel on the experience on the interior, Hill’s commentary reveals concern about deleterious outcomes of modern travel practices. These hasty and strategic experiences of place are far from the slow, embodied lives of the bushmen that Hill celebrated in her writing.

In response, Australian travelers turned to different ways of experiencing place through travel. Nature writing was a major form of travel writing from the 19th century onward, and can be traced from the moment of colonization through explorers’ diaries that were influenced by both natural history and Romantic travel discourses. 86 The early 20th century featured closely observed accounts of particular regional places, such as E. J. Banfield’s Confessions of a Beachcomber ( 1908 ), which evoked island life on the Great Barrier Reef in far North Queensland, as did the marine biologist T. C. Roughley in Wonders of the Great Barrier Reef ( 1936 ). (Roughley wrote ten articles for Walkabout between 1937 and 1956 .) Alongside his scientific writing, Charles Barrett wrote travel books such as Koonwarra: A Naturalist’s Adventures in Australia ( 1939 ) and Coast of Adventure: Untamed North Australia ( 1941 ), as well as writing for Walkabout and other magazines. (During World War I, Barrett had served in the Middle East, when he edited the service magazine, the Kia-ora Coo-ee , for which he wrote a regular “Nature Studies in Palestine” column among other travel and history articles.) Such scientifically informed accounts educated readers about environmental subjects as well as intimately observed regional places. Others turned to bushwalking—long hikes in remote locales—as a way to avoid the speed of modern travel and to experience place differently. After 1910 , walking clubs encouraged urban dwellers to explore their nearby regions: the Blue Mountains near Sydney, Cradle Mountain and the Western Tiers for Hobart and Launceston residents, the Lamington National Park and Glasshouse Mountains near Brisbane, and so on. As Melissa Harper notes, recreational walking became a popular craze by the early 1930s. 87 It influenced writing too—such as Arthur Groom’s One Mountain After Another ( 1949 )—and reinforced the link between travel writing and the environmental ethos of the natural historians. 88

Australians in the Asia-Pacific

Other writers saw opportunities beyond Australia. Writers such as Beatrice Grimshaw regularly traveled in and published about the Pacific—following 19th-century writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson and the Australian Louis Becke—in well-read classics such as In the Strange South Seas ( 1907 ) and Isles of Adventure: From Java to New Caledonia but Principally Papua ( 1930 ). Popular magazines like Walkabout , and other more scholarly or professional journals about with the Pacific region, “invariably promoted the cause of ‘understanding’ among Pacific nations.” 89 Although the complaint that Australians knew little of the outside world already existed by the 1930s, as David Walker shows there was in fact “a sustained commentary on Asia-Pacific themes, not least the merits of forming closer political, economic and cultural ties with the region.” The 1910s and 1920s saw an increased awareness of the Pacific, encouraged by “a trans-Pacific community of writers and intellectuals who charted the commonalities of the region and its many lines of division and potential conflict.” 90 The mechanization of mobility and the extensive travel infrastructure after World War I made both regional and trans-hemispheric travel increasingly accessible. Ocean liners regularly plowed the shipping routes that had expanded from the late 19th century, and leisure cruises became popular. 91 Aviation opened up opportunities, between the wars, for adventure: Australian aviators such as Charles Kingsford Smith captured the public imagination through newspaper and media accounts, and books such as Bill Taylor’s Pacific Flight: The Story of the Lady Southern Cross ( 1935 ). 92 Travel writing was crucial in engaging everyday citizens with Australian regional relationships. 93

Frank Clune’s travel experiences positioned him well for new interest in Asia-Pacific regions during and after the Pacific War. His frankly commercial approach led to a vast output (fifty-nine books, both travel and Australian history), and introduced Australian readers to Europe, the Pacific, and Asia. In self-promoting fashion, Clune described his prewar efforts: “I believe that no other Australian writer travelled as widely or wrote as persistently about this zone as I did in the immediate pre-war years.” 94 Australian and international readers needed to become more “Pacific-minded.” 95 In Clune’s typically boosterish way, he claimed to have anticipated this shift with his series of travel narratives about Japan, China, Malaya, Indonesia, Papua, and Queensland: “Then came the war; and I’ll bet that from now on there will be hundreds, perhaps thousands, of books written in Australia and the U.S.A. about the Pacific—its peoples, its places, its problems, its history and its legend and lore.” 96 Robert Dixon describes the commercial arrangements with airlines and mining companies that Clune enthusiastically sought for the books Prowling through Papua ( 1942 ) and Somewhere in New Guinea ( 1951 ), and rightly condemns Clune’s replication of colonial relations of power and prejudice. 97 Yet settler Australian knowledge about the Pacific changed Australian self-perception as much as ideas about the region. As Chris Dixon and Prue Ahrens argue, “Understandings of what was ‘modern,’ ‘primitive,’ ‘foreign’ or ‘familiar’ were unstable and became more so with each cultural encounter.” 98 Increasing technologies of travel, representation, and education made 19th-century South Seas fantasies increasingly untenable, as well as rigidly compartmentalized categories of self and other, modern and premodern.

Agnieszka Sobocinska suggests that since the 1940s it became common to characterize Asia as Australia’s “neighbourhood,” and best-selling writers such as Clune continued this in popular travel writing about Asia from the 1950s and 1960s. She argues that the term personalizes international relations, “by inviting ordinary people to draw parallels between their private lives and the sphere of international relations.” 99 Clune was part of this, but by no means the only figure. Walkabout had a light but consistent coverage of Japan throughout the magazine: mainly focusing on the pearling industry in northwest Australia, but also incidental articles on Japanese, Aboriginal, and Torres Strait Islander cross-cultural interactions; a 1937 account of climbing Mount Fuji; and stories about post–World War II reconstruction in the Pacific Islands. Many Walkabout articles in the 1930s discussed Japanese pearl luggers in Northern Australia. The opinions expressed vary considerably, but across the spectrum the pearling industry made Australians aware that the Pacific was part of Japan’s neighborhood too. The educational agenda of Walkabout , and its advocacy for travel, was crucial in these social changes. The Asia-Pacific region was imagined into being for Australian readers during this key period by such cultural forms. 100

In the postwar period, returned servicemen and -women took a particular interest in the region, having experienced both the Pacific and conflict with Japan, and developed strong opinions, ongoing connections, and personal engagement. Colin Simpson’s Japan: An Intimate View ( 1959 ) introduced Australian readers to a culture that, post-WWII, seemed compellingly close but very foreign. His was a personal and humanizing portrayal of a culture with whom Australians had only recently been fighting in the Pacific Islands that stretched between the two countries. Simpson convinced his readers that people could not be understood by looking from a car window, nor land truly felt by flying overhead: “You have to get out and be with them on common ground, literally, rub shoulders with them, go along with them, be alone with them.” 101 Such accounts provided new ways for Australians to learn about their region, and augured in an enormous amount of travel from Australia to Asia during the 1960s and 1970s.

Australian Travel Writing and Scholarship: Overview and Discussion

Early- to mid-20th-century travel writing sought to make white Australians at home in the world, and familiar with their island home. 1900–1960 was a pivotal period in which the nation was formed, old allegiances to Britain and Europe were both maintained and questioned, and two world wars expanded the role that Australians could play in global theaters. National identities were negotiated, building from their colonial, 19th-century counterparts. Like many Anglophone countries, the early 20th century provided an explosive increase in technology that both literally and figuratively brought the world closer. By midcentury, Australian individuals and government were aligning themselves with the United States as a global power: Anne Rees shows how Australian women travelers looked to the United States for modern professional self-fashioning, for example. 102 After the Pacific War—in which Australians had to assert themselves against regional threats and some limited territorial incursions—both Asia and the Pacific regions became increasingly important as part of Australia’s imagined neighborhood.

Travel and writing were central to these negotiations of identity, both individual and national. Justine Greenwood and Richard White concur: “ Travel writing mattered : it had a social impact beyond merely entertaining the curious, since it could affect migration, investment and trade.” 103 The elasticity of the travel form—which shares features with adjacent genres such as natural history and environmental writing, life writing, and popular ethnography—enabled it to be adapted for a variety of purposes. The texts are linked, though, by their use of nonfictional prose, and the lived experience of a journey. Both travel and its literature had disproportionate impact in Australia given geographical isolation from its imperial center, but also because the indigenous understanding of country was marked by deep understandings of place and movement within and across internal borders. As a consequence of poor educational and economic opportunities, Aboriginal writing in English remained limited until well after the period under investigation. 104 Writing about Aboriginal Australia, though, has been central to making sense of the continent.

Since the 1960s, writing by both local and overseas writers has sought to unsettle existing preconceptions about national identity, place, and belonging. This is in concert with revisionist national histories, increased political activism by and recognition of Aborigines and land rights, and broader questioning of traditional society: “The New Australia,” to borrow Colin Simpson’s 1970 book title. 105 Travel writing such as Jock Marshall and Russell Drysdale’s Journey among Men ( 1962 ) allowed a zoologist-explorer and artist, respectively, to survey Australian rural life and to correct some of the more prejudiced impressions of tribal Aborigines. Their account is framed by their return from “years of exile in Europe” to “the cold beer and red dust on the fringe of the desert.” 106 This is a tour of bush “characters” of the kind mythologized by Ernestine Hill and Ion Idriess, but here the stereotypes are gently and humorously probed. Writing about Aborigines by white Australians came to seem more and more problematic as Aboriginal rights and writers came to the foreground from the 1960s onward. This certainly did not trouble overseas travel writers, for whom writing about Aboriginal cultures has been central. 107 Travel writers such as Bruce Chatwin and Bill Bryson have focused almost exclusively on Aboriginal cultures and/or race relations in their portrayals of late-20th-century Australia. 108 As an attractive site for travel, Australia retains its allure, even if the opinion of visiting writers sometimes clashes with local self-perception.

This continuity from the 19th century onward continues to make travel writing particularly resonant in Australia. Since the 1990s, scholarship about travel writing has been a constant, if minor, concern in cultural history and literary studies. As Mary Louise Pratt notes, the study of travel writing in the Anglophone academy became an industry from the 1990s onward, as a consequence of decolonizing movements, major publications such as Edward Said’s Orientalism ( 1978 ) and Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation ( 1992 ), and intellectual trends such as postcolonial inquiry and the widespread and cross-disciplinary study of empire. 109 Previously, travel writing was a marginal form of little interest, particularly in literary studies. Indeed, the foundational anthologies of Australian travel writing were produced by a trio of cultural historians who remain major figures in Australian travel writing. The Oxford Book of Australian Travel Writing ( 1996 ) inaugurated a canon of scholarship, featuring Australians writing about non-Australian places almost exclusively. Ros Pesman’s work has foregrounded women travelers and expatriates. 110 David Walker’s studies have used travel writing as a mechanism to explore the relationship between Australia and Asia, in particular. 111 Richard White uses travel writing to explore various aspects of Australian identity, at home and abroad. 112 The rise of travel writing in literary studies has ensured that chapters on Australia are regularly featured in broad surveys of the genre, including the important companions and literary histories published by major Northern Hemisphere presses. 113 High-profile travel writers such as Robyn Davidson have also been central in drawing international attention to Australian travel writing, for instance in her edited book The Picador Book of Journeys ( 2001 ).

New scholarly fields make considerable use of past and present travel texts. Transnational studies have dominated 21st-century approaches in history and cognate fields: this approach has served Australian topics and scholars exceptionally well and brought to the fore primary texts that focus on movement and exchange. The international field of mobility studies has strong Australian representation, evident in journals such as Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies . Print-culture approaches broaden the range of texts under scholarly scrutiny, as evidenced in studies of travel writing and middlebrow culture. 114 Australian topics are regularly featured in established international journals such as Studies in Travel Writing and Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing , with regular special issues on Australia or particular Australian topics. 115 In diverse fields of contemporary scholarly inquiry, Australian travel writing makes an important contribution.

Further Reading

  • Bedford, Randolph . Explorations in Civilization . Sydney: Day, 1914.
  • Clarke, Robert . Travel Writing from Black Australia: Utopia, Melancholia, and Aboriginality . London: Routledge 2016.
  • Clift, Charmian . Peel Me a Lotus . London: Hutchinson, 1959.
  • Clune, Frank . Pacific Parade . Melbourne: Hawthorn, 1945
  • Dixon, Robert . Prosthetic Gods: Travel, Representation and Colonial Governance . St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2001.
  • Groom, Arthur . I Saw a Strange Land . Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1950.
  • Harper, Melissa . The Ways of the Bushwalker: On Foot in Australia . Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2007.
  • Mountford, Charles P. Brown Men and Red Sand: Journeyings in Wild Australia . 2d ed. Melbourne: Robertson & Mullens, 1940.
  • Murdoch, Nina . Seventh Heaven: A Joyous Discovery of Europe . 3d ed. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1930.
  • Pesman, Ros , David Walker , and Richard White , eds. The Oxford Book of Australian Travel Writing . Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996.
  • Phelan, Nancy . Setting out on the Voyage: The World of an Incorrigible Adventurer . St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1998.
  • Prichard, Katharine Susannah . The Real Russia . Sydney: Modern Publishers, 1934.
  • Rolls, Mitchell , and Anna Johnston . Travelling Home, Walkabout Magazine and Modern Australia . London: Anthem, 2016.
  • Simpson, Colin . The Country Upstairs . Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1956.
  • Walker, David . Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia, 1850–1939 . St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1999.
  • White, Patrick . Flaws in the Glass: A Self-Portrait . London: Penguin, 1981.
  • White, Richard . Inventing Australia: Images and Identity, 1688–1980 . St Leonards, New South Wales: Allen & Unwin, 1981.
  • Woollacott, Angela . To Try Her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism, and Modernity . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

1. British travel writing about the Australian colonies includes many well-known writers: James Froude, Anthony Trollope, and Samuel Smiles, among others.

2. James Froude , Oceana or England and Her Colonies (London: Longmans, Green, 1886), 14.

3. James Belich , Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 461.

4. “Lyth” (Kathleen Lambert), The Golden South: Memories of Australian Home Life from 1843 to 1888 (London: Ward and Downey, 1890), 71.

5. Desley Deacon , Penny Russell , and Angela Woollacott , “Introduction,” in Transnational Ties: Australian Lives in the World , eds. Russell Deacon and Woollacott (Acton, A.C.T.: Australian National University E-Press, 2008), xiv–xv.

6. Ros Pesman , Duty Free: Australian Women Abroad (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996), 2.

7. On Australian expatriate life, see Stephen Alomes , When London Calls: The Expatriation of Australian Creative Artists to Britain (Oakleigh, Victoria: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Peter Morton , Lusting for London: Australian Expatriate Writers at the Hub of Empire, 1870–1950 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Bruce Bennett and Anne Pender , From a Distant Shore: Australian Writers in Britain 1820–2012 (Clayton, Victoria: Monash University Publishing, 2013).

8. Patrick White , Flaws in the Glass: A Self-portrait (London: Penguin, 1981). While part 3, “Journeys,” is explicitly travel writing, much of White’s memoir describes his early restless travel among Australia, Britain, and Europe, and the importance of Greece to his identity. Recent scholarly work emphasizes this transnational identification: Shaun Bell, “‘Greece—Patrick White’s Country’: Is Patrick White a Greek Author?,” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 14.5 (2015), 1–14.

9. Richard White , “The Soldier as Tourist: The Australian Experience of the Great War,” War & Society 5.1 (1987), 63–77. On the role of guidebooks and travel accounts read by Australian soldiers abroad, see Amanda Laugesen , “Boredom Is the Enemy”: The Intellectual and Imaginative Lives of Australian Soldiers in the Great War and Beyond (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011).

10. On travel to Russia, frequently with a political motivation, see Sheila Fitzpatrick and Carolyn Rasmussen , eds., Political Tourists: Travellers from Australia to the Soviet Union in the 1920s–1940s (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2008). On Indigenous travelers, see Fiona Paisley , The Lone Protestor: A. M. Fernando in Australia and Europe (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2012); Marilyn Lake , Faith: Faith Bandler, Gentle Activist (Crows Nest, New South Wales: Allen & Unwin, 2002); and Jon Piccini , “‘People Treated Me with Equality’: Indigenous Australians Visiting the Soviet Bloc During the Cold War,” Labour History 111 (2016): 1–16.

11. On reverse migration patterns, see Carl Bridge , “Australians in the England and Wales Census of 1901: A Demographic Survey,” in Australians in Britain: The Twentieth-Century Experience , eds. Carl Bridge , Robert Crawford , and David Dunstan (Clayton: Monash University ePress, 2009), online. Angela Woollacott notes the particular attraction of London for Australian women travelers: Woollacott , “Australian Women in London: Surveying the Twentieth Century,” in Australians in Britain , eds. Bridge, Crawford , and Dunstan (Clayton: Monash University ePress, 2009), online.

12. Richard White , “Australian Tourists in Britain, 1900–2000,” in Australians in Britain , eds. Bridge, Crawford , and Dunstan (Clayton: Monash University ePress, 2009), online.

13. Woollacott, “Australian Women in London”; Pesman, Duty Free .

14. Isabel Edgar, “Is It Fair? British Australian and New Zealander ,” 11 Sept 1930, quoted in Woollacott, “Australian Women in London.”

15. Nancy Phelan , Setting out on the Voyage: The World of an Incorrigible Adventurer (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1998), 185.

16. Phelan, Setting out on the Voyage , 212–213.

17. Nina Murdoch , Seventh Heaven: A Joyous Discovery of Europe (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1930).

18. Murdoch, Seventh Heaven , 254, 56.

19. White, “Australian Tourists in Britain, 1900–2000.”

20. Rev. of Ports and Happy Havens by Ethel Turner, The Athenaeum 4410 (1912): 500.

21. Steve Clark , ed., Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit (London: Zed, 1999), 3.

22. Faye Hammill and Michelle Smith , Magazines, Travel, and Middlebrow Culture: Canadian Periodicals in English and French, 1925–1960 (Alberta: University of Alberta Press, 2015), 1.

23. Hammill and Smith, Magazines, Travel, and Middlebrow Culture , 18.

24. White notes the popularity of the self-drive holiday, and how the car enabled tourists to access areas off the conventional tourist routes. White, “Australian Tourists in Britain, 1900–2000.”

25. Murdoch, Seventh Heaven , 254.

26. A member of the influential family that included the essayist and professor Walter Murdoch and the media magnates Keith and Rupert Murdoch, King had a long broadcasting career, including parenting programs, beginning the kindergarten of the air, and running ABC Women’s Session on radio for forty years.

27. Florence James , “London Letter: The Cultural Cringe Abroad,” Meanjin 10.1 (1951): 61, 62.

28. Arthur Phillips, “The Cultural Cringe,” Meanjin 9.4 (1950): 299.

29. Among her fiction, Gaunt published Alone in West Africa (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1911) and A Woman in China (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1914). See David Walker , “Travelling Asia: Home and Away,” in Story/Telling: The Woodford Forum , eds. Bronwen Ann Levy and Ffion Murphy , 87–98 (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2001), 94.

30. John Urry , The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: SAGE, 1990).

31. Nina Murdoch , She Travelled Alone in Spain (London: G. G. Harrap, 1935), 235.

32. Murdoch, She Travelled Alone in Spain , 257.

33. Colin Simpson , Take Me to Spain: Including Majorca and with a Sampling of Portugal (London: Angus and Robertson, 1964), i. The format was transferable: Simpson , Take Me to Russia and Central Asian Republics of the Soviet Union (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1964).

34. Simpson refers here to classics of English travel writing about Spain: George Borrow’s The Bible in Spain (1843) and Richard Ford’s Handbook for Travellers in Spain (1845). These two influential books were grounded in extensive travel and residence in Spain, and constructed an image of Spain as cut off and insular: Simpson’s book by contrast advocates a modern tourist culture and literary approach.

35. Simpson, Take Me to Spain , i.

36. Richard White , “Armchair Tourism: The Popularity of Australian Travel Writing,” in Sold by Millions: Australia’s Bestsellers , eds. Toni Johnson-Woods and Amit Sarwal (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2012), 194.

37. For broader studies of Australian character, see Richard White , Inventing Australia: Images and Identity, 1688–1980 (St Leonards, New South Wales: Allen & Unwin, 1981); Graeme Turner , National Fictions: Literature, Film, and the Construction of Australian Narrative , 2d ed. (St. Leonards, New South Wales: Allen & Unwin, 1993).

38. White, Flaws in the Glass , 123.

39. Sheila Fitzpatrick has identified forty-eight Australians in the 1930s who were hosted by the VOKS, a semi-official organization responsible for looking after foreign cultural visitors. See Fitzpatrick , “Australian Visitors to the Soviet Union,” in Political Tourists: Travellers from Australia to the Soviet Union in the 1920s–1940s , eds. Sheila Fitzpatrick and Carolyn Rasmussen (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2008), 1–39.

40. See David Carter , “Journeys in Genre: Australian Literary Travellers to the Soviet Union,” in “And What Books Do You Read?”: New Studies in Australian Literature , eds. Irmtraud Petersson and Martin Duwell (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1996), 164–1-80.

41. Dymphna Cusack , “London Letter: ‘Time Runs Backward,’” Meanjin 9.4 (1950), 286–289.; Frank J. Hardy , Journey into the Future (Melbourne: Australasian Book Society, 1952).

42. Katharine Susannah Prichard , The Real Russia (Sydney: Modern Publishers, 1934), 1.

43. Susannah Prichard, The Real Russia , 6. John McNair is highly critical: “Visiting the Future: Australian (Fellow-) Travellers in Soviet Russia,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 46.4 (2000), 463–479.

44. P. L. Travers , Moscow Excursion (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1935), 29, 8.

45. Travers, Moscow Excursion , 159.

46. Betty Roland, Caviar for Breakfast (Melbourne: Quartet, 1979), 29.

47. Roland, Caviar for Breakfast , 78.

48. Roland, Caviar for Breakfast .

49. See Nicole Moore , “The Burden Twain or Not Forgetting Yourself: The Writing of Betty Roland’s Life,” Hecate 18.1 (1992), 6–26; Jeff Sparrow , “Guido Baracchi, Better Roland, and the Soviet Union,” in Political Tourists , ed. Fitzpatrick and Rasmussen (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2008), 122–145.

50. C. M. H. Clark , Meeting Soviet Man (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1960), 1, 117.

51. Randolph Bedford , Explorations in Civilization (Sydney: Day, 1914), 11.

52. Bedford, Explorations in Civilization , 35.

53. Bedford, Explorations in Civilization , 37.

54. See Boyd, A Single Flame (1939) and Much Else in Italy (1958).

55. Bedford, Explorations in Civilization , 240

56. Bedford, Explorations in Civilization , 236.

57. Mitchell Rolls and Anna Johnston , Travelling Home, Walkabout Magazine and Mid-Twentieth-Century Australia (London: Anthem, 2016).

58. Deborah Bird Rose , Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness (Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission, 1996), 7.

59. Gillian Cowlishaw , Rednecks, Eggheads and Blackfellas: A Study of Racial Power and Intimacy in Australia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2014), 38–42.

60. This was a common concern: see Mitchell Rolls , “Painting the Dreaming White,” Australian Cultural History 24 (2006): 3–28.

61. See Anna Johnston , “Travel Magazines and Settler (Post)Colonialism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Travel Writing , ed. Robert Clarke (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

62. Victoria Kuttainen , “Trafficking Literature: Travel, Modernity, and the Middle Ground of Canadian and Australian Middlebrow Print Cultures,” International Journal of Canadian Studies 48 (2014): 86. Here she considers the quarterly magazine The BP Magazine , sponsored by the Australian shipping firm Burns Philp.

63. See Victoria Kuttainen and Sarah Galletly , “Making Friends of the Nations: Australian Interwar Magazines and Middlebrow Orientalism in the Pacific,” Journeys 17.2 (2016): 23–48.

64. See Roger Osborne , “A National Interest in an International Market: The Circulation of Magazines in Australia during the 1920s,” History Australia 5.3 (2008): 75.1–75.16.

65. Ernestine Hill , The Great Australian Loneliness (Melbourne: Robertson and Mullens, 1940), 7, 8.

66. Ernestine Hill , The Territory (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1951), 212.

67. Hill, The Territory , 421, 37–38.

68. Letter from Hill to Coy Bateson, January 15, 1943 (North Adelaide: Ernestine Hill Papers, University of Queensland Fryer Library, Box 27, UQFL18. Hereafter Hill Papers).

69. C. Hartley Grattan , “ʻOutback’ Australia: The Country and the People,” The New York Times October 18, 1942, 6, 32.

70. Howard Daniel , “Review Articles,” Pacific Affairs 16.1 (1943): 120.

71. The series began with Rolling Down the Lachlan (1935) and Roaming Round the Darling (1936).

72. Other books feature other industries: Man Tracks: With the Mounted Police in Australian Wilds (1935); pastoralism in Western Australia in The Cattle King (1938); diamond mining in Stone of Destiny (1948). Idriess also published highly popular adventure fiction, which has received scholarly attention: see Robert Dixon , Prosthetic Gods: Travel, Representation and Colonial Governance (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2001).

73. Julian Croft , “Idriess, Ion Llewellyn (1889–1979),” in Australian Dictionary of Biography (Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 1983). Available online .

74. On the ideologies of adventure fiction and travel from the late 19th century, see Robert Dixon , Writing the Colonial Adventure: Race, Gender and Nation in Anglo-Australian Popular Fiction, 1875–1914 (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

75. Arthur Groom , I Saw a Strange Land (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1950), 22. The phrase was later used by the influential Ernabella mission doctor Charles Duguid in No Dying Race (1963). On the history of the “dying race” idea, see Russell McGregor , Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880–1939 (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 1996) and Patrick Brantlinger , Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (London: Cornell University Press, 2003).

76. Other notable writers include Bill Harney , with titles such as Songs of the Songmen , with A. P. Elkin (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1949); Life Among the Aborigines (London: Robert Hale, 1957); and To Ayers Rock and Beyond (London: Robert Hale, 1963).

77. Anthony Carrigan , Postcolonial Tourism: Literature, Culture, and Environment (New York: Routledge, 2011), xi.

78. Eleanor Dark , “They All Come Back,” Walkabout (January 1951): 20.

79. James, “London Letter,” 63.

80. Dark, “They All Come Back,” 20.

81. Sheard later published An Australian Youth among Desert Aborigines: Journal of an Expedition among the Aborigines of Central Australia (1964).

82. Robert Dixon, Prosthetic Gods ; Dixon , “What Was Travel Writing? Frank Hurley and the Media Contexts of Early Twentieth-Century Australian Travel Writing,” Studies in Travel Writing 11.1 (2007): 59–81. See also Martin Thomas and Margo Neale , eds., Exploring the Legacy of the 1948 Arnhem Land Expedition (Canberra: Australian National University E-Press, 2011).

83. Georgine Clarsen has published widely on cars and Australian culture: see Clarsen and Lorenzo Veracini , “Settler Colonial Automobilities: A Distinct Constellation of Automobile Cultures?,” History Compass 10.12 (2012): 889–900.

84. John Tebbutt , “The Travel Writer as Foreign Correspondent: Frank Clune and the ABC,” Journal of Australian Studies 34.1 (2010): 96. On the invidious politics of this in colonial Papua New Guinea, see Dixon, Prosthetic Gods .

85. Ernestine Hill, Letter to Coy Bateson (May 22, 1953, Hill Papers).

86. See Simon Ryan , The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

87. Melissa Harper , The Ways of the Bushwalker: On Foot in Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2007), 168.

88. See Tom Griffiths , Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

89. David Walker , Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia, 1850–1939 (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1999), 214.

90. Walker, Anxious Nation , 12, 210.

91. See Frances Steel , Oceania under Steam: Sea Transport and the Cultures of Colonialism, c. 1870–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011) and Steel , “The ‘Missing Link’: Space, Race, and Transoceanic Ties in the Settler-Colonial Pacific,” Transfers 5.3 (Winter 2015): 49–67.

92. Chris Lee , “1935: Literary Possibilities of Flight: Bill Taylor’s Pacific Flight ,” in Telling Stories: Australian Literary Cultures, 1935–2010 (Clayton: Monash University Publishing, 2013), 1–7.

93. See Nicholas Halter , “Searching for the Land of the Golden Cocoa-Nut: Australian Travel Writing About Commercial Enterprise in the Pacific Islands,” Journal of Pacific History (2016): 1–17.

94. Frank Clune , Pacific Parade (Melbourne: Hawthorn, 1945), 3.

95. Clune, Pacific Parade , 2.

96. Clune, Pacific Parade , 3.

97. Dixon, Prosthetic Gods , 124.

98. Chris Dixon and Prue Ahrens , “Traversing the Pacific: Modernity on the Move from Coast to Coast,” in Coast to Coast: Case Histories of Modern Pacific Crossings , eds. Chris Dixon and Prue Ahrens (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 7.

99. Agnieszka Sobocinska , Visiting the Neighbours: Australians in Asia (Sydney: NewSouth, 2014), e-book.

100. For a similar process in U.S. texts about the Pacific, see Christina Klein , Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); see also Anna Johnston , “Becoming ‘Pacific-Minded’: Australian Middlebrow Writers in the 1940s and the Mobility of Texts,” Transfers 17.1 (2017): 88–107.

101. Colin Simpson , Japan: An Intimate View (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1959), 7.

102. Anne Rees , “‘Bursting with New Ideas’: Australian Women Professionals and American Study Tours, 1930–1960,” History Australia 13.3 (2016): 382–398.

103. Richard White and Justine Greenwood , “Australia,” in Routledge Companion to Travel Writing (New York: Routledge, 2016), 407.

104. The “first” Indigenous writer has traditionally been identified as the preacher and writer David Unaipon, who began publishing Aboriginal legends in the 1920s. Recent scholarship has sought to uncover a corpus of early Aboriginal writing in diverse, often archival, modes: see Penny Van Toorn , Writing Never Arrives Naked: Early Aboriginal Cultures of Writing in Australia (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2006). In terms of travel writing, Robert Clarke persuasively reads “return to country” narratives in Aboriginal life writing—in which contemporary protagonists travel back to traditional, family country, from which they or their ancestors have often been removed—as an evocation form of travel narrative. Robert Clarke , Travel Writing from Black Australia: Utopia, Melancholia, and Aboriginality (New York: Routledge, 2015).

105. Colin Simpson , The New Australia (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1970).

106. Jock Marshall , Journey among Men (South Melbourne: Sun, 1962), 9.

107. Clarke shows the centrality of settler–Aboriginal relationships in travel writing about Australia: see Travel Writing from Black Australia .

108. Bruce Chatwin , The Songlines (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987); Bill Bryson , Down Under (London: Doubleday, 2000).

109. Mary Louise Pratt , “Afterword,” in The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Travel Writing , ed. Robert Clarke (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

110. Pesman, Duty Free ; and Bill Kent , Pesman, and Cynthia Troup , eds., Australians in Italy: Contemporary Lives and Impressions (Clayton: Monash University ePress, 2008).

111. Walker, Anxious Nation .

112. In addition to publications cited above, see White ’s “The Retreat from Adventure: Popular Travel Writing in the 1950s,” Australian Historical Studies 28.109 (1997): 90–105; and On Holidays: A History of Getting Away in Australia (North Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2004).

113. Most recently, see White and Greenwood, “Australia”; and Anna Johnston , “Australian Travel Writing,” in The Cambridge History of Travel Writing , eds. Nandini Das and Tim Youngs (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

114. See David Carter , Always Almost Modern: Australian Print Cultures and Modernity (North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013); Kuttainen and Galletly.

115. See the special issues “Australian Travel Writing,” edited by Richard White Studies in Travel Writing 11.1 (2007); Robert Clarke and Anna Johnston , eds., “Travel Writing and Tasmania,” Studies in Travel Writing 20.1 (2016); “A Journey to Australia,” edited by Helen Bones , Journeys 17.2 (2016), 1–136.

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Top travel reads for 2024, from memoirs to nature writing

From epic travelogues and nature writing to a pioneering travel publisher’s memoir, these titles will inspire adventure this year.

The natural world continues to inspire travel writers. Standout books for the year ahead include a collection of stories, illustrations and poems that explore our connection with nature, plus a travelogue inspiring us to discover the small green spaces on our doorstep. Walking remains a popular topic for authors, as evidenced by a pair of upcoming travelogues that hit the trail in rural Spain and Istanbul, respectively, plus a collection of literary works that asks the question: why explore on foot? And to celebrate Bradt Travel Guides reaching its 50 th anniversary this year, founder Hilary Bradt is set to release a memoir about her pioneering journeys both in print and around the lesser-explored corners of the planet.

1. Local: A Search for Nearby Nature and Wilderness

World explorer Alastair Humphries spent a year examining every square metre of a 12-mile radius around his home in suburban England and found wonder close to hand. A former National Geographic Adventurer of the Year, Humphries has cycled around the globe, rowed across the Atlantic Ocean and even walked a lap of the M25 in one of his pioneering ‘microadventures’. His latest book is a celebration of slowing things down and discovering a small wild world right on your doorstep – it’s also a rallying cry to revitalise Britain’s depleted natural spaces and our right to roam in them. £12.99, Eye Books.

2. Taking the Risk: My Adventures in Travel and Publishing

Trailblazing travel publisher, Hilary Bradt’s eponymous guidebook company celebrates its 50 th anniversary this year. The first Bradt Travel Guide was born on an Amazon river barge in 1974: Backpacking Along Ancient Ways Peru & Bolivia which included some of the very first descriptions of the Inca Trail geared for travellers. Since then, Bradt has published guidebooks to the remotest parts of the planet – Eritrea, Mongolia and Madagascar among them. Championing slow and low-impact travel before the concepts were widespread, this memoir looks at back at a lifetime of trials, triumphs and following the lesser-known trail. £20.00, Bradt.

3. To the City: Life and Death Along the Ancient Walls of Istanbul

A deep dive into the Turkish capital, framed by the crumbling walls of its Byzantine fortifications. Journalist, Alexander Christie-Miller journeys on foot in and around Istanbul’s ancient city walls, piecing together a jigsaw puzzle of its identity on the fringes of Europe and Asia. The imperialist rhetoric of current Turkish president Erdoğan still holds Istanbul in the image carved out by Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II, who captured then-Constantinople in 1453. But between the ancient minarets that punctuate Istanbul’s skyline, the author seeks out the real soul of the city in its diverse peoples, past and present, raising up voices rarely heard. £25, Harper Collins.

4. Wilder Journeys: True Stories of Nature, Adventure & Connection

Environmental writer Laurie King and bestselling author Miriam Lancewood have gathered a collection of original non-fiction stories, illustrations and poems examining the human connection with nature, penned by travellers, wildlife lovers and adventurers from across the globe. Take a walk across the desert with American explorer Angela Maxwell, discover how hermit Gregory Smith survived for 10 years in an Australian forest and learn how activist David Malana set up a surf school for people of colour in California. These bold stories aim to inspire you to find your wild animal soul and rethink your relationship with nature. £14.99, Watkins Publishing.

5. Vagabond

For anyone who loved Laure Lee’s As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning , this tale of one man’s 761-mile hike across the Iberian Peninsula should appeal. Mark Eveleigh brings the pioneering spirit of adventure previously seen in his travel books on Southeast Asian to the back roads of Spain. The author spent five weeks walking from Gibraltar to Punta de Estaca de Bares in the country’s northernmost tip, taking in blistering sun-beaten planes, grey stone villages hung with mist and vast chains of mountains, in homage to the disappearing lifestyle of the vagabundo , as well as a celebration of rural Spain and its remote communities. £10.99, Summersdale.

6. Globetrotting: Writers Walk the World

Take a literary stroll, from the streets of London to the pilgrim paths of Japan, the jungles of Ghana and beyond. Author Duncan Minshull brings together writing from explorers and adventurers, scientists and missionaries, pleasure-seekers and literary drifters in a new collection of over 50 travelogues that aims to answer the question: why explore on foot? Spanning seven continents, stories date back to as early as the 1500s, and take in lesser-known writers along with the likes of Herman Melville, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, Isabella Bird and William Boyd. £15.99, Notting Hill Editions.

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Columbia University in the City of New York

Miriam and ira d. wallach art gallery.

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Moscow: City, Spectacle, Capital of Photography

April 30–june 21, 2003.

Moscow: City, Spectacle, Capital of Photography , an exhibition of 20th-century photographs of Moscow, opens at Columbia University's Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery on Wednesday, April 30, 2003 and remains on display through Saturday, June 21, 2003.

Moscow has been a powerful magnet for many Russian photographers of the 20th century. Moscow: City, Spectacle, Capital of Photography presents the work of 31 photographers, whose images have defined the visual experience of Moscow from the 1920s to the present. Diverse in form and strategy, the 90 photographs chosen for the exhibition trace the history of Russian documentary photography and offer insight into individual practices. From Aleksandr Rodchenko's constructivist visions and Evgenii Khaldei's humanist landscapes to Igor Moukhin's scenes of urban spectacle and alienation in the works of Russia's key 20th-century photographers, Moscow ventures beyond the expected image as a site of famous landmarks, architectural treasures and dramatic lifestyles.

Early 20th-century photographers Boris Ignatovich and Arkadii Shaikhet saw themselves in the vanguard of an emerging mass-media culture, defining with their cameras the visual experience of Soviet modernity. For nearly 70 years, Soviet photography was assigned the duty of maintaining the ideological rigidity of the Soviet State. Yet, as examples of the work of Iakov Khalip, Anatolii Egorov, Mikhail Savin, and Mark Markov-Grinberg show, Soviet photographic practices were much more complex than has been previously acknowledged. The works of these photographers remain intensely compelling to a modernist eye.

Contemporary Russian photographers, such as Lev Melikhov, Valerii Stigneev and Sergei Leontiev, engage with the legacy of the Soviet documentary photography. But for them the documentary is a complex and multivalent genre, which incorporates subjectivity, ambiguity and reflexivity and comments on social and cultural issues without losing sight of the position from which that commentary is made. In the recent photographs by Vladimir Kupriyanov, Igor Moukhin, Anna Gorunova and Pakito Infante, the "real" space of Moscow is replaced by an imaginary and optical spaces of virtuality.

The works in the exhibition are on loan from Moscow's Cultural Center Dom, and many are being shown outside Russia for the first time. In conjunction with the exhibition, the Wallach Art Gallery is publishing an illustrated catalogue with a scholarly essay by the exhibition curator, Nadia Michoustina, a Ph.D. candidate in Columbia University's Department of Slavic Languages. The essay presents a nuanced history of Russian photography of the 20th century, and contributes to an interpretation of extraordinary images.

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Before and after: How Moscow looked in the 19th century and today (PHOTOS)

travel writing 20th century

1. The Kremlin as seen from across the Moskva River, 1866

travel writing 20th century

This image was a gift album to Maria Feodorovna (Dagmar of Denmark), wife of Alexander III and mother of Nicholas II.

Though the Kremlin's buildings, especially Orthodox churches, suffered much at the hands of the Bolsheviks, this area has changed little since that time.

2. Voskresenskaya Square and Chapel of Iverskaya Icon of The Mother of God, 1900s

travel writing 20th century

This place is now called the Square of the Revolution, and the red building is the State Historical Museum.

This is Moscow's zero mile marker. Throw a coin in for good luck. In 1995, an equestrian statue to World War II hero Marshal Zhukov was erected here.

3. Smolensky Market, 1906

travel writing 20th century

This was a spontaneous market on the crossroads of Arbat Street and Old Smolensky Tract, which led to the city of Smolensk.

Now, a Stalin-era skyscraper (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) stands here, as well as the wide avenue of the Garden Ring. Commerce is still conducted here, and there are many business offices nearby.

4. Krymsky Bridge , Neskuchny Garden and Zachatyevsky Monastery , 1886

travel writing 20th century

This photo was made 50 years ago, and today’s popular Gorky Park was opened on the forested side of the Moskva River. Also, notice that Krymsky Bridge is missing.

Zachatyevsky Monastery is now scrunched between office and residential buildings.

On the other side of the river is the New Tretyakov Gallery.

5. House of Romanov boyars

travel writing 20th century

In this medieval house on Varvarka Street, close to the Kremlin, the first tsar of the Romanov dynasty - Mikhail - was born in 1596.

Today, this ‘palace’ still stands, surrounded by medieval churches and the Old English Court that was built in the early 16th century. The street and the museums are next to the new Zaryadye Park.

6. Lubyanka Square, 1890s

travel writing 20th century

The medieval gates of Kitai-Gorod stood here long before Muscovites saw the appearance of the KGB building, which of course is a symbol of Stalinist repression and torture. Different stores occupied this area, and in the center of the square was a beautiful fountain made by a sculptor with Italian roots, Ivan Vitali.

In Soviet times, the fountain was moved to Neskuchny Garden, and a monument to the bloody KGB leader, Felix Dzerzhinsky, was erected instead. It was demolished in 1991, however, and now the spot is vacant.

7. St. Basil’s Cathedral, 1905

travel writing 20th century

Erected by Ivan the Terrible in the mid-16th century in honor of the conquest of Kazan, it’s now one of the most recognizable symbols of Russia, not to mention Red Square’s pearl.

While the country’s main cathedral, Christ the Savior, was demolished by the Bolsheviks, this cathedral was spared. The street leading to Red Square is called Vasilevsky Descent and is now covered with cobblestones. Large outdoor concerts are held here from to time.

8. Donskoy Monastery, 1882

travel writing 20th century

It was seen as a miracle when in the 16th century the Crimean khan with his formidable army retreated from the walls of Moscow. Donskoy Monastery was erected on the battlefield south of Moscow’s city limits at that time, but which is an area that’s now part of the city center.

In Soviet times, anti-religious art exhibitions were displayed instead of church services, which started again here only after Perestroika .

9. Pashkov House, 1896

travel writing 20th century

This photo was made during the coronation of Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II. There was a big feast for the imperial court, and the city center was sumptuously decorated.

This is one of Moscow’s most gorgeous buildings, and it was the first site of the Russian State Library, the largest public library in the country. Rare manuscripts, sheet music and maps are still stored here.

10. Kremlin seen from southeast , 1880s

travel writing 20th century

In the 20th century, the area around the Kremlin was built up. Inside, the communists built a new State Kremlin Palace, which is the only modern structure in the Kremlin, built for Party meetings.

From the 1960s and until 2006, in front of Red Square stood the massive Hotel Rossiya, which was demolished that year. For more than a decade afterwards , the area was a fenced-off construction site. In 2017, however, Zaryadye Park opened with its stunning floating bridge over the Moskva River.

From July 4 to August 13, 2018, the exhibition, “Moscow in Photographs from the 1860s to the early 1900s,” is on display at the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg as part of the series, “Traveling around the Russian Empire.”

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travel writing 20th century

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Stacker

The country the most people came to Chicago from at the start of the 20th century

Posted: February 24, 2024 | Last updated: February 24, 2024

<p>Though every city in the U.S. has a distinctly American flavor, so many metropolitan areas display distinct signs of the immigrant populations that melded together to make the cities we know and love today. From Miami's Little Havana to New York City's Chinatown and Los Angeles' Little Italy, cultural enclaves continue to thrive in modern metropolitan areas and help build colorful and diverse communities.</p><p>Many cultural and ethnic enclaves have become <a href="https://www.tripsavvy.com/unique-ethnic-enclaves-in-the-u-s-5209425">destinations</a> for locals and tourists alike, but these visitors bring with them a mixed bag of consequences. On one hand, increased foot traffic allows small businesses and restaurants more opportunities for business, ushering in much-appreciated cash flow. On the other hand, rising demand for goods and services can cause prices to rise, hiking up the cost of living and potentially pushing poorer individuals and families out of the community.</p><p>The <a href="https://metropolitics.org/The-Endangered-Enclave.html">gentrification of ethnic enclaves</a> is not new. The term "<a href="https://www.kqed.org/news/136343/gentrification-a-word-from-another-place-and-time">gentrification</a>" was coined by Ruth Glass in the 1960s to describe the displacement of working class folks in London, but the first examples of gentrification can be traced back to the 18th century when wealthy landowners, or the "gentry," began buying out small farmers who were struggling to accumulate the capital necessary to operate in England.</p><p>Today, ethnic enclaves continue to thrive despite the looming threats of gentrification and economic impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic. As one step towards understanding the history of these enclaves, <a href="https://stacker.com/">​​Stacker</a> compiled a list of the largest sources of immigrants in Chicago in 1900 by transcribing a previously untranscribed dataset from the U.S. Census Bureau. <a href="https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1900/volume-1/volume-1-p13.pdf">Table 35 of the Twelfth Census</a> details the immigrant population of every city in the U.S. with at least 25,000 inhabitants as of the turn of the last century.</p><p>Read on to find out more about the historical immigrant community in your home city or explore the data on your own on <a href="https://stacker.com/stories/40507/data-1900-immigrants-city">our site</a>, <a href="https://github.com/stacker-media/data/tree/main/1900-census-immigrant-city">GitHub</a>, or <a href="https://data.world/stackermedia/twelfth-census-of-the-us-country-of-birth-by-city">data.world</a>.</p>

What Chicago's immigrant population looked like in 1900

Though every city in the U.S. has a distinctly American flavor, so many metropolitan areas display distinct signs of the immigrant populations that melded together to make the cities we know and love today. From Miami's Little Havana to New York City's Chinatown and Los Angeles' Little Italy, cultural enclaves continue to thrive in modern metropolitan areas and help build colorful and diverse communities.

Many cultural and ethnic enclaves have become destinations for locals and tourists alike, but these visitors bring with them a mixed bag of consequences. On one hand, increased foot traffic allows small businesses and restaurants more opportunities for business, ushering in much-appreciated cash flow. On the other hand, rising demand for goods and services can cause prices to rise, hiking up the cost of living and potentially pushing poorer individuals and families out of the community.

The gentrification of ethnic enclaves is not new. The term " gentrification " was coined by Ruth Glass in the 1960s to describe the displacement of working class folks in London, but the first examples of gentrification can be traced back to the 18th century when wealthy landowners, or the "gentry," began buying out small farmers who were struggling to accumulate the capital necessary to operate in England.

Today, ethnic enclaves continue to thrive despite the looming threats of gentrification and economic impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic. As one step towards understanding the history of these enclaves, ​​Stacker compiled a list of the largest sources of immigrants in Chicago in 1900 by transcribing a previously untranscribed dataset from the U.S. Census Bureau. Table 35 of the Twelfth Census details the immigrant population of every city in the U.S. with at least 25,000 inhabitants as of the turn of the last century.

Read on to find out more about the historical immigrant community in your home city or explore the data on your own on our site , GitHub , or data.world .

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 170,738<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 29.08%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 2,669,164<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 25.52%<br> - #1 most common country of origin</p>

#1. Germany

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 170,738 - Percent of foreign born residents: 29.08% National - Number of residents: 2,669,164 - Percent of foreign born residents: 25.52% - #1 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 73,912<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 12.59%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 1,619,409<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 15.48%<br> - #2 most common country of origin</p>

#2. Ireland

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 73,912 - Percent of foreign born residents: 12.59% National - Number of residents: 1,619,409 - Percent of foreign born residents: 15.48% - #2 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 59,718<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 10.17%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 383,595<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 3.67%<br> - #8 most common country of origin</p>

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 59,718 - Percent of foreign born residents: 10.17% National - Number of residents: 383,595 - Percent of foreign born residents: 3.67% - #8 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 48,836<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 8.32%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 574,625<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 5.49%<br> - #5 most common country of origin</p>

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 48,836 - Percent of foreign born residents: 8.32% National - Number of residents: 574,625 - Percent of foreign born residents: 5.49% - #5 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 36,362<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 6.19%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 156,999<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 1.50%<br> - #12 most common country of origin</p>

#5. Bohemia

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 36,362 - Percent of foreign born residents: 6.19% National - Number of residents: 156,999 - Percent of foreign born residents: 1.50% - #12 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 34,779<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 5.92%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 1,183,225<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 11.31%<br> - #3 most common country of origin</p>

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 34,779 - Percent of foreign born residents: 5.92% National - Number of residents: 1,183,225 - Percent of foreign born residents: 11.31% - #3 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 29,308<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 4.99%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 843,491<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 8.06%<br> - #4 most common country of origin</p>

#7. England

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 29,308 - Percent of foreign born residents: 4.99% National - Number of residents: 843,491 - Percent of foreign born residents: 8.06% - #4 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 24,178<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 4.12%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 424,372<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 4.06%<br> - #7 most common country of origin</p>

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 24,178 - Percent of foreign born residents: 4.12% National - Number of residents: 424,372 - Percent of foreign born residents: 4.06% - #7 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 22,011<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 3.75%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 338,426<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 3.24%<br> - #9 most common country of origin</p>

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 22,011 - Percent of foreign born residents: 3.75% National - Number of residents: 338,426 - Percent of foreign born residents: 3.24% - #9 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 18,555<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 3.16%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 105,098<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 1.00%<br> - #17 most common country of origin</p>

#10. Holland

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 18,555 - Percent of foreign born residents: 3.16% National - Number of residents: 105,098 - Percent of foreign born residents: 1.00% - #17 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 16,008<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 2.73%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 484,703<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 4.63%<br> - #6 most common country of origin</p>

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 16,008 - Percent of foreign born residents: 2.73% National - Number of residents: 484,703 - Percent of foreign born residents: 4.63% - #6 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 11,815<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 2.01%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 276,702<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 2.65%<br> - #10 most common country of origin</p>

#12. Austria

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 11,815 - Percent of foreign born residents: 2.01% National - Number of residents: 276,702 - Percent of foreign born residents: 2.65% - #10 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 10,347<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 1.76%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 234,699<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 2.24%<br> - #11 most common country of origin</p>

#13. Scotland

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 10,347 - Percent of foreign born residents: 1.76% National - Number of residents: 234,699 - Percent of foreign born residents: 2.24% - #11 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 10,166<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 1.73%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 154,616<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 1.48%<br> - #13 most common country of origin</p>

#14. Denmark

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 10,166 - Percent of foreign born residents: 1.73% National - Number of residents: 154,616 - Percent of foreign born residents: 1.48% - #13 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 4,946<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.84%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 145,815<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 1.39%<br> - #14 most common country of origin</p>

#15. Hungary

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 4,946 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.84% National - Number of residents: 145,815 - Percent of foreign born residents: 1.39% - #14 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 3,251<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.55%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 115,959<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 1.11%<br> - #15 most common country of origin</p>

#16. Switzerland

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 3,251 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.55% National - Number of residents: 115,959 - Percent of foreign born residents: 1.11% - #15 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 2,989<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.51%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 104,534<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 1.00%<br> - #18 most common country of origin</p>

#17. France

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 2,989 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.51% National - Number of residents: 104,534 - Percent of foreign born residents: 1.00% - #18 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 1,818<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.31%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 93,744<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.90%<br> - #20 most common country of origin</p>

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 1,818 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.31% National - Number of residents: 93,744 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.90% - #20 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 1,493<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.25%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 8,655<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.08%<br> - #31 most common country of origin</p>

#19. Greece

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 1,493 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.25% National - Number of residents: 8,655 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.08% - #31 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 1,179<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.20%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 106,659<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 1.02%<br> - #16 most common country of origin</p>

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 1,179 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.20% National - Number of residents: 106,659 - Percent of foreign born residents: 1.02% - #16 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 1,160<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.20%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 29,848<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.29%<br> - #24 most common country of origin</p>

#21. Belgium

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 1,160 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.20% National - Number of residents: 29,848 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.29% - #24 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 416<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.07%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 63,440<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.61%<br> - #22 most common country of origin</p>

#22. Finland

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 416 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.07% National - Number of residents: 63,440 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.61% - #22 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 389<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.07%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 11,928<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.11%<br> - #27 most common country of origin</p>

#23. Asia (except China, Japan, and India)

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 389 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.07% National - Number of residents: 11,928 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.11% - #27 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 334<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.06%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 3,049<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.03%<br> - #37 most common country of origin</p>

#24. Luxemburg

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 334 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.06% National - Number of residents: 3,049 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.03% - #37 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 315<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.05%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 8,310<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.08%<br> - #32 most common country of origin</p>

#25. Born at sea

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 315 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.05% National - Number of residents: 8,310 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.08% - #32 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 287<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.05%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 15,043<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.14%<br> - #25 most common country of origin</p>

#26. Roumania

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 287 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.05% National - Number of residents: 15,043 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.14% - #25 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 273<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.05%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 7,041<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.07%<br> - #34 most common country of origin</p>

#27. Australia

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 273 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.05% National - Number of residents: 7,041 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.07% - #34 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 180<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.03%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 9,949<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.10%<br> - #30 most common country of origin</p>

#28. Turkey

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 180 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.03% National - Number of residents: 9,949 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.10% - #30 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 141<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.02%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 3,911<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.04%<br> - #36 most common country of origin</p>

#29. Central America

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 141 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.02% National - Number of residents: 3,911 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.04% - #36 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 139<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.02%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 14,468<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.14%<br> - #26 most common country of origin</p>

#30. West Indies (except Cuba and Puerto Rico)

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 139 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.02% National - Number of residents: 14,468 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.14% - #26 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 138<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.02%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 7,284<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.07%<br> - #33 most common country of origin</p>

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 138 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.02% National - Number of residents: 7,284 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.07% - #33 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 121<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.02%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 4,814<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.05%<br> - #35 most common country of origin</p>

#32. South America

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 121 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.02% National - Number of residents: 4,814 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.05% - #35 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 115<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.02%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 2,272<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.02%<br> - #41 most common country of origin</p>

#33. Europe (not otherwise specified)

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 115 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.02% National - Number of residents: 2,272 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.02% - #41 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 102<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.02%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 103,445<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.99%<br> - #19 most common country of origin</p>

#34. Mexico

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 102 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.02% National - Number of residents: 103,445 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.99% - #19 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 97<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.02%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 2,069<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.02%<br> - #42 most common country of origin</p>

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 97 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.02% National - Number of residents: 2,069 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.02% - #42 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 91<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.02%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 2,587<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.02%<br> - #39 most common country of origin</p>

#36. Other countries

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 91 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.02% National - Number of residents: 2,587 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.02% - #39 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 90<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.02%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 2,577<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.02%<br> - #40 most common country of origin</p>

#37. Africa

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 90 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.02% National - Number of residents: 2,577 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.02% - #40 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 87<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.01%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 11,159<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.11%<br> - #28 most common country of origin</p>

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 87 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.01% National - Number of residents: 11,159 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.11% - #28 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 86<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.01%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 10,955<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.10%<br> - #29 most common country of origin</p>

#39. Atlantic Islands

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 86 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.01% National - Number of residents: 10,955 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.10% - #29 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 80<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.01%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 81,590<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.78%<br> - #21 most common country of origin</p>

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 80 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.01% National - Number of residents: 81,590 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.78% - #21 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 46<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.01%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 2,659<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.03%<br> - #38 most common country of origin</p>

#41. Pacific Islands (except Phillipine Islands)

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 46 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.01% National - Number of residents: 2,659 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.03% - #38 most common country of origin

<p>Chicago, Illinois<br> - Number of residents: 21<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.00%<br> National<br> - Number of residents: 37,144<br> - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.36%<br> - #23 most common country of origin</p>

#42. Portugal

Chicago, Illinois - Number of residents: 21 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.00% National - Number of residents: 37,144 - Percent of foreign born residents: 0.36% - #23 most common country of origin

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Travel Itinerary For One Week in Moscow: The Best of Moscow!

I just got back from one week in Moscow. And, as you might have already guessed, it was a mind-boggling experience. It was not my first trip to the Russian capital. But I hardly ever got enough time to explore this sprawling city. Visiting places for business rarely leaves enough time for sightseeing. I think that if you’ve got one week in Russia, you can also consider splitting your time between its largest cities (i.e. Saint Petersburg ) to get the most out of your trip. Seven days will let you see the majority of the main sights and go beyond just scratching the surface. In this post, I’m going to share with you my idea of the perfect travel itinerary for one week in Moscow.

Moscow is perhaps both the business and cultural hub of Russia. There is a lot more to see here than just the Kremlin and Saint Basil’s Cathedral. Centuries-old churches with onion-shaped domes dotted around the city are in stark contrast with newly completed impressive skyscrapers of Moscow City dominating the skyline. I spent a lot of time thinking about my Moscow itinerary before I left. And this city lived up to all of my expectations.

7-day Moscow itinerary

Travel Itinerary For One Week in Moscow

Day 1 – red square and the kremlin.

Metro Station: Okhotny Ryad on Red Line.

No trip to Moscow would be complete without seeing its main attraction. The Red Square is just a stone’s throw away from several metro stations. It is home to some of the most impressive architectural masterpieces in the city. The first thing you’ll probably notice after entering it and passing vendors selling weird fur hats is the fairytale-like looking Saint Basil’s Cathedral. It was built to commemorate one of the major victories of Ivan the Terrible. I once spent 20 minutes gazing at it, trying to find the perfect angle to snap it. It was easier said than done because of the hordes of locals and tourists.

As you continue strolling around Red Square, there’s no way you can miss Gum. It was widely known as the main department store during the Soviet Era. Now this large (yet historic) shopping mall is filled with expensive boutiques, pricey eateries, etc. During my trip to Moscow, I was on a tight budget. So I only took a retro-style stroll in Gum to get a rare glimpse of a place where Soviet leaders used to grocery shop and buy their stuff. In case you want some modern shopping experience, head to the Okhotny Ryad Shopping Center with stores like New Yorker, Zara, and Adidas.

things to do in Moscow in one week

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To continue this Moscow itinerary, next you may want to go inside the Kremlin walls. This is the center of Russian political power and the president’s official residence. If you’re planning to pay Kremlin a visit do your best to visit Ivan the Great Bell Tower as well. Go there as early as possible to avoid crowds and get an incredible bird’s-eye view. There are a couple of museums that are available during designated visiting hours. Make sure to book your ticket online and avoid lines.

Day 2 – Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, the Tretyakov Gallery, and the Arbat Street

Metro Station: Kropotkinskaya on Red Line

As soon as you start creating a Moscow itinerary for your second day, you’ll discover that there are plenty of metro stations that are much closer to certain sites. Depending on your route, take a closer look at the metro map to pick the closest.

The white marble walls of Christ the Saviour Cathedral are awe-inspiring. As you approach this tallest Orthodox Christian church, you may notice the bronze sculptures, magnificent arches, and cupolas that were created to commemorate Russia’s victory against Napoleon.

travel itinerary for one week in Moscow

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Unfortunately, the current Cathedral is a replica, since original was blown to bits in 1931 by the Soviet government. The new cathedral basically follows the original design, but they have added some new elements such as marble high reliefs.

Home to some precious collection of artworks, in Tretyakov Gallery you can find more than 150,000 of works spanning centuries of artistic endeavor. Originally a privately owned gallery, it now has become one of the largest museums in Russia. The Gallery is often considered essential to visit. But I have encountered a lot of locals who have never been there.

Famous for its souvenirs, musicians, and theaters, Arbat street is among the few in Moscow that were turned into pedestrian zones. Arbat street is usually very busy with tourists and locals alike. My local friend once called it the oldest street in Moscow dating back to 1493. It is a kilometer long walking street filled with fancy gift shops, small cozy restaurants, lots of cute cafes, and street artists. It is closed to any vehicular traffic, so you can easily stroll it with kids.

Day 3 – Moscow River Boat Ride, Poklonnaya Hill Victory Park, the Moscow City

Metro Station: Kievskaya and Park Pobedy on Dark Blue Line / Vystavochnaya on Light Blue Line

Voyaging along the Moscow River is definitely one of the best ways to catch a glimpse of the city and see the attractions from a bit different perspective. Depending on your Moscow itinerary, travel budget and the time of the year, there are various types of boats available. In the summer there is no shortage of boats, and you’ll be spoiled for choice.

exploring Moscow

Travel Itinerary for One Week in Beijing

If you find yourself in Moscow during the winter months, I’d recommend going with Radisson boat cruise. These are often more expensive (yet comfy). They offer refreshments like tea, coffee, hot chocolate, and, of course, alcoholic drinks. Prices may vary but mostly depend on your food and drink selection. Find their main pier near the opulent Ukraine hotel . The hotel is one of the “Seven Sisters”, so if you’re into the charm of Stalinist architecture don’t miss a chance to stay there.

The area near Poklonnaya Hill has the closest relation to the country’s recent past. The memorial complex was completed in the mid-1990s to commemorate the Victory and WW2 casualties. Also known as the Great Patriotic War Museum, activities here include indoor attractions while the grounds around host an open-air museum with old tanks and other vehicles used on the battlefield.

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The hallmark of the memorial complex and the first thing you see as you exit metro is the statue of Nike mounted to its column. This is a very impressive Obelisk with a statue of Saint George slaying the dragon at its base.

Maybe not as impressive as Shanghai’s Oriental Pearl Tower , the skyscrapers of the Moscow City (otherwise known as Moscow International Business Center) are so drastically different from dull Soviet architecture. With 239 meters and 60 floors, the Empire Tower is the seventh highest building in the business district.

The observation deck occupies 56 floor from where you have some panoramic views of the city. I loved the view in the direction of Moscow State University and Luzhniki stadium as well to the other side with residential quarters. The entrance fee is pricey, but if you’re want to get a bird’s eye view, the skyscraper is one of the best places for doing just that.

Day 4 – VDNKh, Worker and Collective Farm Woman Monument, The Ostankino TV Tower

Metro Station: VDNKh on Orange Line

VDNKh is one of my favorite attractions in Moscow. The weird abbreviation actually stands for Russian vystavka dostizheniy narodnogo khozyaystva (Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy). With more than 200 buildings and 30 pavilions on the grounds, VDNKh serves as an open-air museum. You can easily spend a full day here since the park occupies a very large area.

Moscow sights

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First, there are pavilions that used to showcase different cultures the USSR was made of. Additionally, there is a number of shopping pavilions, as well as Moskvarium (an Oceanarium) that features a variety of marine species. VDNKh is a popular venue for events and fairs. There is always something going on, so I’d recommend checking their website if you want to see some particular exhibition.

A stone’s throw away from VDNKh there is a very distinctive 25-meters high monument. Originally built in 1937 for the world fair in Paris, the hulking figures of men and women holding a hammer and a sickle represent the Soviet idea of united workers and farmers. It doesn’t take much time to see the monument, but visiting it gives some idea of the Soviet Union’s grandiose aspirations.

I have a thing for tall buildings. So to continue my travel itinerary for one week in Moscow I decided to climb the fourth highest TV tower in the world. This iconic 540m tower is a fixture of the skyline. You can see it virtually from everywhere in Moscow, and this is where you can get the best panoramic views (yep, even better than Empire skyscraper).

top things to do in Moscow

Parts of the floor are made of tempered glass, so it can be quite scary to exit the elevator. But trust me, as you start observing buildings and cars below, you won’t want to leave. There is only a limited number of tickets per day, so you may want to book online. Insider tip: the first tour is cheaper, you can save up to $10 if go there early.

Day 5 – A Tour To Moscow Manor Houses

Metro Station: Kolomenskoye, Tsaritsyno on Dark Green Line / Kuskovo on Purple Line

I love visiting the manor houses and palaces in Moscow. These opulent buildings were generally built to house Russian aristocratic families and monarchs. Houses tend to be rather grand affairs with impressive architecture. And, depending on the whims of the owners, some form of a landscaped garden.

During the early part of the 20th century though, many of Russia’s aristocratic families (including the family of the last emperor) ended up being killed or moving abroad . Their manor houses were nationalized. Some time later (after the fall of the USSR) these were open to the public. It means that today a great many of Moscow’s finest manor houses and palaces are open for touring.

one week Moscow itinerary

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There are 20 manor houses scattered throughout the city and more than 25 in the area around. But not all of them easily accessible and exploring them often takes a lot of time. I’d recommend focusing on three most popular estates in Moscow that are some 30-minute metro ride away from Kremlin.

Sandwiched between the Moscow River and the Andropov Avenue, Kolomenskoye is a UNESCO site that became a public park in the 1920’s. Once a former royal estate, now it is one of the most tranquil parks in the city with gorgeous views. The Ascension Church, The White Column, and the grounds are a truly grand place to visit.

You could easily spend a full day here, exploring a traditional Russian village (that is, in fact, a market), picnicking by the river, enjoying the Eastern Orthodox church architecture, hiking the grounds as well as and wandering the park and gardens with wildflower meadows, apple orchards, and birch and maple groves. The estate museum showcases Russian nature at its finest year-round.

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If my travel itinerary for one week in Moscow was a family tree, Tsaritsyno Park would probably be the crazy uncle that no-one talks about. It’s a large park in the south of the city of mind-boggling proportions, unbelievable in so many ways, and yet most travelers have never heard of it.

The palace was supposed to be a summer home for Empress Catherine the Great. But since the construction didn’t meet with her approval the palace was abandoned. Since the early 1990’s the palace, the pond, and the grounds have been undergoing renovations. The entire complex is now looking brighter and more elaborately decorated than at possibly any other time during its history. Like most parks in Moscow, you can visit Tsaritsyno free of charge, but there is a small fee if you want to visit the palace.

Moscow itinerary

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Last, but by no means least on my Moscow itinerary is Kuskovo Park . This is definitely an off-the-beaten-path place. While it is not easily accessible, you will be rewarded with a lack of crowds. This 18th-century summer country house of the Sheremetev family was one of the first summer country estates of the Russian nobility. And when you visit you’ll quickly realize why locals love this park.

Like many other estates, Kuskovo has just been renovated. So there are lovely French formal garden, a grotto, and the Dutch house to explore. Make sure to plan your itinerary well because the estate is some way from a metro station.

Day 6 – Explore the Golden Ring

Creating the Moscow itinerary may keep you busy for days with the seemingly endless amount of things to do. Visiting the so-called Golden Ring is like stepping back in time. Golden Ring is a “theme route” devised by promotion-minded journalist and writer Yuri Bychkov.

Having started in Moscow the route will take you through a number of historical cities. It now includes Suzdal, Vladimir, Kostroma, Yaroslavl and Sergiev Posad. All these awe-inspiring towns have their own smaller kremlins and feature dramatic churches with onion-shaped domes, tranquil residential areas, and other architectural landmarks.

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I only visited two out of eight cities included on the route. It is a no-brainer that Sergiev Posad is the nearest and the easiest city to see on a day trip from Moscow. That being said, you can explore its main attractions in just one day. Located some 70 km north-east of the Russian capital, this tiny and overlooked town is home to Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius, UNESCO Site.

things to do in Moscow in seven days

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Sergiev Posad is often described as being at the heart of Russian spiritual life. So it is uncommon to see the crowds of Russian pilgrims showing a deep reverence for their religion. If you’re traveling independently and using public transport, you can reach Sergiev Posad by bus (departs from VDNKh) or by suburban commuter train from Yaroslavskaya Railway Station (Bahnhof). It takes about one and a half hours to reach the town.

Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius is a great place to get a glimpse of filling and warming Russian lunch, specifically at the “ Gostevaya Izba ” restaurant. Try the duck breast, hearty potato and vegetables, and the awesome Napoleon cake.

Day 7 – Gorky Park, Izmailovo Kremlin, Patriarch’s Ponds

Metro Station: Park Kultury or Oktyabrskaya on Circle Line / Partizanskaya on Dark Blue Line / Pushkinskaya on Dark Green Line

Gorky Park is in the heart of Moscow. It offers many different types of outdoor activities, such as dancing, cycling, skateboarding, walking, jogging, and anything else you can do in a park. Named after Maxim Gorky, this sprawling and lovely park is where locals go on a picnic, relax and enjoy free yoga classes. It’s a popular place to bike around, and there is a Muzeon Art Park not far from here. A dynamic location with a younger vibe. There is also a pier, so you can take a cruise along the river too.

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The Kremlin in Izmailovo is by no means like the one you can find near the Red Square. Originally built for decorative purposes, it now features the Vernissage flea market and a number of frequent fairs, exhibitions, and conferences. Every weekend, there’s a giant flea market in Izmailovo, where dozens of stalls sell Soviet propaganda crap, Russian nesting dolls, vinyl records, jewelry and just about any object you can imagine. Go early in the morning if you want to beat the crowds.

All the Bulgakov’s fans should pay a visit to Patriarch’s Ponds (yup, that is plural). With a lovely small city park and the only one (!) pond in the middle, the location is where the opening scene of Bulgakov’s novel Master and Margarita was set. The novel is centered around a visit by Devil to the atheistic Soviet Union is considered by many critics to be one of the best novels of the 20th century. I spent great two hours strolling the nearby streets and having lunch in the hipster cafe.

Conclusion and Recommendations

To conclude, Moscow is a safe city to visit. I have never had a problem with getting around and most locals are really friendly once they know you’re a foreigner. Moscow has undergone some serious reconstruction over the last few years. So you can expect some places to be completely different. I hope my one week Moscow itinerary was helpful! If you have less time, say 4 days or 5 days, I would cut out day 6 and day 7. You could save the Golden Ring for a separate trip entirely as there’s lots to see!

What are your thoughts on this one week Moscow itinerary? Are you excited about your first time in the city? Let me know in the comments below!

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24 comments.

travel writing 20th century

Ann Snook-Moreau

Moscow looks so beautiful and historic! Thanks for including public transit information for those of us who don’t like to rent cars.

travel writing 20th century

MindTheTravel

Yup, that is me 🙂 Rarely rent + stick to the metro = Full wallet!

travel writing 20th century

Mariella Blago

Looks like you had loads of fun! Well done. Also great value post for travel lovers.

Thanks, Mariella!

travel writing 20th century

I have always wanted to go to Russia, especially Moscow. These sights look absolutely beautiful to see and there is so much history there!

Agree! Moscow is a thousand-year-old city and there is definitely something for everyone.

travel writing 20th century

Tara Pittman

Those are amazing buildings. Looks like a place that would be amazing to visit.

travel writing 20th century

Adriana Lopez

Never been to Moscow or Russia but my family has. Many great spots and a lot of culture. Your itinerary sounds fantastic and covers a lot despite it is only a short period of time.

What was their favourite thing about Russia?

travel writing 20th century

Gladys Parker

I know very little about Moscow or Russia for the\at matter. I do know I would have to see the Red Square and all of its exquisite architectural masterpieces. Also the CATHEDRAL OF CHRIST THE SAVIOUR. Thanks for shedding some light on visiting Moscow.

Thanks for swinging by! The Red Square is a great starting point, but there way too many places and things to discover aside from it!

travel writing 20th century

Ruthy @ Percolate Kitchen

You are making me so jealous!! I’ve always wanted to see Russia.

travel writing 20th century

Moscow is in my bucket list, I don’t know when I can visit there, your post is really useful. As a culture rich place we need to spend at least week.

travel writing 20th century

DANA GUTKOWSKI

Looks like you had a great trip! Thanks for all the great info! I’ve never been in to Russia, but this post makes me wanna go now!

travel writing 20th century

Wow this is amazing! Moscow is on my bucket list – such an amazing place to visit I can imagine! I can’t wait to go there one day!

travel writing 20th century

The building on the second picture looks familiar. I keep seeing that on TV.

travel writing 20th century

Reesa Lewandowski

What beautiful moments! I always wish I had the personality to travel more like this!

travel writing 20th century

Perfect itinerary for spending a week in Moscow! So many places to visit and it looks like you had a wonderful time. I would love to climb that tower. The views I am sure must have been amazing!

I was lucky enough to see the skyline of Moscow from this TV Tower and it is definitely mind-blowing.

travel writing 20th century

Chelsea Pearl

Moscow is definitely up there on my travel bucket list. So much history and iconic architecture!

Thumbs up! 🙂

travel writing 20th century

Blair Villanueva

OMG I dream to visit Moscow someday! Hope the visa processing would be okay (and become more affordable) so I could pursue my dream trip!

Yup, visa processing is the major downside! Agree! Time and the money consuming process…

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travel writing 20th century

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COMMENTS

  1. Travel Writing

    The essays place travel writing from the early modern period up to the late 20th century in relation to modern models of analysis, emphasizing the genre's complicity with violent acts of incursion. Hooper, Glenn, and Tim Youngs, ed. Perspectives on Travel Writing: Studies in European Cultural Transition. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004.

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