TRAVELS WITH MY HAT BACKGROUNDER & QUOTES
No other
occupation, or preoccupation than travel delivers a life lived in the moment,
declares the author of Travels with My
Hat: A Lifetime on the Road, an insightful summation of everything
Australian photojournalist Christine Osborne ever fought for.
Running
through Travels with My Hat is a
contemplative seam on the art of travel, a sometimes lonely act of bravado and
risk. The angst behind Osborne’s accomplished professional veneer is unveiled
against an ever changing backdrop of Africa and the East.
While already an award winning travel writer in Australia, it was her haunting pictures of starving women and children taken during the Ethiopian droughts of the 1970s which brought her renown.
But even before becoming an established travel writer, Osborne had lived a packed life, first arriving in Europe in 1964 and hitchhiking through France, Spain and across North Africa to Cairo before working in various restaurants in London’s Chelsea of the swinging sixties, and saving enough to sail down the Swahili coast of Africa to Kenya.
She taught biology in a Christian school in Mombasa before being threatened with deportation for not having a work permit. In Uganda she got a job writing for a giveaway newspaper. In Senegal, she acted as a guide for cruise ships visiting Dakar. 1967 saw her working as a hostess at the Club Mediterranee in Cefalu, Sicily, landing her first photography job when a Canadian travel writer, needed pictures for her story. “I’m a photographer,” Osborne lied, but her images were published as a double-page spread in the Toronto Star.
In 1970, her first set of articles on south-east Asia won the Pacific Area Travel Association Award while a single article on Burma won the PATA Grand Award in 1971. By now her work was published by many of Australia’s leading magazines of the day, including The Bulletin, Daily Telegraph, the Sydney Moring Herald, The Australian, Women’s Weekly and Cleo.
She visited Sierra Leone on a commission to photograph then President Siaka Stephens, while subsequent commissions took her to Gambia, Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Zanzibar.
While having already switched from a career as a nurse to become a freelance travel writer, Osborne was largely unknown outside of Australia until arriving in London in 1974. She was told: ‘You might be known as a travel writer in Australia, but no one here gives a hoot. If you want to make a name in London, you will have to write a book.”
Which is precisely what she did.
Surveying the available travel literature, Osborne realised that while businessmen were flocking to the developing Arab oil states, little was known, or published, about this world of coral stone houses, and traditional Bedouin life.
“Whole societies were in the middle of dramatic change as a result of sudden huge incomes the sheikhs were receiving from oil and gas fields,” Osborne says.
“With its great dhows moored on the creek, Dubai was old Araby. When I investigated, I found there was next to nothing written about any of the Gulf states. It was a tough area to research but I seized the opportunity.”
Indeed, most of the world Osborne saw and photographed has since disappeared under the bulldozer.
“I was in a man’s world out there. It didn’t bother me; it was just a fact. And I was doing a man’s job so I had to be one of the boys. But not in a butch sense. I would wear evening dress when meeting a ruler or important minister. I didn’t really receive any unwanted attention, except from stupid western salesmen away from their wives at home.”
“There was no internet. There were no guide books. No street names. No maps. No apps. No public relations to make things easier. It was really ground breaking work.”
Publication
of The Gulf States & Oman in 1977
brought commissions on the Middle East. Books followed. The foreword to her
second book, An Insight and Guide to
Jordan was written by Queen Nour, the US-born architect who became fourth
wife of HM King Hussein. Other books and guides followed on Thailand, Malaysia,
Bali, Pakistan, Egypt, the Seychelles and her beloved Morocco, some 15 in all.
Travels with My Hat: A Lifetime on the Road is filled with stories and letters from Zambia, Tunisia, Uzbekistan, Yemen, Morocco, Sudan, Algeria and other places.
The tens of thousands of pictures Christine Osborne took during her travels form the basis of several major photo collections, including her widely regarded World Religions Photo Library.
After being injured in a freak horse-and-carriage accident in Egypt, and having used London as a base since the 1970s, the author returned to live in Australia in 2012.
QUOTES FROM TRAVELS WITH MY HAT: A
LIFETIME ON THE ROAD
CHAPTER ONE
TICKET TO ADDIS ABABA
‘She will die,’ murmured the doctor of a wasted mite whose arms were no
thicker than my fingers. ‘There have to be mass graves before anyone wants to
help, and once you find fresh graves, we have lost our battle against the
drought.’ He sighed deeply.
CHAPTER TWO
RED SEA ADVENTURE
A school of eight squid, my favourite marine creature, jetted through the
water like a team of Red Arrows. When I swam after them, they flushed brown,
then green, and the last animal squirted a puff of sepia coloured ink.
CHAPTER THREE:
MEMBER OF THE ROYAL PRESS CORPS
Several hours had passed since their arrival at the palace and the tide
now covered the red carpet under a metre of water. Golden handrails leading down
the steps seemed to beckon to a nautical kingdom and attracted by the lights,
schools of small sharks were swimming across it. Holding onto her tiara and
lifting her gown, Her Majesty jumped on board, and the royal tour of Arabia was
over.
CHAPTER FIVE
NO MOCHA IN MOCHA
Over the years I’ve occasionally wished I were a boy. Not for the penis
per se, but for the freedom it allows a man, since reality for a woman traveller
is that her sex presents constraints. I wanted to sail on Arab dhows like the
French adventurer, Henri de Monfreid, and to follow in Wilfred Thesiger’s
tracks across the Empty Quarter: how wonderful to go on mountain walks like the
travel writer Kevin Rushby and at sunset, to simply roll out your sleeping bag
under a tree.
CHAPTER SIX
MAY YOU NEVER BE TIRED
‘That’s not leprosy,’ I said.
‘Rats,’ said Mehdi, swabbing the cavity with
peroxide. ‘She sleeps on the floor and at night her feet are gnawed by rats.’
I was shocked. Although my
flight was due to depart in forty minutes, taking Mehdi with me, I rushed out
of the clinic and into the bazaar.
‘Charpai,’ I yelled
running past stalls of dried fish, sandy dates, plastic sandals, and rotting
apples. ‘We must buy her a bed!’
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE MARABOUT FROM TAROUDANT
I’ve often thought I’d found the middle of nowhere on my travels, only to
realise that I was actually on the edge of somewhere, but the Café Lemsid was
definitely in the middle of nowhere…
The explosive growth of tourism and infrastructure during the last
decades had rendered unrecognizable so many places I’d once enjoyed. I stopped
for a camel to cross the road. It was the last one I saw…. Some people are
fortunate enough to find their niche, others never settle down, and while
friends speak of living life each day as it comes, only travel brings a life
lived in the moment.
CHAPTER EIGHT
CORRESPONDENCE WITH MUM
I would repair to the nearest café to devour her news. Of how the seeds
I’d sent home from the Seychelles had grown into a tree, and of feeding
bits
of chicken
to a blue-tongue lizard living under the house…
1984: From the
shores of Lake Galilee:
The picture of a fish mosaic is in a church built on the spot where
Jesus is said to have performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes… The
tourists are nice simple folk—I feel such a heathen... Don’t think I can stand
the Middle East much longer—the loneliness is too great. After this trip, I
think I will give up being a travel writer. It is not a normal life.
Letter from Mum: 1994
It’s not like you to go on a press trip but good
to have the company for once. Julia and I discussed the dangers of working
alone in some of the wild places you go to. We agreed that one day Chris will
just disappear and that will simply be that…
Travels with My
Hat is an OUTSTANDING BOOK. I simply could not put it down.
For me, I love history
and also geography etc. When I read this outstanding book, I found so much
more. In fact, from the very beginning of this book, that Christine and I were
sharing journeys together. Yes, I know that I could go on and on about how much
I loved reading this book…
Highly recommended:
Daisy.S Top 10 Amazon Reviewer.
