Travels With My Hat: A Lifetime on the Road

Christine Osborne

Description

Travels with My Hat is the story of how an Australian nurse switched careers to become an award-winning international travel writer and photographer. It is a colourful record of her experiences defined by travel and frequently against all odds. "We don't know who you are," she was told on arrival in London in 1974. "To get a name here, you need to write a book," which is precisely what she did, choosing as subject, the developing Arab oil states of the western Gulf. Publication of The Gulf States & Oman in 1977 brought commissions on the Middle East. Books followed on Jordan and Pakistan. In 1979 she was accredited to the Buckingham Palace press corps to cover Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth's historic tour of Arabia. The title refers to a famous piece of millinery which was on the road for decade. Her Majesty Queen Elisabeth II, disoriented in the great souq in Nizwa in the Sultanate of Oman, said: "I was looking everywhere for your blue hat."

Christine Osborne has visited 35 different Muslim countries, usually treated with great respect and kindness. But of her experiences in the secretive mountain republic of Yemen near the Red Sea she says, "I've occasionally wished I were a boy. Not for the penis per se but for the freedom it allows a man." In 1981 Christine Osborne travelled to Iraq, invited to Baghdad by the Ba'athist regime of Saddam Hussein. Christine's adventures in Iraq, Ethiopia, Egypt, Pakistan, Morocco and other exotic places, are rounded off with letters to her mother, who never left Australia.

Sujets

• Special Interest
• Travel
• Adventure

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 17 février 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781456620455
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 15 Mo

Extrait

TRAVELS WITH MY HAT
 
 
Christine Osborne
 
 
photographs by the author

 
 
Travels with My Hat (pbk) ISBN 978-09923240001
First published by Christine Osborne Pictures, 2013.
© copyright Christine Osborne.
All Rights Reserved
 
Published in eBook format by A Sense of Place Publishing, 2014
ISBN 978-1-4566-2045-5
 
This book has its origins in copious notes and journals from many years ago and certain items stated as facts may no longer be applicable. The names of some persons have been changed to protect their privacy.
 
Cover photograph of the author taken in Zambia, 1994.
Back cover: Migrant worker returning home Dubai-Sharjah border, 1975.
Photograph of the old city of Sana’a by Julian Worker.
 
All other photographs copyright of Christine Osborne.
Foreword

 
It was at an American Independence Day party in 1976 that I first met the author and significantly, the word independence, is one of the major clues to the nature of this expatriate Australian.
Fiercely independent and single-minded, she has photographed and written books about countries as diverse as Tahiti and Oman. I occasionally met up with her and witnessed the mix of guts and perseverance, interspersed with the odd tear of frustration, and a hint of the memsahib that seemed to overcome all obstacles. Once, on point of arrest for some minor infringement over photography, with an authoritarian Pakistani army officer, she suggested they have tea first which they both drank, exchanged pleasantries, and Osborne was allowed to go on her way.
Her fondness of small creatures—birds and fish—often manifested itself. A sock was used as a nest to nurture chickens found in a rubbish heap in Beirut. Tiny fish caught in a mountain stream in the Yemen, were carried home in a jam jar to survive for seven years in her fish tank, along with other exotics in her London flat.
A girl’s own adventure story, Travels with My Hat will put a spring in the step of anyone seeking excitement. It is Christine Osborne’s unique life, from scrubbing bedpans as a young nurse in Sydney, to becoming not only a successful travel writer, but a top flight photographer who would accompany Her Majesty the Queen on her riches-laden tour of Arabia.
 
AILEEN AITKEN
Introduction

 
I’d noticed her in a waterfront restaurant in Marseilles: an elegant, older woman wearing an exotically patterned kaftan. Seated at a corner table, she was dipping bits of baguette into a steaming bowl of bouillabaisse, the traditional seafood soup in this part of Provence. Where were her friends and family? Was she a traveller, or simply an independent soul enjoying an evening out? Whatever her social situation, I decided she looked like someone who had seen the world. And me. What was I doing in the big French port? I was waiting to board the Pierre Loti, a packet steamer on Messageries Maritimes East Africa run. The Kenyan port of Mombasa was my destination at the time.
I got to thinking about the woman again a few years later, in a café-bar in the Canary Islands. Would this be me one day? I drove my fork into a plate of arroz cubano (fried eggs and bananas served with sticky rice) and wondered how she might have spent her youth. My thoughts were interrupted when a middle-aged man sat down near my table. Cream flannels dangled at his skinny white ankles and a scarlet handkerchief peeped out of the top pocket of a yachting jacket, rather worn at the elbows. Ordering a drink, he scanned the menu and then called across to me.
‘Tell me, what brings a lovely young woman like yourself to the god forsaken island of La Palma?’ He spoke with an impeccable English accent.
‘I’m just travelling about,’ I poured myself a final glass of wine from the earthenware carafe.
‘Yes, but why do you travel and what is your aim? Name’s Milne.’ Christopher Robin Milne—for it was him—looked me in the eye.
‘Forgive me if I appear rude,’ I said. ‘But along with being asked my age (I was twenty-six), I dislike being quizzed about travel. However, if you must know, I’m waiting to catch a banana boat to the Caribbean.’
‘Travel,’ Milne pronounced it gravely, ‘is a form of neurosis.’
‘For you perhaps,’ I called for my bill. ‘But to me, no other experience compares. Especially slow travel and that frisson of setting out to discover something new, only to find that while you were making the trip, the trip was making you.’
Milne looked surprised at this explanation and feeling rather pleased with myself, I stepped out onto the storm-lashed waterfront of Santa Cruz de La Palma, the last port of call for many a boat embarking on a trans-Atlantic voyage.
My thoughts have occasionally returned to this brief encounter. Why do certain individuals refuse to remain hostage to their birthplace and only appear to be happy when on the move? The Scottish writer William Dalrymple suggests that travellers by nature, tend to be rebels and outcasts, and that setting out alone and vulnerable on the road is often a rejection of home. In my own case, it was not a rejection of home, but a ‘walkabout’ in search of the world, since I knew from childhood that a domestic life anchored at the end of the earth in Australia was not for me.
Apart from a conviction in the human need for adventure, I could not contemplate an existence rendered simple by a deadening routine. Catching the same train each morning with the same announcement— Mind the step . Doors closing . Seeing the same pale faces in the office, drinking the same weak coffee from the same clapped-out machine. Sandwich at one. Leave at five. Mind the step . Doors closing . Standing room only. Alone travel replaces the monotony of daily grind.
Few activities generate as much excitement as setting off somewhere foreign, where different landscapes, interesting people, and colourful customs await. Every night after saying my prayers, I would fall asleep to dream of destinations in books signed out by Miss Myrtle, the frizzy-haired librarian who never smiled.
I wanted to visit Burma after reading Ethel Mannin’s Land of the Crested Lion 1 and the Greek islands, immortalised by Charmian Clift in Mermaid Singing 2 . I wanted to stand on the spot where Speke discovered the source of the Nile and to follow Freya Stark, to Damascus and Baghdad. I wanted to dance the tango in Buenos Aires and to meet glamorous characters from The Arabian Nights : sultans, sheikhs and odalisques in harem trousers serving tiny glasses of mint-flavoured tea. And while I loved mum’s roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, I longed to try dishes such as fesanjan, a duck and pomegranate dish from Persia, and the aromatic tajine stews of Berber kitchens in Morocco.
I grew up in Temora, an old goldmining town in the Riverina area of New South Wales, where my father managed the Bank of New South Wales as it was then known. The main street ended in arid plains with scattered eucalypts and a sprinkling of sheep and wheat stations. Beyond was the great Outback, ending on the west Australian coast, 3,218 kilometres (2,000 miles) away. On weekends I used to cycle down past the newsagent and the Greek café, to where the asphalt ended and the dirt road began. Further on, it dipped into a shallow gully where I would sit by a creek and fish for yabbies 3 as flocks of green-and-yellow budgerigars wheeled overhead. To go yabbying, you only needed a lump of raw meat dangled from the end of a stick by a string. The yabbies would grab it with a claw and you could drag them ashore, often two or three hanging on at a time. But we didn’t eat them. In the 1950s, along with rabbits, the small crustaceans were considered vermin, so the pleasure lay in simply catching them and throwing them back.
I remember the day at Temora High School when we discussed what we would do in later life. Janice planned to become a teacher. Pam, the Presbyterian minister’s daughter, hoped to train as a hairdresser and the boys all wanted to be rugby league footballers. How they laughed when I announced I was going to see the world. See the world? They found it so hilarious that I never mentioned it again.
On leaving school, I went to Sydney to train as a nurse, only to discover that my calling did not aspire to wearing a starched uniform— the collar used to cut my neck—and to turning my three-piece horsehair mattress daily in Vindin House, the nurses’ home. But gritting my teeth, I persevered and after four years study and graduation, I walked out the iron gates of Royal North Shore Hospital with a vow to travel a year for each year I had spent emptying bedpans. The four years became five and by 1968, I had sailed around the world and had flown across it, still unsure of my direction, until one evening, in the south of France, a Spanish gypsy woman took my hand and read my fortune.
 

ME (CENTRE) AND RUTH, ROYAL NORTH SHORE HOSPITAL GRADUATES, 1963
 
‘ Usted se convertira en un escritor de viajes, ’ she said. And it had dawned: to be a travel writer was my passport to visit foreign lands.
Golden earrings flashing in the candlelight, she stood up in the café and sang a lament to a solitary guitar. I never knew her name, but the craggy-faced guitarist was Manitas de Plata—‘Silver Fingers’—who rose to fame in the 1960s, even playing at a Royal Variety performance in London, my eventual home.
That night in Les Saintes Maries de la Mer, I dreamt of the white horses and black bulls that still roam the Camargue and of the annual festival when gypsies from all over Europe come to venerate their patron saint, Sarah le Noir whose statue stands in the church. And next morning, ears still ringing with the flamenco, I wrote a story about the festival which was published in the Sydney Morning Herald.
It was an auspicious start. The newspaper accepted a second article on Djerba, the Mediterranean island of Ulysses and the lotus-eaters, a third on Djibouti which I’d visited on the Pierre Loti and a fourth on Spain, and unwilling to surrender myself