Travel Writing

The migration process makes you adept, Kim Cheng Boey remarks, in coded language. The first poem he wrote after settling in Sydney recalls an exhibition in the Queen Victoria Building about the Chinese tea entrepreneur Mei Quong Tart, whose clan name is the same as the Boey family’s. His daughter, pointing with her small finger, decodes the character mei, meaning ‘nothing’, a negative prefix that also signifies bad luck.

Jeremy Mynott begins his capacious and disarming new book with a dedication to his wife, the author Dianne Speakman. ‘In all our twenty-five or so years together,’ he writes, ‘I have never yet succeeded in persuading her to take the slightest interest in birds. This is my best and last shot.’ Any ornithophile knows this feeling: the regret that his sense of wonderment remains for the most part private, something that others regard as slightly weird or ridiculous.

Strange Museums is a strange book, a kind of fugue whose first theme is introduced by the poem ‘Tortures’ by Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska. It is a lament of evasion, uncertainty, the reservoir of pain that is the body and the inability to escape. It is enlarged da capo with the author’s discovery of a plaque commemorating the day in 1942 when Jews were rounded up and shot in the town of Piatrk w Trybunalski.

It is the tale of a most unusual journey made through Poland by performance artist and writer Fiona McGregor from May to July 2006. With A A Wojak, her performance partner and former lover, the journey is focused around an international action art festival where the two women, as senVoodoo, perform their confronting work, Arterial. It involves fear and shock, with the pain and risk endured by the artists calculated to take them to the edge. Even in description, Arterial draws a gasp.

Roads are not places, but ways to and away from them, perhaps in fearful flight or in buoyant expectation. Travelling them can engender boredom (‘Are we there yet?’) and horror (‘Will we ever get there, alive?’). Roads are means of reaching those fabled and amorphous Australian locations – the city, the bush, the beach. Each of these has attracted anthologies (some from Penguin). Delia Falconer’s task, as editor of The Penguin Book of the Road, is less straightforward, being concerned with how we travel rather than where we arrive, with highways but also with indirect, crooked ways. In a masterly and challenging introduction, she warns us of what to expect.

Before you settle into this ‘random history of the twenty-first century’, grab an atlas: Andrew Mueller is one well-travelled hack. A fatalist philatelist, he has spent most of his career collecting the types of stamps that adorn passports, not envelopes. In I Wouldn’t Start from Here, Mueller reports on and from some of the most exotic sites of international strife imaginable: Jerusalem, Baghdad, Gaza, Kabul. There are also trips to places of lesser renown, aspirational statelets and breakaway provinces in countries as far-flung as Georgia (Abkhazia). All of which, as his publishers congratulate him in their press release, is ‘[n]ot bad for a guy who originally hails from Wagga Wagga’.

So here we are. A house in Dosson, a village ‘almost joined to’ Treviso, which in turn is not far at all from Venice. A casa aperta, an open house, one to which friends and colleagues of the owner, a well-regarded musician, are drawn, not only by their confidence that a simple permesso will ensure welcome but because the owner ‘believes implicitly in the civilising effects of hospitality’. The maestro wants his friend to write a book. It will be about ‘music and art and culture and my friends and food and where I live’. He loves to cook and obliges the appointed scribe with a list of kitchen accoutrements, which will cover all occasions. It is admirably short and begins with ‘3 pots (one big one for 10 people, one medium one for 6, one little one for 2)’. Thoreau’s central explanation of his furniture comes to mind as a rejoinder to a casa affollata: ‘I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.’ The book will include recipes, the writer decides, and it does. She tells the reader, ‘Maybe the book will get sorted out, maybe not.’

Whether it’s fate or mere coincidence, the life stories of the two most celebrated writers of the Pacific – Robert Louis Stevenson and Albert Wendt – dovetail together on the small tropical island of Upolu in Western Samoa. In 1889, when Stevenson concluded his third Pacific cruise on the Janet Nichol, he told his readers in Europe and America that: ‘Few men who come to the islands leave them; they grow grey where they alighted; the palm trees and trade-wind fan them till they die.’ In hindsight, this reads as a premonition, but, after years of ill-health Stevenson was seduced and invigorated by sweet air and unexpected interests, describing his time during the Pacific voyages as ‘passing like days in fairyland’.