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Writing the Journey: June 1999

"Women, travel, colonial and national identity, c.1880 -- c.1930"


Ros Pesman
University of Sydney
rpesman@mail.usyd.edu.au

Travel to other places provides sites to play with identity, to try out new identities, to adopt new personae. It also foregrounds national identity as the most obvious means for self categorisation and inscription by others. This paper will consider some of the reflections in the writing of Australian women travelers and expatriates on their national identity, reflections rendered denser in the nineteenth century by Australia's colonial position. Australians constructed the world not as 'us' and 'foreign' but as 'us', 'Britain', the home that was not home, the foreign that was not foreign, and the 'foreign'. As one woman traveler wrote on her arrival in France from Britain:

...from the first, I felt more at ease on the Continent, despite the language barrier, than I had been or ever was to be in England. That was, I suppose, largely because our status on the Continent was not anomalous: we were foreigners pure and simple. In England, we were not exactly foreigners but decidedly we were not English either but colonials, people of an inferior race...

Consideration will also be given to the intersections of gender and national identity and to national identity as something which is malleable and flexible, something which may be taken up, discarded, changed, which may be patriotic, instrumental, chosen or ascribed. The paper will also take up the issue of the extent to which women were, or felt that they were, excluded from national myths and turned to the forging of international and cosmopolitan identities.


Ros Pesman
Professor of History,
Chair of the Academic Board,
University of Sydney,
Australia
rpesman@mail.usyd.edu.au

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Updated May 23, 1999