Between Europe and Australia Literary Walkabouts: Contemporary Australian Writers on Their European Experiences

It is amazing to see just how much travel writing, writmg which does not exclusively belong to this sub-genre of "creative non-fiction", and also how many non-Australian settings with emphasis on European and Asian ones there are in recent contemporary writing. This fact certainly speaks about a certain preoccupation or downright trait in the Australian national character. Perhaps, it is a reflection of a particular condition of being down under, derived from "a tradition of colonialism and post-colonialism; from geographical location, both a deterrent and a spur; from post-Romantic literary tradition, coinciding with the early years of white settlement; and from the universal lure of ideas of travel, never more flourishing than at the present " (Hergenhan, Petersson xiii). Tourism is an increasingly global phenomenon to some extent shaping the physical reality as well as the spiritual world of the people involved in it. Within this globalization process, with the prospect of "cyber " travel, there is, however, always a particular "national " experience of the country of destination that a traveller has and puts into words, experience which is typical and conditioned by specific socio-political and cultural circumstances of development. Some travellers, and one must distinguish between travellers and tourists, the latter of whom are generally more passively acquiescent about the target country and its culture, are fascinated by the development of jet travel, which enables to cross "in a few hours the same distance that cost Marco Polo years of his life " (James 48) and, perhaps, did away with "the tyranny of distance". Others again find that "air travel and the mass movemen