On the rocks

Last Easter, I travelled with my family to Nambucca Heads, a coastal town about half-way between Brisbane and Sydney. We stayed in a hut a few metres back from a small lagoon, on the ocean side of which was a popular walking path. On a rock wall that formed the barrier to the ocean, and the head of the Nambucca River, were painted dozens of rock-sized family portraits, many quite distinctive in the way they represented the relations between family members.

This one (left) seems traditional in its conception of family life as a perfect symmetry. Mum and Dad stand on either side of the family dog, with brothers and sisters grouped together and the family as a whole framed by the security of the red and yellow flags, in Australia the symbol of where on the beach it is safe to swim.

Other portraits suggest a different ideal of family relations, such as this one (below), which exchanges symmetry for a floating affinity: each of the family members are held by the gravity of the sea horse, which I read to be the family as an idea or genealogical point of origin.

Most, though, want also to record the years in which the family has had its annual holiday at Nambucca Heads.

It seems that Taylors of Cessnock were in 2006, on the occasion of their eighth visit, joined by the Baileys of Cessnock. As it was only April, it was too early in the year to suggest that the Taylors and the Baileys might not be coming in 2009.

The line of portraits made compelling reading, even though most gave little in the way of family biography. Their effectiveness was a reminder of the power of names and dates alone: in most cases, these two things, combined with the personal character of the painters' hands, were enough to evoke a sense of how families saw themselves and their time in Nambucca Heads. Seemingly uniting all the portraits, was the statement that families became more fully themselves when they got away for a holiday.

On a crimson sea

My three year old son, Finnur, and I spent an hour or so on this construction today. He told me that it was definitely a ship. Not a boat. The insistence might be related to his grandfather's profession as a ship's pilot and master mariner. 'I'm going to be a ship captain when I'm bigger,' Finnur tells me. 'Just like Pa.'

Great Journeys: Norman Lewis in India

Norman Lewis, like many travel writers before and since, was a novelist who also dabbled (seriously) in travel, but he will probably continue to be read because of his travel writing. Sometimes they are better, the things you do when you're not doing the thing you do.

Lewis wanted most to visit faraway places and to have experiences that were soon to be impossible, and it was this desire for the disappearing that took him to India and into his encounters with the remaining tribal communities of Orissa.

Lewis, who died in 2003, has many great qualities as writer. One is that he is able to adapt the information of his guides to suit his own prose. Many passages become blends of his own rather analytical, densely descriptive voice and the informative, experiential voices of his guides - the story about persuading cobras to stop biting is an example (p. 254: apparently, cobras love popcorn and will be appeased in this way). And Lewis also expertly acknowledges his debt to earlier travellers; look at the extended apology for Sebastian Manrique, a seventeenth-century Portuguese missionary, at the start of ch. 13. It's expert because the acknowledgment gives the book thematic depth at the same time as it places Lewis' experiences in the broader context of European travel to India.

Perhaps what remains most important, though, is the core reason for his travels, which is to find something very different from himself. And because that something is threatened, the process of understanding differences becomes an urgent one. The reader needs Lewis to work it out.

1979: One of my own less adventurous experiences in India

The book:

Lewis, Norman. A Goddess in the Stone. Picador, 1991.

See also, Evans, Julian. Semi-Invisible Man: The Life of Norman Lewis. Cape, 2008.

Are my feet in the way?

As I was sitting in front of TV setting up this blog, my wife Olanda asked if her feet were in the way? No, they weren't, but she'd given me a title for a blog about travelling and travellers, and more particularly the relationship of travelling and writing.

When I was a child, my mother and I moved around between Iceland, England, and Australia. I loved the whole business of packing up and going somewhere new, and I haven't ever shaken the desire for the sense of movement, disruption, excitement, and anticipation that came with each of these childhood relocations. I suppose there were downsides to moving around, but not enough it seems.

I now teach creative writing at a university in Brisbane, Australia, and, apart from novels, travel literature is my genre of choice. What am I reading at the moment? I've just begun a classic, The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux, father of Louis Theroux and something of a father-figure of modern, anecdotal travel writing. Bill Bryson, for example, in Notes From A Small Island, writes longingly about Theroux's apparent ability to strike up conversations. Bryson doesn't have that skill, but in some other respects the two are similar: both give us witty, personal, well-paced writing.

I'm getting ahead of myself. All I really wanted to say in this first post was that the main impulse behind this blog is reading and writing about travel; like those pursuits, I hope it reminds me to look past my own two feet.