Saturday 10 September 2011

Preview: for publication in 2012
















Travels with My Hat is the memoir of an Australian nurse who through skill and determination, switched careers to become an award-winning travel writer and photographer. It is a colourful record of her experiences defined by travel, undertaken on her own initiative, often without official help, and frequently against all odds. “We don’t know who you are,” she was told by the travel editor of the Daily Telegraph on arriving in London in 1974. “To get a name here, you need to write a book.” Which is exactly what she did. Publication of The Gulf States and Oman in 1977 brought a deluge of commissions on the Middle East. Books followed on Jordan and Pakistan. Christine was invited to visit Iraq by the Ba’athist regime of Saddam Hussein. Since visas were not issued to British journalists, she returned home and obtained clearance from the Iraqi Vice-Consul in – of all places –Bondi! Her journeys to Iraq, Ethiopia, Egypt, Yemen, Pakistan and Morocco are rounded off with letters to her mother who had never left Australia. We join Christine avoiding bandits in Yemen, diving in the Red Sea, and dining with Arab sheikhs in a racy account of forty years of travels when only one of a thousand and one problems, was being a young, western woman working in a man’s world. I have occasionally wished I were a boy, she writes in a chapter on Yemen. Not for the penis per se, but for the freedom it allows a man, since reality for a woman traveller is that her sex presents constraints…

Photos by Christine Osborne
www.copix.co.uk

http://travelswithmyhat.com


Experience, travel and

12 comments:

  1. Great pix, good luck-

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  2. Have just read your introduction on you life, facinating account! What an amazing figure
    you presented in those early days,how brave you were I will always be so proud of you as your Mother was !

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  3. Thank you for yr how kind words. Wish I still presented such an "amazing figure" !!

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  4. Who is soldier on left: is it Menghistu. The bastard!

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  5. Wonderful! So looking forward to the book!
    x
    Rose

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  6. Who would of known way back in the early seventies what an amazing adventure of "life" would stretch ahead of you and how you managed to achieve so much as a single woman.
    Looking forward to seeing you again in the Autumn and get the rest of the bloody book finished!!

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  7. Well having read the introductory page I cant wait for the finished book. I am on the edge of my seat in anticipation.Love the photographs

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  8. Thanks for dropping by Margaret. I have one chapter left to write - woohoo!

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  9. The Entree is wonderful, can hardly wait to enjoy the whole meal. A long way since a shy, young girl came into see me at Diners!!.

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  10. Ho! You gave me my first commissions --stories which went on to win the PATA award/s. I owe you a great deal. Thanks.

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  11. In fact I believe there are instances where a woman has an advantage over a male photographer.
    Though not saying yr pix are not good.

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