Contemporary Australian writers and Europe

Abstract

It is amazing to see just how much travel writing, writing which does not exclusively belong to the travel sub-genre of "creative non-fiction", and also how many non-Australian locales, with emphasis on European and Asian ones, there are in the recent contemporary Australian writing since the 1960s. This perhaps 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", itself 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 an individual "national" experience of the country of destination that a literary traveller puts into words, an experience which is typical and conditioned by specific socio-political and cultural circumstances.