Travels With My Hat: A Lifetime on the Road. Christine Osborne

      I’d noticed her in a waterfront restaurant in Marseilles: an elegant, older woman wearing an exotically patterned kaftan. Seated at a corner table, she was dipping bits of baguette into a steaming bowl of bouillabaisse, the traditional seafood soup in this part of Provence. Where were her friends and family? Was she a traveller, or simply an independent soul enjoying an evening out? Whatever her social situation, I decided she looked like someone who had seen the world. And me. What was I doing in the big French port? I was waiting to board the Pierre Loti, a packet steamer on Messageries Maritimes East Africa run. The Kenyan port of Mombasa was my destination at the time.

      I got to thinking about the woman again a few years later, in a café-bar in the Canary Islands. Would this be me one day? I drove my fork into a plate of arroz cubano (fried eggs and bananas served with sticky rice) and wondered how she might have spent her youth. My thoughts were interrupted when a middle-aged man sat down near my table. Cream flannels dangled at his skinny white ankles and a scarlet handkerchief peeped out of the top pocket of a yachting jacket, rather worn at the elbows. Ordering a drink, he scanned the menu and then called across to me.

      ‘Tell me, what brings a lovely young woman like yourself to the god forsaken island of La Palma?’ He spoke with an impeccable English accent.

      ‘I’m just travelling about,’ I poured myself a final glass of wine from the earthenware carafe.

      ‘Yes, but why do you travel and what is your aim? Name’s Milne.’ Christopher Robin Milne—for it was him—looked me in the eye.

      ‘Forgive me if I appear rude,’ I said. ‘But along with being asked my age (I was twenty-six), I dislike being quizzed about travel. However, if you must know, I’m waiting to catch a banana boat to the Caribbean.’

      ‘Travel,’ Milne pronounced it gravely, ‘is a form of neurosis.’

      ‘For you perhaps,’ I called for my bill. ‘But to me, no other experience compares. Especially slow travel and that frisson of setting out to discover something new, only to find that while you were making the trip, the trip was making you.’

      Milne looked surprised at this explanation and feeling rather pleased with myself, I stepped out onto the storm-lashed waterfront of Santa Cruz de La Palma, the last port of call for many a boat embarking on a trans-Atlantic voyage.

      My thoughts have occasionally returned to this brief encounter. Why do certain individuals refuse to remain hostage to their birthplace and only appear to be happy when on the move? The Scottish writer William Dalrymple suggests that travellers by nature, tend to be rebels and outcasts, and that setting out alone and vulnerable on the road is often a rejection of home. In my own case, it was not a rejection of home, but a ‘walkabout’ in search of the world, since I knew from childhood that a domestic life anchored at the end of the earth in Australia was not for me.

      Apart from a conviction in the human need for adventure, I could not contemplate an existence rendered simple by a deadening routine. Catching the same train each morning with the same announcement—Mind the step. Doors closing. Seeing the same pale faces in the office, drinking the same weak coffee from the same clapped-out machine. Sandwich at one. Leave at five. Mind the step. Doors closing. Standing room only. Alone travel replaces the monotony of daily grind.

      Few activities generate as much excitement as setting off somewhere foreign, where different landscapes, interesting people, and colourful customs await. Every night after saying my prayers, I would fall asleep to dream of destinations in books signed out by Miss Myrtle, the frizzy-haired librarian who never smiled.

      I wanted to visit Burma after reading Ethel Mannin’s Land of the Crested Lion¹ and the Greek islands, immortalised by Charmian Clift in Mermaid Singing². I wanted to stand on the spot where Speke discovered the source of the Nile and to follow Freya Stark, to Damascus and Baghdad. I wanted to dance the tango in Buenos Aires and to meet glamorous characters from The Arabian Nights: sultans, sheikhs and odalisques in harem trousers serving tiny glasses of mint-flavoured tea. And while I loved mum’s roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, I longed to try dishes such as fesanjan, a duck and pomegranate dish from Persia, and the aromatic tajine stews of Berber kitchens in Morocco.

      I grew up in Temora, an old goldmining town in the Riverina area of New South Wales, where my father managed the Bank of New South Wales as it was then known. The main street ended in arid plains with scattered eucalypts and a sprinkling of sheep and wheat stations. Beyond was the great Outback, ending on the west Australian coast, 3,218 kilometres (2,000 miles) away. On weekends I used to cycle down past the newsagent and the Greek café, to where the asphalt ended and the dirt road began. Further on, it dipped into a shallow gully where I would sit by a creek and fish for yabbies³ as flocks of green-and-yellow budgerigars wheeled overhead. To go yabbying, you only needed a lump of raw meat dangled from the end of a stick by a string. The yabbies would grab it with a claw and you could drag them ashore, often two or three hanging on at a time. But we didn’t eat them. In the 1950s, along with rabbits, the small crustaceans were considered vermin, so the pleasure lay in simply catching them and throwing them back.

      I