Travels With My Hat: A Lifetime on the Road. Christine Osborne
we discussed what we would do in later life. Janice planned to become a teacher. Pam, the Presbyterian minister’s daughter, hoped to train as a hairdresser and the boys all wanted to be rugby league footballers. How they laughed when I announced I was going to see the world. See the world? They found it so hilarious that I never mentioned it again.
On leaving school, I went to Sydney to train as a nurse, only to discover that my calling did not aspire to wearing a starched uniform— the collar used to cut my neck—and to turning my three-piece horsehair mattress daily in Vindin House, the nurses’ home. But gritting my teeth, I persevered and after four years study and graduation, I walked out the iron gates of Royal North Shore Hospital with a vow to travel a year for each year I had spent emptying bedpans. The four years became five and by 1968, I had sailed around the world and had flown across it, still unsure of my direction, until one evening, in the south of France, a Spanish gypsy woman took my hand and read my fortune.
ME (CENTRE) AND RUTH, ROYAL NORTH SHORE HOSPITAL GRADUATES, 1963
‘Usted se convertira en un escritor de viajes,’ she said. And it had dawned: to be a travel writer was my passport to visit foreign lands.
Golden earrings flashing in the candlelight, she stood up in the café and sang a lament to a solitary guitar. I never knew her name, but the craggy-faced guitarist was Manitas de Plata—‘Silver Fingers’—who rose to fame in the 1960s, even playing at a Royal Variety performance in London, my eventual home.
That night in Les Saintes Maries de la Mer, I dreamt of the white horses and black bulls that still roam the Camargue and of the annual festival when gypsies from all over Europe come to venerate their patron saint, Sarah le Noir whose statue stands in the church. And next morning, ears still ringing with the flamenco, I wrote a story about the festival which was published in the Sydney Morning Herald.
It was an auspicious start. The newspaper accepted a second article on Djerba, the Mediterranean island of Ulysses and the lotus-eaters, a third on Djibouti which I’d visited on the Pierre Loti and a fourth on Spain, and unwilling to surrender myself to a sedentary life, I kept on travelling, writing and taking photographs. It was not going to make my fortune, but I never looked back, only forward to the next adventure and interesting encounters with people from all walks of life.
Although I have lived in London for thirty-five years, I am still awestruck by the sight of the Tower of London, built by William the Conqueror and Westminster Abbey, constructed five hundred years before Captain Cook discovered Australia. Dirty and overcrowded London may be, but it is an ideal base to travel from one country to another, and my flat near the river Thames is filled with artefacts collected in foreign lands.
In my living room, an African voodoo mask hangs next to a patchwork quilt from Samarkand. A Chinese coffee-table holds a spice box containing fourth century Kushan coins from Gilgit in northern Pakistan, Minaean pottery shards from Baraqish in the Yemen and a speckled egg from Bird Island in the Seychelles. Beside it stand Ashanti fertility dolls from Ghana and a camel skull found in the Wahiba Sands of Oman. A wooden snake, carved by political prisoners in Ethiopia, coils around the staircase; a red rocking horse made in Mumbai has a place in the hall and on the sideboard is a basket from the Banaue rice-terraces in the Philippines containing my collection of ‘world seeds’. There are kapok pods from Indonesia, a huge kernel dropped by the Kigelia africana ‘sausage tree’ in Zambia, ylang-ylang flowers picked on Grande Comore in the Indian Ocean, Zanzibar cloves, palm nuts from Malaysia, tamarind from Thailand, pine cones from the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. There is even a coconut from Tetiaroa, the late Marlon Brando’s island hideaway off Tahiti.
This basket holds a lifetime of travels. Now friends on both sides of the world have encouraged me to share some of the adventures as a freelance photojournalist. Although the thread may zig-zag a little and double-back to events remembered from one place or another, the tales are basically in chronological order and as the last word is written, I cannot help but wonder what will be the next destination on my ticket.
ABOUT TO BOARD THE PIERRE LOTI IN MARSEILLES, AUGUST 1965
Chapter 1: Ticket to Addis Ababa
Mother was a great armchair traveller. Seated on the verandah of our eventual home on Lake Macquarie, she would glance up from reading and say, ‘I don’t need to see the world: the world comes to me through my letterbox.’ A Yorkshire doctor, her grandfather had sailed to Australia in 1841 as Surgeon Superintendent on the 406 tonne barque Georgiana. Settling in the Hunter Valley district of New South Wales, he had sired three daughters and six sons; four of the boys he sent back to the ‘old country’ to study medicine.
A gracious lady more suited to croquet and church fetes, mother should really have been born in the green environment of England, not the sunburnt plains Down Under. I once found a scrap of paper in her recipe book advising of First Aid treatment in the event of a funnel-web spider bite. It explained her anguish every time she did a spot of gardening.
On sifting through the hundreds of letters I wrote home during more than forty years of travels, I can appreciate why she never wished to go further than the High Street where she shopped at the butcher, Mr Burns, and collected her daily copy of the Herald from Cooper’s corner store. Some of my letters in envelopes post-marked from places such as Sana’a and Freetown, even frighten me today. Did I really have such adventures? There was never anything gentle, like an appreciation of the Florentine masters in the Uffizi Gallery, or a description of Royal Kew Gardens in spring. Yes, I religiously visited Rome, Paris and Amsterdam, but my real interests lay east of Suez.
‘I wish you would grow a little more cultivated,’ she used to say, enrolling me at Wenona Ladies College whose boarders were brought up as though they were daughters of an English country estate, wearing black velvet dresses for dinner and once a week, speaking only in French. But deprived of culture in 1940s Australia, mother yearned for something a little highbrow. When I was nine, she took my younger sister Julia and me to a performance of Swan Lake in the Mosman Town Hall. The ballet was a momentous event for Sydney, but when she asked what I thought of it, I’d replied: ‘you could see the men’s bottoms’.
Poor mum certainly tried while I lived in Australia, but she gave up when I sailed away, only to appear on flying visits ever after. However, she was an excellent correspondent herself. At the poste restante in places such as Rawalpindi or Khartoum, I used to wait patiently for the clerk to sort through correspondence from the pigeon-hole under the letter O. I could spot the thin, blue aerogramme long before he did and snatching it up, I would repair to the nearest café to devour her news. Of how the seeds I’d sent out from the Seychelles had grown into a tree, and of feeding bits of chicken to the blue-tongue lizard living under the house. In Dubai, I once miraculously received an envelope in her neat handwriting, addressed simply: Christine Osborne c/- Hotel InterContinental, Trucial States.
Finding myself short of funds in London in July 1975, I reluctantly put on the dreaded nurse’s uniform again and began a day job caring for a bedridden lady living in Chelsea. Mrs Graham’s three-storey Victorian terrace was a short walk from my small rented flat off Sloane Square. My brief was to prepare her breakfast and to tidy her bedroom, and when this was finished, I used to sit on a bathroom chair writing articles about my travels.
After five weeks on the case, I returned home to find a letter in my box. Ethiopian Airlines, one of many companies I’d contacted since coming to England, was organising a press trip to Addis Ababa. The invitation was to mark the first anniversary of the overthrow of His Majesty Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, whose imperial government had been replaced in 1974 by a Revolutionary Military Council known as the Dergue.
‘Addis Ababa,’ said Mrs Graham, sharply cracking the top of her egg,