Travels With My Hat: A Lifetime on the Road. Christine Osborne
the road and swerving to avoid it, we spun off into mud.
‘De-plane!’ ordered Captain Karlsson, clearly under stress.
Jumping out, I disturbed thousands of yellow butterflies that fluttered around us like confetti as the men began breaking off branches and packing them in front of the wheels. A family of olive baboons, attracted by the noise, climbed onto a rock and blinked curiously at the unfamiliar commotion. After some minutes scrutiny, a large dog-faced male dropped down and walked purposely towards us.
‘Get in Christine. He can rip your face open,’ yelled Karlsson.
I didn’t need to be told again and seated in the Land Rover, I realised with beating heart, that it would soon be dusk when animals come down to drink. Bugger the Gujis—my new concern was being surrounded by a herd of trumpeting elephant.
‘Okay. Start her up,’ called Fineberg, and as he and Karlsson leant against the vehicle, up popped the man with the python skin.
‘Gimme twenty dollars,’ he said once again.
‘Put your foot down,’ yelled Fineberg and as I struggled to control the spinning wheel, rocking and squelching, the vehicle roared free.
I reflected that the racket must have been audible to Gujis all over the Nechisar and perhaps also to Father Gannon seated on his verandah back in Arba Minch.
‘Gimme fifteen dollars,’ said the man and passed half that amount by Karlsson, he rolled up the note, stuck it behind his ear, and disappeared into the undergrowth.
Every six weeks, Fineberg visited Addis Ababa for supplies and on this occasion, he’d waited so I might join him on an uneventful trip when compared to our experience in the Nechisar. We passed farmers working their fields with wooden wish-bone ploughs and groups of peasants carrying loads to market. Near Sodo, an ancient town on the Omo River, we stopped for an old woman carrying a bag of charcoal. Getting out she pressed a roasted corncob into my hand that may have been her lunch.
It took us seven hours to complete the journey, and to my surprise, the first person I saw back at the Ghion was Jean-Emile, a dapper figure with a burgundy silk cravat knotted precisely at the neck of his bush jacket.
‘ ’ave you found this child?’ he asked with a wry smile.
‘Yes, and I’ve changed my plans to stop in Athens. I have exclusive photos of the Ogaden and want to get back to London.’
To Jean-Emile’s regret, I changed my ticket, but we enjoyed dinner in the hotel and afterwards took an evening stroll. With Addis Ababa under curfew, few pedestrians were about, but outside the gate, several youths beckoned to us.
‘Shouldn’t we listen to what they may have to say?’ I was astonished by the French journalist’s apparent lack of interest.
He frowned. ‘Non. They bother me all the time you are gone.’
‘Please listen. Something will happen,’ one boy pleaded.
‘It’s always going to happen in Ethiopia. Faites-les, alors,’ Jean-Emile retorted.
My flight left on schedule and touching down at Heathrow, I went straight to News Limited at Wapping and deposited my film of the drought with the picture desk.
On my way to Mrs Graham next morning, I stopped to buy the Times at the kiosk outside Sloane Square Station. My picture of the famine widows weeding maize fields in Gen was on the front page! Dodging traffic, I flicked through to an item of news: police had opened fire on students distributing anti-government literature at Bole International Airport. Several Ethiopian Airlines employees had been killed and passengers were among the injured. It was the Athens flight I had been due to take with Jean-Emile.
‘Well, Sister. Did you enjoy your holiday?’ inquired Mrs Graham when I took in her breakfast tray. ‘Oh! The egg is too soft. I told you how I like it cooked.’
In the following weeks, I sold several articles and photographs of Ethiopia and while none-too-rich, I felt confident enough to hang up my nurse’s uniform for good.
It was a start. But only a beginning. I made the rounds of London newspapers and magazines. Some took my work, most rejected it. Then Elizabeth de Stroumillo13, the travel editor of the Daily Telegraph made a suggestion that would change my life.
‘You might be known as a travel writer in Australia, but no one here gives a hoot. If you want to make a name in London, you will have to write a book,’ she told me.
MY PHOTO OF THE FAMINE WIDOWS WEEDING A FIELD AT GEN,
ON THE FRONT PAGE OF THE TIMES, 29 SEPTEMBER 1975
Chapter 2: Red Sea Adventure
I was seated in the Colony Room in Soho with Haile Selassie’s grandson who was passing a dummy cover of my book around the drinkers, a mix of actors, artists, publishers and PRs. Muriel Belcher, the butch bar-owner was pouring us whiskys. At two in the afternoon. Somewhere between then and midnight I made it home. I have no recollection of how I came to be out with Ethiopian royalty and Muriel was too acerbic to call to inquire if anyone had handed in the cover which I’d lost. She’d referred to me as ‘Missy’ but she could just as easily have called me ‘c...y’, her favourite name for drinkers of either sex in her London watering-hole that managed to be louche, yet fashionable at the same time.
The Gulf States and Oman that took me two years to write was published in 1977 by the fledgling team of Croom Helm. Filled with facts for business visitors, the book examined the remarkable changes linked to the discovery of huge oil and gas fields in the eastern states of the Arabian peninsula. Travelling up and down the Gulf, at a time when there were no tourist offices and few hotels, I had been humiliated, propositioned, frightened and led up the garden path on so many occasions, that it was a miracle I’d finished the book at all, but illustrated with my pictures, it attracted good reviews in the Australian media as well as the Gulf News, the daily paper in Bahrain. Elizabeth de Stroumillo called it a ‘riveting read’. A further review said ‘... her text is good...clear and brisk...but depth is given by her truly remarkable photographs showing a traditional people on the brink of an unimaginable future ...’
The book lent clout in the competitive world of freelance travel writing in London. I received commissions for articles on the Middle East, and the prestigious photo-agency Camera Press agreed to market my pictures. Tom Blau, the Hungarian photographer who founded Camera Press in 1947, called me into his rabbit warren office in Russell Square. It was stacked from floor to ceiling with photographs of every conceivable news-making event, those of popular film stars, rock bands and royal persons. Cecil Beaton and Lords Snowdon and Litchfield were just three of its celebrated photographers.
‘See these pictures,’ Mr Blau pushed a sheet of contacts across his desk. ‘We’ve made this American photographer £500. Your pictures might do even better.’ He gave an encouraging smile.
With the Gulf States on sale, I returned to travel journalism and in the autumn of 1977, I was invited to Egypt with a party of scribes from the London dailies. Among them were Shauna Crawford-Poole, the travel editor of the Times, Reg Grizell from the Daily Express and the historian and former war correspondent, Tom Pocock. Our program included sightseeing in Cairo, Luxor and Aswan, where staying at the Old Cataract Hotel, Agatha Christie penned her murder mystery Death on the Nile. I would not accompany the others on the return flight to London. I was to visit Hurghada on the Red Sea coast, a small fishing village, that was being groomed for package tourism and the diving facilities to be offered by a new Sheraton Hotel were of special interest to me.
The