went to spend a year in the incomparable town of Alice Springs learning how to handle camels before setting out with a dog and two camels (one of which was pregnant) on an astonishing trek across 1700 miles of Australian scrubland. Her stay in Alice Springs was a baptism by alcoholism and sexism, and at times was nothing less than sheer misery, but the experience provided her with the protective armour she needed in order to make the journey.
A university girl, she had been accused of being a bourgeois individualist – an insult too terrible to contemplate. ‘For one who associated herself for years with the Left, it was the political equivalent of having VD.’ Soon however, the pressing need to organize her trek pushed any such self-centred concerns to the back of her mind. She learned how to scout in the desert, how to saddle a camel and, when one of them became ill, how to inject it with massive doses of antibiotics. More important for her own survival, she learned how to supplement her diet with witchetty grubs. She wasn’t altogether sure what she was doing in the middle of this vast nowhere. Perhaps she was expiating a collective guilt? The misery caused by her mother’s death had affected her whole family and at times she felt that all the stupid, meaningless pain our family had suffered might somehow be symbolically absolved, laid to rest through this gesture of mine’.
Robyn Davidson was twenty-seven when she made her solitary and memorable journey across Australia. She has blond hair and a determined smile and though there is a gentleness in her eyes there is also the self-knowledge she gained during her own remarkable pilgrimage. ‘You are as powerful,’ she wrote when she reached the Indian Ocean and the end of her journey, ‘and as strong as you allow yourself to be.’
Lucy Irvine was strong too, but despite that she nearly succumbed to poisoning on three occasions while spending a year as a castaway on the island of Tuin, which lies between the north coast of Australia and Papua New Guinea. She was a 24-year-old tax clerk when she saw a newspaper notice advertising for a wife to live on a desert island for a year. Gerald Kingsland, who had placed the ad, liked what he saw – her ‘bubbling, bucaneering spirit … her delicate wrists … unwavering eyes – and long, shapely legs’.
On her twenty-fifth birthday they made love. A month later, for his fifty-first birthday, she took him to the Royal Festival Hall and the following month they married. It was a marriage merely of convenience. The Australian immigration authorities would feel happier, they said, about allowing a couple to live together on a deserted island if they were married.
‘I’m not in love with you,’ Lucy told him, ‘but I feel very closely attached to you and who knows what the year will bring?’
How could they have guessed what it would be like? They’d brought only the minimum of food with them – two hundred tea bags, a packet of spaghetti, two kilos of dried beans, a bottle of cooking oil and a few other bits and pieces. It would be enough to keep going until they could grow some things of their own. They drank the milk from the large green coconuts that hung overhead and caught and cooked their own shark. It was an idyll that wasn’t to last. Three times Lucy became violently ill from eating wild berries. They ran dangerously short of water and Gerald’s extra years began to tell on him. He developed a gangrenous ulcer and they both lost weight Their affection for each other degenerated into a strained uneasiness and it wasn’t until their year was ending that they managed to recapture their earlier feelings. At the end of the year, however, she left both the island and Gerald just as she had always planned to do, marriage or not.
‘“I know you’ve got to go,” he said. “Christ, you’re only twenty-six, you’ve got your whole life ahead of you.” … And with that he pulled me closer and our faces bumped together in a brief kiss.’ The year was over.
There have been other women propelled by the same curious combination of determination and vulnerability – a blind woman sets out to climb Kala Patthar, 500 feet above Everest base camp, a grandmother cycles solo across America and Eve Jackson, a young Englishwoman, plans to fly solo in 1986 from England to Australia in a frail microlight aircraft. The list lengthens each year, but spread across the world as they are, spanning the years from youth to old age, these women appear linked by nothing more than their sex and the common experience of travelling. Surprisingly, the link that initially might appear to be a vital one – that of feminism – is rarely to be found.
It may be thought that because a woman attempts to achieve something in what has hitherto been considered a male area she is doing so with the primary intention of making a statement about women. It is abundantly clear, however, that in the case of most women travellers, this is not so. It is true, certainly, that some of them have consciously and deliberately laid their motivations and success on the altar of their womanhood. Others, in the course of travelling, have taken on the mantle of their sisters, as their physical journey has evolved into one also of the soul. But to describe all women travellers as feminists would be to take away from them that very quality which makes each one unique – their individuality.
Put them in a room together, and there is no guarantee that harmony will prevail. In the 1880s, when Marianne North and Constance Gordon Cumming accepted an invitation to meet Isabella Bird Bishop, their lion-hunting London hostess was overjoyed. ‘Three globe-trotteresses,’ she trilled, unwisely. The two were not especially amused. Isabella was decked out in gold-embroidered slippers, a silver and gold petticoat from Japan and was sporting a favour presented to her by the King of the Sandwich Islands. ‘We withdrew,’ said Miss North, somewhat loftily, ‘leaving Miss Bird unruffled and equal to the occasion.’
Miss Gordon Cumming, in fact, was not unlike the unruffled Isabella. Born into a wealthy Scottish family – her home was at Gordonstoun – she got her first glimpse of the outside world at the age of thirty-one when she received an invitation from her sister to visit her in India. Visit! She was amazed at the idea and almost turned it down since no one, she felt, went to India unless they had to. Yet on arrival, she was immediately captivated by its mystery and sense of history and especially by the similarities between Hindu and Celtic customs. After a two-year stay, she returned to England and wrote an ecstatic two-volume account of what she saw. A few years later, she received an invitation from the Bishop of Colombo to visit him in Ceylon and her reputation as a traveller began to grow. As soon as she got back home to England, people started asking her where next, to which she replied: ‘Fiji, because that was the most absolutely improbable idea that could suggest itself.’ But improbable or not, she went, and then on to Japan, Tahiti and San Francisco. Mistress of the throwaway line, her books – she wrote one about each journey – are littered with tantalizing phrases such as ‘our acquaintance with camels had hitherto been limited to the Arabian dromedary …’ An inquisitive, studious lady, she observed misery and poverty with compassion but from a distance and, in common with many travellers, she was not always around when her publishers needed her. In a foreword to one of her books, there is an apology for some inadequacy or other, explained by the telling phrase: ‘In the absence of the author, who sailed unexpectedly for Fiji …’ The proofs, on this occasion, were read by none other than the unruffled Miss Bird.
It is perhaps surprising that the paths of the travelling sisterhood did not cross more often, though had Fanny Workman met up with her contemporary, Gertrude Bell, the political sparks might well have turned into a conflagration. At the very time that Fanny was conducting a series of major climbing expeditions in the Karakorams, resolutely advertising the cause of women’s suffrage, Gertrude was helping to found, in England, the Anti-Suffrage League.
Both these women were products of their respective worlds, moulded and influenced by the whims, attitudes, needs and prejudices of those around them. Certain women have set out on their journeys happy not only to take the attitudes of society with them but also to impose them on those they have encountered along the way, whom they perceived to be in some way in need of improvement Others have found such values false and insufficient, and have felt compelled to go in search of qualities which they feel are lacking in the world they leave behind.
Whatever their needs and motivations have been, travelling has over the centuries offered to women a means both of discovering and expressing their own individuality, for the change in their needs has been one only of degree. Women, said a seventeenth-century writer, should stay at home and attend to their duties, which he kindly characterized as ‘subjection,