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. 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.’
Travels with My Hat Description:
Travels with My Hat: A Lifetime on the Road by Christine Osborne tells the unlikely story of how a young woman growing up in a small Australian country town surrounded by wheat and sheep farms was laughed at by her classmates when, in the 1950s, she declared she wanted to see the world. But in the decades to follow that’s exactly what she did, becoming an award winning photographer and writer working alone in some of the most offbeat places on Earth.
In 1979 she was accredited to the Buckingham Palace press corps to cover Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth’s historic tour of Arabia. Her Majesty Queen Elisabeth II, disoriented in the great souq in Nizwa in the Sultanate of Oman, said: “I was looking everywhere for your blue hat.” The title Travels with My Hat refers to this piece of millinery.
Running through the book is a contemplative theme on the transformational nature of travel itself. Christine Osborne has visited 35 different Muslim countries, usually treated with great respect and kindness. But of her experiences in the secretive mountain republic of Yemen near the Red Sea she says, “I’ve occasionally wished I were a boy. Not for the penis per se but for the freedom it allows a man.”
The tens of thousands of images collected during Osborne’s travels became the basis for several major photo stock libraries, later to become her primary source of income. Images from the World Religions Photo Library, founded by Osborne in 1994, are sort by leading academic publishers including Oxford University Press.
Osborne’s adventures in Yemen, Pakistan, Morocco, Ethiopia and Iraq are rounded off with letters to her mother, who had never left Australia.
