SPEECH FOR TRAVELS WITH MY HAT
I would like to welcome everybody here, and thank you for all for coming on such a cold, wet night; in particular our special guest Ita Buttrose, and of course, the author and photojournalist Christine Osborne. And I would like to thank Gleebooks for hosting this event.
A Sense of Place Publishing is proud to be associated with Travels with My Hat: A Lifetime on the
Road which is both a lovely work to read and a significant personal achievement.
This is Christine’s 16th book, many of which, including works on Thailand, Malaysia, Oman, the Seychelles, Pakistan and Morocco, were done through the distinguished London publishers Longman.
The author spent most of her life overseas, using London as a base, and is perhaps not as well known here as she should be.
The culmination of a life’s work, Christine Osborne’s Travels with My Hat: A Lifetime on the Road begins in the 1950s in the tiny Australian gold mining town of Temora. Osborne’s classmates laughed at her when she declared she wanted to see the world. But in the decades to follow that’s exactly what she did, becoming an accomplished international travel writer and photographer whose many adventures include encounters with the Queens of England and Jordan, and Sheikha Fatima, the desert queen of Abu Dhabi.
Back in the 1970s, as Editor-in-Chief of Cleo, Ita Buttrose appointed Osborne as the magazine’s travel editor. One of the assignments Ita dished out was for Christine to track down an Ethiopian child that Cleo was sponsoring.
Later, after a return visit, Christine’s photographs of starving women and children in the appalling Ethiopian droughts of the 1970s were seen around the world.
Christine Osborne is a continually surprising person. I always walk away from a conversation with her having learnt something new. Among her many accomplishments, she has founded two major photo stock libraries, including the World Religions Photo Library.
While an award winning travel writer in her own country of Australia, when she first settled in London in 1974 she was told: “We don’t know who you are. To get a name here, you need to write a book.”
Which is precisely what she did, choosing the then largely unexplored subject of the developing Arab oil states. It was ground breaking work.
In the Middle East of the time, Osborne often found herself the only woman in many situations, but makes no special pleading, saying the Arabs always treated her with kindness and respect. The end result was the publication of her first book in 1977, The Gulf States and Oman.
Having established herself as an expert on the region, shortly thereafter Ita Buttrose, by then Editor-in-Chief of The Australian Women’s Weekly, commissioned coverage of Queen Elizabeth II’s historic tour of the Middle East – an adventure which forms the basis for Chapter Three of Travels with My Hat.
Osborne was the only woman photographer accredited to the tour by the Buckingham Palace Press Corp.
The title Travels with My Hat refers to a famous piece of millinery worn everywhere by Osborne.
Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, disoriented in the great bazaar in Nizwa in Oman one day after the Royal Party and the Press contingent had become separated, said to Christine: “I was looking everywhere for your blue hat.”
What readers of Travels with My Hat: A Lifetime on the Road have all marvelled at, is the vivid descriptions of far off places in an era before mass tourism and cheap flights. There was no internet. There were often no guide books, no street names, no maps. There were certainly no smart phone apps, Trip Adviser or the public relations people that now make the lives of most travel writers so comfortable.
Osborne’s adventures in Iraq, Ethiopia, Egypt, Yemen, Pakistan and other countries are rounded off with a series of letters to her mother, who never left Australia.
In one communiqué, from the shores of Lake Galilee, she declares she cannot bear the loneliness anymore: “I think I will give up being a travel writer. It is not a normal life.”
But Osborne never stopped travelling. In the end, she declares, “only travel brings a life lived in the moment”.
Just before I hand over to our special guest, I want to read a couple of short quotes, the first from a rave review by a Top Ten Amazon reviewer.
Amazon, of course, is yet another phenomenon which did not exist in the days when Christine first began travelling.
“I love history and also geography,” the reviewer wrote. “When I read this outstanding book, I found so much more. I could go on and on about how much I loved reading this book…”
And from another professional reviewer Greg Taylor, formerly of Fairfax, now of News Limited: “This is an unheralded gem, a voyage into strange territory told by a natural writer. It drew me in from the first page, and didn’t let go. Highly recommended.”
And now, ladies and gentlemen, talking of remarkable women, our guest tonight, here to officially launch Travels with My Hat, is a truly exceptional Australian: a legendary media editor, businesswoman, best-selling author, committed community and welfare contributor and 2013 Australian of the Year.
Twice voted Australia’s most admired woman, she was the youngest ever and an unprecedentedly successful Editor of ‘The Australian Women’s Weekly’, the founding editor of ‘Cleo’, the first woman to ever edit a major metropolitan newspaper in Australia as Editor-in-Chief of the ‘Sydney Daily & Sunday Telegraphs’, and the first woman director of News Limited. In 2011, her early career was the subject of highly-acclaimed ABC miniseries ‘Paper Giants: The Birth of Cleo’, in which she was portrayed by actor Asher Keddie.
She later founded Capricorn Publishing and The Good Life Publishing Company, and has been involved with publishing work for such clients as David Jones, Telstra, and the ATO.
She is the current National President of Alzheimer’s Australia, Patron of the Macular Disease Foundation, and Emeritus Director of Arthritis Australia. She received an AO for her services to the community especially in the field of public health education when she spearheaded Australia’s HIV/AIDS Education Program, an OBE for her services to journalism, and a Centenary Medal for business leadership.
A founding member and former president of Chief Executive Women and host of the TEN Network’s new morning chat program, she has written 11 very successful books including her best-selling autobiography ‘A Passionate Life’.
Ladies and gentlemen, please make very welcome… Ita Buttrose.