Cirrus@Austlit

'In conversation with Adam Ouston on 1 and 12 January 2015, novelist, broadcaster, critic, traveller, and one of Australia's most prominent and respected writers, Robert Dessaix, discusses his motivations for both travelling and writing. Addressing topics from domestic life to vulnerability, friendship to eros, art to illness, Dessaix talks about the ways travel contributes to his senses of self and home, how travelling to visit shrines, or embarking on pilgrimages, is both meaningless and essential, and the importance of the traveller's imagination. Revisiting major themes from most of his works, Dessaix acknowledges a continuing desire to encounter absolute otherness, and traces many of its (often threatening) manifestations throughout his writing.'  (Introduction)

'The basis for Robert Clarke’s wide-ranging study of recent Australian travel writing is his contention that encounters with Australia – whether on the part of residents of or visitors to that country – are nearly always set against an experience of Black Australia that places Aboriginality at the centre of national life. “Aboriginality” and “Black Australia” are both tricky terms, as Clarke well knows, and both remain at the heart of intense, sometime fractious discussions about the protocols surrounding the acknowledgment of Aboriginal worldviews and ways of life. Simply put, neither Aboriginality nor Black Australia have a great deal to do with what Aboriginal people think about themselves; rather, both are intersubjective – if rarely fully reciprocal – formations that provide a general framework for what white people think about Aborigines and, far less often, what Aborigines think about them.' (Introduction)