Cirrus@Austlit

'Madoline “Nina” Murdoch (1890–1976) was an Australian journalist, broadcaster, and writer. Among her other works, Murdoch wrote several travel books about her trips to Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. Travel to Europe from Australia was becoming increasingly accessible in the early twentieth century, and Murdoch’s books contributed to a popular discourse about Australia’s relationship both to Britain and to European civilisation more generally, as well as reflecting anxieties about women’s role in society and about industrialisation. This essay discusses the travel writing of Nina Murdoch in the context of the nature and meaning of travel to Europe – Spain in particular – for Australians in the early twentieth century, analysing how Mucrdoch’s equivocal Eurocentrism and her feminine authorial voice are inflected by changing discourses of modernity and of women’s lives.' (Publication abstract)