Cirrus@Austlit

'Travel has always been an important trope of settler literature, central not only to colonial displacement and dispossession but to postcolonial reimaginings of identity, gender, and place. However, it was not until the early twentieth century, after the rise of literary nationalism, that a nativist form of travel writing emerged in Australia. By mid-century, there was a more established tradition due to the introduction of motor touring and a post-war boom in mass migration and tourism. In the 1970s and 1980s, Australian travel writing was chiefly preoccupied with road stories, and with narratives of risk and adventure, while in the 1990s, Indigenous writers imagined new possibilities for healing through travel writing that sought to recover ancestral connections to language and land. Today, Australian travel writing is a burgeoning subject of academic enquiry, and in Australia, as elsewhere, there is a broadening rather than narrowing perspective of what constitutes ‘travel’ writing. Recently, an upsurgence of interest in mobility studies has raised new questions, not only about the experience of moving (and being moved), but about how different theories of im/mobility are central to the way travel is practised and prohibited, and sometimes undertaken reluctantly.'

Source: Abstract