Ros Pesman

In our postmodern age, when everything travels and travel is a metaphor for everything, travel and travel writing have become the subject of intense scholarly interest and debate. Travel, once largely the domain of geographers, and travel writing, previously relegated to the status of a sub-literary genre, now engage attention from literary studies, history, anthropology, ethnography, and, most fruitfully, from gender and postcolonial studies. Conferences and publications abound.

From the earliest days of white settlement, Australians have made the voyage to Britain. Many stayed for long periods and some forever. Prominent among the more permanent residents were writers, prominent not only in terms of numbers but also because it was they who in large part created the stories and legends of Australians abroad. Some left without regret, lambasting their local world as ‘suburban’, hostile to originality and creativity. But Australian writers were not only denizens of a small, narrow society. They also lived in an English-speaking imperial world constructed in terms of metropolises and provinces. Thus Australian writers went to Britain in search of better opportunities for publication, wider markets for their wares, and to become part of a critical mass of writers, critics, intellectuals in a more complex, variegated society. When nationalist fervour was strong, local attitudes to expatriates could be ambivalent if not hostile. In 1967 Christina Stead was named by the Britannica Australia Award for Literature Committee as ‘the outstanding novelist of this day’ but was not given the prize because it was noted that she had not lived in Australia for forty years and that her contribution to literature had little reference to Australia.

From the mid-nineteenth century, the city of Florence and its surrounding hills were home to a large expatriate community in which the British were both prominent and visible – in the English tearooms and English pharmacy, in the waiting rooms of the English doctors and bankers, in the pews of the English Church. The foreigners came to live in a better climate and at less expense, to discover the world and themselves, to write, paint, collect, to escape the restraints – or the failures – of home, and to live unorthodox and unconventional lives. Aldous Huxley, whose enthusiasm for Florence was brief, wrote of this cultural mecca as ‘a third-rate provincial town, colonized by English sodomites and middle-aged Lesbians’. Despite, or because of, Huxley’s view, this English colony and its denizens, who more than adequately memorialised themselves, continue, like Bloomsbury, to be a popular and marketable publishing commodity. In his recent contribution on Florence to The Writer and the City series, David Leavitt suggested that Florence was unusual in that its most famous citizens for at least the past one hundred and fifty years have been foreigners. He then went on to make the foreigners the subject of his biography of the city, Florence: A Delicate Case (2002).

In October 2005, Monash University hosted a workshop on Australians in Italy at its Centre in the Palazzo Vaj in Prato. Australians in Italy were certainly visible in the week of the conference. Wall posters in Rome advertised the Macquarie Bank and an exhibition, Viaggio nella Provincia di Roma di una pittrice australiana, the paintings of the expatriate artist Janet Venn-Brown. In Florence, the invitation to the opening of an international exhibition of Women’s Art bore the image of Tracey Moffatt’s photograph Something More 1 (1989). The workshop in Prato included papers on artists, writers, returned migrants, the Catholic clergy – and a vignette on the best-known Australian in contemporary Italy, the supermodel Megan Gale. Also on the programme was the contribution of Australian scholars to Italian Renaissance studies. Now extending to three generations, their work is no longer subsumed under ‘British’, and references are to ‘American–British–Australian’ approaches and research. A member of the first generation, Bill Kent, through his own writing and his training of PhD students, is the crucial figure in the ‘piccola scuola australiana’ (‘piccola’ only when confronted with the North American Renaissance industry), just as he was in the establishment of the Monash Centre in Prato.

The history of fifteenth-century Florence is indissolubly linked to the Medici, the political bosses and patrons of the arts who presided over the city-state’s Renaissance. The names of Cosimo, Lorenzo and Giovanni, known to God and the world as Pope Leo X, immediately come to the fore in any discussion of Renaissance Italy. Rarely heard are the names of their female kin: Contessa de’ Bardi, wife of Cosimo the Elder and republican matron; Lucrezia Tornabuoni, mother of Lorenzo il Magnifico, and vernacular poet; Lorenzo’s daughters; Lucrezia Medici Salviati and Contessa Medici Ridolfi; his daughter-in-law, the despised Alfonsina Orsini Medici; or of his granddaughter, Maria Salviati Medici, who worked so assiduously to secure the future of her son, Cosimo, Grand Duke of Florence.

In The Medici Women, Natalie Tomas seeks to explore the political and cultural influence of these Florentine matriarchs who, by birth or marriage, were at the centre of the Medici clan. She investigates why and how certain Medici women were able to utilise power and influence contemporary perceptions and representations of their authority.

An Australian tourist visiting Italy in the mid-1930s wrote home: ‘you may say what you like about Mussolini but you cannot deny that he has done a more amazing thing than anyone else in history.’ Unstinting admiration for Fascist Italy was common in Australian references to Italy in the interwar years; politicians, businessmen, Catholic prelates, Protestant pastors and middle-class tourists all sang his praises. They were also at one with the view expressed by R.G. Menzies, at the 1934 Conference of the Victorian Young Nationalists, that Italy’s transformation was the product not of Fascism but of its charismatic leader and his untrammelled power. In the eyes of the rarely well-informed Australian observers, Mussolini had resurrected Italy, ‘made over his people’, ‘intensified and completed the creation of Italian nationality’, and erected an efficient and effective state. Trains not only ran on time but also at a profit, according to Sir Hal Colebatch, Premier of Western Australia.

This book, My Other World, is in Margaret Whitlam’s words, ‘the story of my travels as the leader of group study tours around the world’ in the 1990s. It is also another episode in the life journey of a remarkable woman who has the capacity and the vitality to go on inventing new lives. Previously a swimming champion, social worker, suburban mother, prime minister’s and ambassador’s consort, advocate for adult education, Margaret Whitlam in her seventies embarked upon a new career as a travel guide, leading her companions not only into Britain, France and Italy, but also into China and Central America and the Russia and Siberia of the early 1990s. Now in her eighties, she has begun another life, writing her first book.