In December 2004 the town of Penneshaw, Kangaroo Island, provided the backdrop for an international conference titled 'Journeying and Journalling'. The conference created a space for creative and critical meditations on travel writing.
Collectively the essays in this collection provide a snapshot of current directions and preoccupations in contemporary travel writing scholarship. They function as a reminder of the work that has been done on representations of Indigeneity and of writing marginalised narratives into the travel canon. However, these chapters also remind us of the important work that remains - particularly in relation to travel writing as form of reconciliation - for example, between Indigenous people and colonisers, and between colonisers and neo-colonials.
Scholars also bear the responsibility of considering the complexities of representing culture and place in a post-colonial, even post-traumatic world.
This collection includes essays by Tim Youngs, Helen Tiffin, and Paul Sharrad, and many other leading writers in the field of travel writing.
Giselle Bastin is Head of English, Creative Writing, and Australian Studies at Flinders University. Her research interests include biographies and biopics of the British Royal Family, literary adaptations, and heritage film.
Kate Douglas is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at Flinders University specialising in life writing, contemporary literary studies, postcolonial literatures, Australian Studies, and literary/cultural theory. Her most recent publications are
Trauma Texts (with Professor Gillian Whitlock; Routledge 2009) and
Contesting Childhood: Autobiography, Trauma and Memory (Rutgers University Press 2010).
Michael X. Savvas completed a PhD, in the Department of English, Creative Writing and Australian Studies at Flinders University – a crime novel as a metaphor for reconciliation. Michael feels infinitely qualified to write about crime, having genuine convict ancestry, living in an Adelaide suburb formerly known as Little Chicago, and being a Port Power supporter.
