29. The Australian Abroad

Chosen by:
Associate Professor Robin Gerster,
School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Faculty of Arts

The Australian abroad : branches from the main routes round the world / by James Hingston. (London : Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1879-1880) 2 vols.

The British-born journalist James Hingston first revealed his taste for travel writing on a modest scale, in his Guide for Excursionists from Melbourne (1868), in which he assures his readers that ‘to get an agreeable holiday, it is not necessary to go always as far as Europe’. Evidently he did not heed his own advice. His superbly illustrated two-volume The Australian Abroad: Branches from the Main Routes Round the World, published in London in 1879-1880, is the record of an extended global tour undertaken in the late 1870s, notes from which first appeared in the Melbourne newspaper The Argus.

The Australian Abroad is perhaps the seminal Australian travel book, which reveals both the common prejudices of its time and a receptivity to foreign cultures, especially those of Asia, which was modern and forward-looking. A believer in the beneficence of the British Empire, Hingston doesn’t think much of French Indochina. Saigon is dispensed with as ‘a low-lying waterside settlement of Frenchmen, Malays, and mosquitoes’; the local people are described as having ‘no gratitude, no energy, no industry, no manners of any good kind’. But elsewhere Hingston is remarkably open to ‘the East’ (as Australians continued to call the Asian countries to their north). ‘Going through the East,’ he writes, ‘gives something Eastern in nature, orientalising our ideas to a degree of which we are not perhaps fully conscious’. Hingston was particularly impressed by Japan, then revealing a seductive image of itself to the world after a long seclusion. ‘Nature’s gentlemen are the Japanese’, he says. ‘Any one who wishes to get away from himself for a time…will find the newest and freshest in the land of the Rising Sun’.