Travelling Home, `walkabout Magazine` and Mid-Twentieth-Century Australia, Rolls Mitchell, Johnston Anna

Travelling Home provides a detailed analysis of the contribution that the mid twentieth-century Walkabout magazine made to Australias cultural history. Spanning five central decades of the twentieth century (1934-1974), Walkabout was integral to Australias sense of itself as a nation. By advocating travel--both vicarious and actual--Walkabout encouraged settler Australians to broaden their image of the nation and its place in the Pacific region. In this way, Walkabout explicitly aimed to make its readers feel at home in their country, as well as including a diverse picture of Aboriginal and Pacific cultures. Like National Geographic in the United States, Walkabout presented a cornucopia of images and information that was accessible to a broad readership.

Given its wide availability and distribution, together with its accessible and entertaining content, Walkabout changed how Australia was perceived, and the magazine is recalled with nostalgic fondness by most if not all of its former readers. Many urban readers learnt about Indigenous peoples and cultures through the many articles on these topics, and although these representations now seem dated and at times discriminatory, they provide a lens through which to see how contemporary attitudes about race and difference were defined and negotiated.

Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship, Travelling Home engages with key questions in literary, cultural, and Australian studies about national identity and modernity. The books diverse topics demonstrate how Walkabout canvassed subtle and shifting fields of representation. Grounded in the archival history of the magazines production, the book addresses questions key to Australian cultural history. These include an investigation of middle-brow print culture and the writers who contributed to Walkabout, and the role of Walkabout in presenting diverse and often conflicting information about Indigenous and other non-white cultures. Other chapters examine how popular natural history enabled scientists and readers alike to define an unique Australian landscape, and to debate how a modernising nation could preserve its bush while advocating industrial and agricultural development. While the nation is central to Walkabout magazines imagined world, Australia is always understood to be part of the Pacific region in complex ways that included neo-colonialism, and Pacific content was prominent in the magazine. Through complex and nuanced readings of Australian literary and cultural history, Travelling Home reveals how vernacular understandings of key issues in Australias cultural history were developed and debated in this accessible and entertaining magazine.