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The culmination of a life’s work, Travels with My Hat: A Lifetime on the Road by photojournalist Christine Osborne begins in the 1950s in the tiny Australian gold mining town of Temora. Osborne’s classmates laughed at her when she declared she wanted to see the world. But in the decades to follow that’s exactly what she did, becoming an accomplished international travel writer and photographer whose many adventures include encounters with the Queens of England and Jordan, and Sheikha Fatima, the desert queen of Abu Dhabi.
While an award winning travel writer in her own country of Australia, when photojournalist Christine Osborne first settled in London in 1974 she was told: “We don’t know who you are. To get a name here, you need to write a book.”
Which is precisely what she did, choosing the then largely unexplored subject of the developing Arab oil states. It was ground breaking work.
In the Middle East of the time, Osborne often found herself the only woman in many situations, but says she was always treated with kindness and respect.
“Arabs are a very hospitable race,” says Osborne. “Some of the humblest people, the least well off, were always ready to offer you water or a date. But it was a man’s world out there. I rarely met any women. It didn’t bother me; it was just a fact. And I was doing a man’s job so I had to be one of the boys. But not in a butch sense: I would wear evening dress when meeting an important ruler or minister. I didn’t really receive any unwanted attention, except from stupid western salesmen away from their wives.
“There was no internet. There were no guide books. No street names. No maps. No apps. No public relations officers to make things easier.”
Publication of The Gulf States & Oman in 1977 established Christine Osborne as a media resource for photographs and information.
In 1979 she was commissioned to cover Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth’s historic tour of Arabia. At the time she was the only woman photographer accredited Buckingham Palace Press Corp.
The title Travels with My Hat refers to a famous piece of millinery worn everywhere by Osborne. Her Majesty, disoriented in the great bazaar in Nizwa in Oman, said: "I was looking everywhere for your blue hat."
The foreword to Osborne’s second book, An Insight and Guide to Jordan, was written by Queen Nour, the US-born architect and fourth wife of HM King Hussein.
Fourteen more books followed, primarily through Longman, including works on Thailand, Malaysia, Oman, the Seychelles, Pakistan and Morocco.
Osborne’s indelible images of starving children in the Ethiopian droughts of the 1970s were seen around the world.
The tens of thousands of photographs taken during her travels throughout Africa, Asia and the Middle East, ultimately led to her founding two major photo stock libraries, including, in 1990, The World Religions Photo Library based in London.
Travels with My Hat is a record of a life defined by travel. Maintaining a professional demeanour no matter what, and often the only woman in difficult and hostile environments, Christine Osborne saw and photographed many of the world’s most pristine places, before mass tourism and hyper-development changed them forever. Osborne’s adventures in Iraq, Ethiopia, Egypt, Yemen, Pakistan and other developing countries are rounded off with a series of letters to her mother, who never left Australia.
In one communiqué, from the shores of Lake Galilee, she declares she cannot bear the loneliness anymore: “I think I will give up being a travel writer. It is not a normal life.”
But Osborne never stopped travelling. In the end, she declares, “only travel brings a life lived in the moment”.
For interviews, review copies, photographs and more information contact John Stapleton at A Sense of Place Publishing on +61 24786 0329 or email asenseofplacepublishing@gmail.com
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