ABSTRACT
Within the framework of a rising sense of Australian national identity and a progressive evolution of travel, the second part of this book shifts focus to Australian journeys to Italy from the 1850s until 1905, and to the ways they manifest issues of authority and non-authority. As I have already noted, the course of the events in the first 60 years that elapsed from the foundation of the penal colony in 1788 to the territorial division into six colonies and finally the concession of self-government from 1850 set the scene for subsequent developments in Australian travel. A class of Anglo-Australian travellers did not consolidate until after the 1850s, as a result of the demographic and economic growth initiated with the Victorian gold rush. Although subsequently, with the Depression of the 1880s and 1890s, overall colonial welfare decreased, considerable transformations in Australian overseas voyaging nonetheless took place in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Thanks to a growing sense of Australian self-understanding in the second half of the century, Australian journeys transformed from colonial Grand Tours to more touristic and distinctively Australian experiences. This gradual transition is particularly evident in the accounts of women travel writers, to which I devote my main focus in this part of the book. I discuss the Australian Grand Tour of Grace Leadbetter, the successive touristic and anti-touristic reinterpretations of this type of journey by Sophia Jennings and Violet Chomley, and finally the artistic curve that it assumed for impressionist painter Louie Riggall. I was alerted to the accounts of these travellers by the important work of Ros Pesman, especially her 1998 article ‘Overseas Travel of Australian Women: Sources in the Australian Manuscripts Collection of the State Library of Victoria’. Pesman disclosed the existence of these documents but did not investigate them, and since then they have not been the object of further academic attention. This book offers the first sustained analysis of these valuable unpublished sources. Their examination is interpolated with that of two accounts published by James Smith and Nathan Spielvogel. 128Their presence is not only relevant to the geographical, chronological and thematic context of this book but constitutes a further acknowledgement of two authors who have been little studied as travel writers.
