Outback and Beyond

by Cynthia Nolan

Outback and Beyond is a collection of the celebrated travel writings of Cynthia Nolan. It is an account of her extensive travels with her husband, the painter Sidney Nolan, to the remote outback of Australia, and to Africa, China and Papua New Guinea.
Cynthia Nolan describes the landscapes, experiences and people that were the inspiration for some of Sidney's finest paintings. She records her own and Sidney's responses to people and landscape with intelligence, wit and good humour. She goes straight to the essentials of what she is describing, whether it be the luminous Australian desert, game reserves in Africa, the highlands in Papua New Guinea or the crowded streets of Shanghai, ablaze with the bustle and paradoxes of revolutionary China.
Outback and Beyond is an invaluable insight into the imaginative world of one of Australia's greatest artists, as well as being a fascinating piece of travel writing in its own right.

Genres: Australia, Travel

573 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1994

Reviews

[Owen · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a tedious text, derived from what appear to be competently written diary notes. They should have stayed like that. Cynthia Nolan must have known that she was being published only because of her famous husband. I enjoy reading about the experience of people travelling in remote places in years past (especially outback Australia), but there was nothing of interest in the 60 odd pages I read before giving up. The crime of precipitous publication was compounded by the notion Nolan had that she could pronounce on aspects of the country through which she was travelling for the first time as though she was an old Territory hand. The result is a great deal of nonsense seemingly coughed up second-hand and peppered with fatuous accounts of unimportant events (somebody's boil on the Marrakai plains was treated to a page and a half, if you can believe that). Shame. She was in a position to produce something of far more value. I should have taken note of the fact that she was constantly reminding the reader that "she hadn't wanted to come on this trip, in the first place." I shouldn't have gone either.