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1 - Walkabout: The Magazine

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2017

Mitchell Rolls  and
Anna Johnston
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Summary

The editorial in the inaugural edition of Walkabout explained its projected charter. Signed by Charles (Chas) Lloyd Jones, chairman of the board of the expanding merchant store David Jones and acting chairman of the Australian National Travel Association (ANTA), it proclaimed that one of the principal aims of the ‘travel magazine’ was to educate.

[I]n publishing ‘Walkabout’, we have embarked on an educational crusade which will enable Australians and the people of other lands to learn more of the romantic Australia that exists beyond the cities and the enchanted South Sea Islands and New Zealand.

Travel itself was held to be instrumental to the sort of education Walkabout wanted to provide, as the editorial of the fifth edition (March 1935) made explicit. Far more than just learning the facts and figures of potential investment opportunities, or learning about geography, engineering feats and regional produce, travel itself was considered to impart significant social and personal benefits.

Travel is the most successful of the outdoor sports. It conditions the body, informs the mind, inspires the heart, and imparts a grace to our social intercourse. It is a university of experience. It teaches that the bigger drama of life is played in the open – out where ships speak as they pass in the night – where the glory of the mountain, plain, and desert awe us with a mystery that is forever new to the responsive traveller. Travel is the fifth dimension in Australia's system of educating all people. Travel is as much a part of life's necessary experience as is that of the school, the church, the library and the museum.

Whilst much of the travel promoted was beyond the reach of many, Walkabout was confident that its readership would gain valuable education travelling vicariously through its articles and photography: ‘in adult and youth alike, [Walkabout] will inspire an infinitely greater knowledge and appreciation of their own and neighbouring lands.’ In recognition of this objective Walkabout was from the very beginning envisaged as ‘Australia's geographic magazine’, a title and role formalized in later years. Walkabout 's sense of itself as a geographic magazine gave the somewhat disparate assortment of photographs and articles a certain coherence.

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Travelling Home, 'Walkabout Magazine' and Mid-Twentieth-Century Australia , pp. 11 - 38
Publisher: Anthem Press
Print publication year: 2016

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