Travels with My Hat - Christine Osborne

This is the story of how an Australian nurse switched careers to become an award-winning international travel writer and photographer. It is a colourful record of her experiences defined by travel and frequently against all odds. "We don't know who you are", she was told on arrival in London in 1974. "To get a name here, you need to write a book". Which is precisely what she did, choosing as subject the developing Arab oil states of the eastern Gulf. Publication of The Gulf States & Oman in 1977 brought commissions on the Middle East. Books followed on Jordan and Pakistan. In 1979 she was accredited to the Buckingham Palace press corps to cover Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth's historic tour of Arabia. In 1981, she travelled to Iraq, invited to Baghdad by the Ba'athist regime of Saddam Hussein. Her adventures in Iraq, Ethiopia, Egypt, Yemen, Pakistan, Morocco and other exotic places, are rounded off with letters to her mother who had never left Australia.