Rachael Gurney

Digging for Australia: Memories of Countries Lived in and Places Visited on the Way Rachael Gurney

'What would you think about going to live in Paris?' In 2003, having returned to the UK unexpectedly, Rachael Gurney was looking through the thousands of slides that her father had taken in the sixties and seventies. Trying to work out when and where they had been taken, she turned to the scrapbooks she had made as a child. Apart from the usual postcards, the scrapbooks were full of plane and boat tickets, and as a indication of things to come, lids cut out from cheese boxes, and labels lovingly soaked and dried from bottles of wine her parents had drunk. This helped her place many of the slides, and re-awakened fond memories of childhood, family holidays. Wanting to preserve these memories she started writing about them. However, it didn't stop there as she was enjoying the writing process so much and continued with further travelling tales. The result is part biography, part travel guide. It tells of some wonderful highs, counteracted by those disasters which make travelling so interesting. It also acts as a personal travelogue from places as diverse as Mexico, Slovakia and Singapore, and an insight into living and working in a number of counties, including Poland and Portugal.