Where are all the walking, writing women? A Wander-lust-full response to Rebecca Solnit’s epic History of Walking

Feb 20, 2023

I am not a reviewer, but rather use books as an inspiration and contemplation of my own thinking. Here I am in conversation with Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust.

Wandering and writing with Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust

She and me are not truly alone in this slice of time. She towers over telephone poles and solar-panelled roofs, keeps a careful watch on early-morning tradies in their silver-backed utes, on-route to worn-out homes where dodgy plumbing competes with debt and architectural dreams. She holds tight to the Ironbark trees that emerge from her granite belt and explode into lemon blossoms that cover in my suburb once a year. It is both loud and quiet here, at this time of day. My boots crunch in time with birdsong and its varying octaves and timbres, depending on size, colour, and line of flight. Kookaburras introduce the day in this part of the world, followed, in a close second, by Rainbow Lorikeets and Sulphur-crested Cockatoos. Their atonal symphony sings stories of this range: the then and the now. I’m just not sure how many of us are listening. Or walking.

Mt Coot-tha watches over the city. Picture: author’s own.

What colonists once dubbed One Tree Hill is now one of the most recognisable natural landmarks in my city. Some mornings splashes of apricot drape around her like a curtain. At other times mist veils her midsection. She is part of a series of peaks and toughs that constitute the south-western end of the D’Aguilar range. She’s more commonly known, now, as Mt Coot-tha, a name reminiscent of the original Turrbal name for the area: Kuta, place of native bees. Early European accounts of the place I live and walk and write about describe this place as once thick with trees: Hoop Pine, Cedar, She Oaks. She sits several kilometres from the spike in the river that the Turrbal and Jagera people called Meannjin for millennia and the colonists named Brisbane less than 200 years ago. This place I now wander across is part of a mountain range historian Janet Spillman, in her History of Mt Coot-tha, writes “define(s) the city”.[1] and I believe frames my life. I trace her borders with my boots, and she sits on the edge of my life’s page. Today I walk this mountain range solo, Rebecca Solnit’s words of Wanderlust flowing through my earbuds in time with each step. I have already listened, and read, several chapters, but am becoming increasingly frustrated.

Rousseau—

Thoreau—

All the ….male-ohs.

Where are the women walkers and writers who wonder?

I am a keen solitary walker but don’t walk solo as much as I would like. And so, the words in Solnit’s introductory chapter to Wanderlust reverberated strongly. The solitary walker, says Solnit, is someone being “in the world, but apart from it, with the detachment of the traveller rather than the ties of the worker, the dweller, the member of a group”.[2] But after listening to Solnit’s words on walking and thinking I am growing tired of thinking about the wandering white men of history and want to know more about the women writers who wandered, or didn’t. If walking, as Solnit writes, is “a state of mind in which the mind, the body and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord,”[3] then what did women write about when they wandered? Where are all the women? The answer, I finally discovered, can be found, “Walking after Midnight”.

“Walking after Midnight” is a chapter towards the end of Wanderlust. In it, Solnit addresses questions that have been wandering through my mind as I walk through this mountain range alone. She writes that while women have made ground indoors “—in the home, the workplace, the schools and the political system”, access to both urban and rural public space remains limited for women “by their fear of violence and harassment”. This sexualised violence can be seen in the “insulting and aggressive propositions, comments, leers, and intimidations that are part of ordinary life for women in public places”. But it is fear of rape, says Solnit, that “puts many women in their place—indoors, intimidated, dependent yet again on material barriers and protectors rather than their own will to safeguard their safety”[4]

“I’m finished my hike. Haven’t been murdered.”

“I’m out. Still alive. Not raped.”

These are the types of text messages I send my partner when I go, or return from, hiking solo. I’m usually only a few kilometres from home; I have not yet dared to go solo further afield. The local bush is thick but familiar, and the tracks are clear. Urban-spread is so close; motorbikes whirr up the mountains and car engines permeate the thickness of trees and bush. The usual dangers in the natural world remain—high grass often conceals snakes— but there’s also dehydration and the bother of twisting an ankle. These things don’t worry me too much. Despite their venom, snakes are more scared of us galumphing humans, and I usually always carry a snake-bite bandage and a couple of litres of water. But there is little I can do about the imagined threats of the human world. Once, on a relatively challenging hike of high heat and steep climbs I arrived at the top of a hill to find a man sitting there. My first thought was not polite conversation but perceived threat. I scoured the landscape for the closest, and biggest rock. I wondered how fast I might be able to run down that hill. As wandered closer, and held my breath. He nodded hello, picked up his sandwich and munched down while staring out at the view.

Solnit writes that it has long been important for writers to wander alone. Such wandering provides “encounters and experiences that [inspire] their work and “space to imagine it”.[5] If, she says, “walking is a primary cultural act and a crucial way of being in the world, those who have bene unable to walk out as far as their feet would take them have been denied not merely exercise or recreation but a vast proportion of their humanity”[6]. The story of humanity, and in-humanity, in the mountain I walk is multi-layered. Early surveys labelled the area my suburb now rubs against as “Ironbark Spurs”. For the colonists, the value of these Ironbark trees was in their timber. Spillman writes that when the former penal colony opened to free settlement in the early 1800s, surveyors needed to conduct a trigonometrical survey by measuring a base to various points. To do so they “cleared a knot of a hill” on the southern edge of the range, leaving a single tree; hence the name One Tree Hill. For a while, this mountain was walking solo too. Colonists gazetted the area for what they most desired: a timber reserve. For colonists, a tree’s story emerged when it was lain, prone and prostrate, carved into straight rectangular lines and recalibrated into homes and roads and train tracks. From my veranda each morning I listen closely for the ghosts of trees smashing to the ground. For women walkers too, a solo story remains a silent story, or one not yet begun. But if you listen hard enough, these stories are there, whispering on the wind. The mountain, and the women who walk it, have a story to tell about our humanity.

Something new: Reading Rebecca Solnit’s work on Wandering has sent me down a rabbit hole, searching out more women writers who wandered. Next month’s book, then, will be Wanderers: A History of Women Walking by Kerri Andrews. Andrews writes about ten women, from Dorothy Wordsworth and Virginia Woolf, through to contemporary writers such as Cheryl Strayed (her substack can be found here) and their thoughts on writing and wandering. Wanderers can be purchased online and is also available at all good libraries.

NOTE: This is the first in a series of musings on women walking and writing. I will be including some more thoughts on Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust in forthcoming posts.

Angle of arrival

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