Travelling to Tomorrow: The modern women who sparked Australia’s romance with America (Yves Rees, NewSouth)

Historian and memoirist Yves Rees’s Travelling to Tomorrow is a new history of Australia’s relationship with the US during the first half of the 20th century, told through the stories of 10 Australian women drawn to America’s promise of freedom and modernity. With these examples, Rees demonstrates how cultural exchange, everyday encounters, and official policy shape international relations. Beginning in 1910 with Brisbane-born lawyer May Lahey, the book progresses chronologically through chapters headed by its cast of characters (The Painter, The Economist, etc.), all written with Rees’s novelistic flair for bringing historical figures to life. It is an unapologetically personal book, with Rees acknowledging ‘feelings of identification’ with their subjects. At times, the absence of firsthand accounts from these women leads Rees to fill the gaps with speculations about their inner lives or reasons for their decisions. Chapters reflecting on the author’s own relationship with the States and their fascinating years-long research journey are also interspersed throughout. While Rees believes these are lives worth remembering, they avoid casting them as irreproachable feminist heroines, acknowledging that while these (white) women broke the mould in some respects, they also benefited from or even perpetuated systems such as colonialism. Travelling to Tomorrow will appeal to those eager for intimate, vibrantly told histories of remarkable women in the vein of Anna Funder’s Wifedom.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Megan Koch is a writer and bookseller based in Adelaide. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

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