sallyhammond.com.au

In blog-talk they call this a meme. Me, me. So here is mine.

As a child growing up in isolated farming country in the south-west of Western Australia, I was passionate about three things – reading, writing and dreaming of far-away places. For much of my childhood words were my closest companions and reading transported me to another world.

So it wasn’t surprising that I also began to write at a very young age. My first ‘book’, written when I was eleven, was about a fictional journey through Europe. I read it out loud under the playground wattle tree to my squirming fellow-students at our one-teacher school. Talk about predestination!

The desire to travel must have been fizzing in my blood as I remember in high-school poring over the atlas for hours, trying to imagine what it would be like to visit other countries. I learned about lakes and mountains, volcanoes and deserts and wondered if I would ever see any.

Today my dreams have come true beyond my wildest expectations. I live what could be described as a double life – exploring my homeland and the rest of the world – while writing on my favourite topics, food and travel.

Better still, I mainly travel with my photographer-husband, Gordon, and our shared life has taken us from Fiji to Finland, along the Silk Road in China, and to the Shetland islands far north of the Scottish mainland. We’ve explored southern Italy, most parts of France, India, the Marquesas and Mauritius, Vietnam, Vanuatu, Antarctica and Argentina and so much more.

For me, travel is not simply about ticking off a destination on a ‘must see’ list. It is about meeting the people (and yes, that means shopping in their shops and markets, of course) and trying to understand what it might mean to live in a place, then attempting to convey its unique character in my writing.

It’s a beautiful world and there’s so much to experience in it.

……………………

If a man be gracious to strangers, it shows that he is a citizen of the world, and his heart is no island, cut off from other islands, but a continent that joins them.

- Francis Bacon

 

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