Travels With My Hat: A Lifetime on the Road

Born in Sydney, Australia, Christine Osborne is an award winning journalist and photographer who has worked as a senior travel editor and contributed to prominent newspapers and magazines around the world. First leaving the then cloistered shores of Australia in the 1960s, she came to prominence in 1970 when she received the Pacific Area Travel Writers' award for travel articles on Asia. For many decades Osborne explored the Middle East and Africa from her base in London. Following publication of The Gulf States & Oman in 1977, she fulfilled writing and photographic commissions throughout the developing world. The thousands of images Osborne collected became the basis of a number of photo stock libraries, including the World Religions Photo Library. Her haunting pictures of starving children taken during the devastating Ethiopian droughts of the 1970s were published in a number of European newspapers, including The Times of London. One of her many assignments was interviewing Joy Adamson, the Lion Woman, in Kenya in 1973. In 1979 Osborne was the only woman accredited to the Buckingham Palace press corps to cover Her Majesty Queen Elizabethâe(tm)s historic tour of Arabia. Â The Queen of Jordan wrote the introduction to her second book, An Insight and Guide to Jordan. Osborne saw many of the world's most pristine places before the advent of mass tourism, her ground breaking work taking her to many of the world's most beautiful and dangerous places. In 1981 she travelled to Iraq, invited to Baghdad by the Baâe(tm)athist regime of Saddam Hussein. An intrepid traveller throughout her career, Osborne has spent a lifetime on the road. She has written 16 books in all, including on Pakistan, Morocco, Thailand, Malaysia, Oman and the Seychelles.