EPISODE 1
April 19, 2021
In this solo episode, I talk a bit about how this podcast came to be and what I hope to offer listeners. Women Who Walk is a continuation of the kind of conversations I had with the interviewees whose stories feature in my book, Women Who Walk. Conversations with inspiring women, who for a myriad of reasons left their countries of origin, sometimes independently, sometimes with partner and or family, en route to life in another country. And just like in the book, on this podcast we’ll be hearing from women who’ve made multiple international moves, for work, for adventure, for love, for freedom.
TRANSCRIPT:
Louise: Hello, welcome to Women Who Walk. I’m Louise Ross writer and author of Women Who Walk the book, the inspiration for this podcast. And just as I did for the book here, I’ll be interviewing and unpacking the journeys of impressive, intrepid women, who’ve made multiple international moves for work, for adventure, for love, for freedom. You can find show notes to each episode and my books on my website, LouiseRoss.com.
[00:00:48] Hello, I’m Louise Ross and welcome to Episode 1 of Women Who Walk. This is my very first show and it’s a solo episode during which I’ll talk a bit about how this podcast came to be and what I hope to offer listeners. Women Who Walk the podcast is a continuation of the kind of conversations I had with the interviewees whose stories feature in my book, Women Who Walk. Conversations with inspiring women, who for a myriad of reasons left their countries of origin, sometimes independently, sometimes with partner and or family, en route to life in another country.
[00:01:29] Six years ago, when I had the idea for the book, I ran it by a friend. Someone I considered a mentor. After listening to me pitch the concept, Pat immediately came up with the title, and as soon as it was out of her mouth, I knew it was right. Women Who Walk, it captures images such as the most obvious: women walking, women moving forward with direction, empowered women, women of strength, women with the freedom to move, and so on. The subtitle of the book, How 20 Women From 16 Countries Came to Live in Portugal, references where the women originated and where they were going. And even though they found their way to Portugal, it could have been any country in the world, since the universal nature of their stories means the journey carries greater meaning than the destination.
[00:02:25] As you might’ve noticed by my accent, I’m originally from Australia. Portugal is where I’ve been living for the past seven years and very soon after I moved here from the United States, where I’d been living for 27 years, I joined the social organization, International Women in Portugal or, IWP for short. IWP has a membership of more than 250 women from over 40 different countries. I reasoned that joining this group would be a great way to make new friends.
[00:03:01] In Colorado where I’d lived, weekend hiking into the foothills of the Rocky Mountains had been very much a part of my social life. So naturally I gravitated toward a similar activity here, IWPs Friday hiking group. And on that weekly hike, I was bumping elbows with well traveled and intrepid, multi-lingual women who happily shared captivating snippets about their lives and I found those snippets so intriguing, I decided to ask some of the women if I could interview them.
[00:03:34] It was all very organic. I simply approached the women, told them about my project and asked if they’d be willing to participate. I received a couple of surprising responses that went something like this: But my life’s not interesting, there are other women here with far more interesting lives than mine.
[00:03:55] Gee I found this discouraging listeners. It’s very unsettling when women compare themselves to others and discount their lives as less than, or not as important. We all have experiences that distinguish us and to the extent that we discount those experiences and give up the opportunity to share stories of our unique journeys, the legacy of the female narrative will remain comparatively underrepresented.
[00:04:24] Quite simply the truth of women’s lives matter. The personal trials and disappointments educational and professional achievements and failures, travels, adventures, and discoveries, the decision to marry or not marry, the decision to have, or not have children, plain and simple women’s lives matter.
[00:05:03] I have fabulous black and white pictures of my mother in the late forties and early fifties, hiking in jodhpurs in the Australian Bush, canvas backpack weighing her down. But just to be clear, there were no horses involved, Mum didn’t ride. Jodhpurs were the go-to trekking trousers of the time.
Mum in the Australian bush on a backpacking trip. (Circa late 1940s early 50s)
I also have colored pictures of her skiing in the high country, Northeast of Melbourne. In those days, there were no tows or lifts. So this meant that once you’d skied down, you’d have to take your skis off and walk back up again, and then ski back down again. Ooh, kind of takes the fun out of skiing as we know it today.
[00:05:45] In 1951, when she was 23, Mum set off to explore the Northern Territory with her best friend. She’d not long graduated from a college of domestic economy in Melbourne where her vocational training was in dressmaking. For a young woman who eventually worked for a fashion house designing exquisite evening gowns, heading off into Outback Australia was in stark contrast and, an incredibly courageous thing to do in those days. It was, and still is a vast and highly remote area. I mean, if you had an accident, chances are, it could end up being fatal as medical help might well be days away.
Mum (kneeling), trainhopping through outback Australia. (Circa early 1950s)
[00:06:30] So my mother had been quite an adventurer and outdoors woman, but when she married Dad, she gave up this life, and her career, which was rather sad. But her story was that she did so in order to begin a life with my father and start a family. And to be honest, Dad was 11 years older and he’d spent his early twenties in trench warfare, fighting back Rommel’s German army in the Libyan desert. Toward the end of the second world war, he was sent to New Guinea where jungle warfare left him stricken with malaria and hepatitis. So roughing it hiking and backpacking, even with my gorgeous young mum was not on Dad’s must-do list. In his spare time, he preferred to unwind with a game of golf or a good book.
[00:07:22] But when I was in 11, Mum did manage to coax him to come along on a weekend family ski trip. My sister and I enrolled in ski school, Mum skied with her brother and his wife, and when I popped back into the ski lodge for a bit of a break, I found Dad, feet up by the fire, reading my uncle’s Playboy magazines. But in Dad’s defense, lad mags were not his usual reading fare.
[00:07:49] When I was in my early teens, I noticed that Mum did quite a bit of armchair travel. She loved biographies of spirited women who’d lived rather daring lives, such as Karen Blixen, who under her pen name, Isak Dineson, wrote Out of Africa, and Beryl Markham, author of West With The Night. Beryl was the first person to fly solo, nonstop across the Atlantic from Britain to North America. Her memoir is really quite racy. She led a very colorful life. And there were other notable women, characters that Mum loved to read about.
[00:08:27] Curious about my mother’s interest in the tales of women of substance, I began to read similar kinds of books, but more in keeping with my age and the time. The first was The Dove, a memoir by 16-year-old Robin Lee Graham’s 1965 around-the-world solo voyage in his single-mast sailboat. Robin was a teenage boy when he set sail, so it wasn’t the journey of a young woman. Nonetheless, I fancied myself a bit of a solo Voyager after reading The Dove.
[00:09:02] This was followed by Tracks by Robin Davidson. Another Robin, but this time an Australian woman, who at 19 set off with her dog Digby, and four, drooling and rambunctious camels, and walked the grueling 2,700 kilometers from Alice Springs in central Australia, through the Gibson Desert, to the Western Australian coastline. I read that book several times, wondering if I too could walk across Australia with camels and survive to tell the tale.
[00:09:35] Somewhere in between, I read a novel by American author, James A. Michener. The Drifters is about six young adults from diverse cultural backgrounds who meet up and travel together through Spain, Portugal, Morocco, and Mozambique. One of the characters is 18-year-old Britta from Tromso in Norway. After finishing school, she works in an office fending off the advances of her lecherous boss. And curious about the world beyond the dark winters of Norway, Britta decides to vacation in Torremolinos, Spain. Once there, she finds a job and her life changes to the extent that she never returns to Norway to live.
[00:10:17] The Drifters had a huge impact on me. In fact, I think it must have imprinted on my psyche because when I re-read it a couple of years ago, I realized I had traveled to many of the places mentioned in the book. Not because I plotted my travels accordingly, rather it just happened. And, like Britta, I’ve never returned to my country of origin to live.
[00:10:43] Into my young adulthood. I continued to read the books of women leading exciting and noteworthy lives. This genre of biography and memoir is still my preferred nonfiction reading. And I’d have to say it was my mother, her youthful adventures and reading choices, that fostered my interest in the female narrative.
[00:11:03] Additionally, I’ve always been naturally curious about people, and with an inclination to listen attentively and a keen interest in the lives of others, you can almost predict the direction my life was heading.
[00:11:30] In 1987 at the age of 27, I traveled to the U.S. for the third time. Previously, it had been to travel about the country solo. A couple of years later, it was for a working holiday in Utah, at Park City Ski Resort, since by that time, I was totally into skiing, having worked in my early twenties in two resorts in Australia, as well as in Courcheval, in the French helps. But my third trip to the U.S. was for graduate studies in psychology and counseling.
[00:12:05] Boulder Colorado is a university town with a student population of about 35,000 and that includes a sizeable international student body. By 1991, I’d finished my graduate degree and was working in a women’s clinic counseling young women from varied backgrounds, most of whom were students at the university. I was particularly fascinated by the life events of my international clients, so much so, I wrote them into 45 short stories, fictionalizing the details and the names of the young women to protect their identities.
[00:12:42] Less than 10 years later, and in a new job, I was working in marketing at a small preparatory school for mature aged students from developing countries. They’d been sent by that governments to the U.S. to complete graduate studies in economics and business, with the intention that the students would then return to their countries to work in development. But first, they had to attend the Institute where I worked and improve their English and prepare academically to enter the American university system.
[00:13:15] My job included promoting the school to the local community and beyond. After all, though the Economics Institute was a small enterprise, the cultural diversity of the students, and the roles they’d come from in government and would resume once back in their home countries, meant that it was like a mini UN at the base of the Rocky Mountains.
[00:13:39] As part of my promotion strategy, I would identify students with unique and compelling stories, and then I’d help them prepare for interviews with the local media: newspaper and radio. One of those students, a charismatic young Muslim woman from Kosovo, had an incredible story to share, and it was clear to me and I’m sure everyone that met her, that she was destined for great things. And indeed, that was the case because eventually she did return to Kosovo and went on to serve as the Deputy Prime Minister followed by Minister of Trade and Industry.
[00:14:19] I’m sure it’s clear by now that I’ve spent many years honing my ear for a good story. And this brings me to the point at which I’d finished interviewing women I’d met here in Portugal. And then with over 50 hours of recorded conversations, I had to organize that information into 20 captivating mini memoirs. And I did this by exploring the following topics:
[00:14:44] What causes someone to leave their country of origin, which is the story before their departure. And then what happens to them on the journey to the new place, which is the story of getting from one place to another. And then what causes them to land somewhere and decide to stay, if not indefinitely, then for an extended period.
[00:15:05] I’ve lived abroad since the mid eighties and at different times, people have asked me, why did you leave Australia? Australia is known as the lucky country that people want to move to from all corners of the world due to its economic health, opportunities for better quality of life, and its geographic beauty. So why leave? The most obvious answer is that I left to study in the U.S. where not long after arriving, I fell in love, married, and then nine years later, for very undramatic reasons, we divorced. Basically, I think we’d grown apart, but by then I had a flourishing life in Boulder: community, friends, and my job at the Economics Institute, which I loved. But that was 23 years ago, and it feels as though the reasons I’ve continued to stay abroad, such as my latest move to Portugal in 2014, rather than return to Australia, have become more complex as I’ve aged.
[00:16:08] Interestingly, what I’ve discovered as an interviewer is that it’s much easier to ask others the questions we have difficulty resolving ourselves. In listening thoughtfully to their responses, we often find reassuring, shared experiences that shed light on the grey areas of our life.
[00:16:32] A couple of times a year, I housesit for a friend in London. And while they’re in 2019, I learned of Women of the World Festival. It’s founder and director, an awe-inspiring creative by the name of Jude Kelly had this to say:
[00:16:58] “Women can do extraordinary things because they’re human. The difficulty is they’ve been made to feel that it’s an unusual thing, mainly because people have not called on them to be extraordinary and haven’t really wanted them to be extraordinary, but we are!” She goes on to say, “We have a mutual responsibility to value our own stories.”
[00:17:22] My vision for this podcast is that it achieves Jude Kelly’s directive by becoming a library of substantive stories told by extraordinary women who walk, uplifting stories that I hope will shed light on the grey areas of your life while giving you many, many reasons to value your own unique journey.
[00:17:53] Thank you for listening today. And if you would like to read a transcript of this episode, you can find it in the show notes on my website, LouiseRoss.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review Women Who Walk on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser.