Sub-Project MC 12.3 Reading and Writing at Sea

Project Leader: Susann Liebich

The practices of reading and writing are fundamental to making sense of our world, to orientating ourselves within familiar and new surroundings, to negotiating and maintaining identities, and to cultural exchanges in global and local contexts. This project explored reading and writing practices on sea voyages during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by a range of actors and within a variety of contexts, from nineteenth-century migrants, to soldiers on troopships, ships’ crews, and leisure travellers of the mid-twentieth century. The broad research question was two-fold: How did reading and writing practices performed on ships influence and form part of the experiences of travel, and vice-versa, how did the unique floating space of a ship shape the practices and experiences of reading and writing? One of the case studies of the project explored the reading and writing lives of soldiers on New Zealand troopships during the First World War. Hundreds of transport ships crossed the oceans between New Zealand and the battlegrounds in Europe and the Middle East, a journey that could take several months. Soldiers on board these transports produced troopship magazines during the voyage, which speak of their experiences on board, reveal a sense of comradery and community amongst the men, and provided a means of negotiating the transition from citizen to soldier. Soldiers also interacted with and draw on print cultures at stops along the way, for instance in Freemantle, Colombo or Cape Town, which highlight the manifold cultural exchanges through engagement with print facilitated through oceanic travel.