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ABSTRACT
The relative compactness of postcards belies their significance as vehicles for much that is interesting about tourism. In providing vignettes of holiday happenings and tourist events, they are invaluable documents, which hold much that is telling about how individuals chronicle being on the move and in alien places. They are a form of travel writing, but one which has not attracted much scholarly attention, or if it has, then it has been restricted to a particular time period or unconnected individuals. This paper’s approach is different in that it focuses on a corpus of postcards from a single provenance, which means that the cards involved, which extend from the early 1970s through to the present, are interconnected in various ways. Moreover, as many of their senders and receivers were accessible for interview, it has been possible to employ a form of textual ethnography and consult with them about their postcards.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank those who made this paper possible, who gave their precious time to talk to the author about their postcards and allowed them to be reproduced and the two referees whose valuable comments ameliorated its analytic acumen.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Colin Symes is an honorary lecturer in the Department of Educational Studies, Macquarie University. Recent papers have appeared in Critical Studies in Education, Space and Culture and the Journal of Australia Studies. His most recent book (with Kal Gulson) is Education and the mobility turn (Routledge).