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Astray is a storytelling project centred on travel, place, culture and identity. 

As a publication, we seek to take readers on journeys, contemplate the breadth of human experience and start conversations about the need to dismantle oppressive global systems.

As an educational tour provider – running writing workshops in Japan, Indonesia and Australia – we seek to foster connection, embody sustainable travel practices and work against colonial and imperialist legacies in the media industry.

Self-funded and independent, we welcome story pitches and workshop applications from writers of all stripes: beginning, emerging and established. 

An image from one of our Bali writing workshops that shows two students dressed in raincoats and farm hats laughing at each other as they clutch a basket of vegetables they have picked.

The trouble with travel writing

A bunch of white male writers have bemoaned what they consider to be the death of travel literature. Often citing ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ as the nail in the coffin of the genre, they decry the indulgence of the idea that even conventional travel can somehow “heal the soul” and turn what they call a “suburban ninny” into a philosopher.

Though we roll our eyes at those misogynists, who are referring to the popular I-found-myself-overseas narratives written by women, most travel writing throughout time has been deeply intertwined with colonialism, western imperialism and neo-colonialism. Driven by a desire to conquer, exoticise the findings to the folk back home and glorify themselves, privileged writers from the global north and their stories have created harmful, dominant narratives that reinforce stereotypes and binary frameworks.

We see it still today in creative non-fiction. We see it in newspapers and in-flight magazines, in Instagram captions, in travel guides, and in tiktok videos made by self-proclaimed digital nomads living overseas. Tourism boards the world over (especially in “Australia”) erase Indigenous histories and cultures, refuse to properly acknowledge genocides and don’t promote locally-owned businesses. We’ve also seen it in the stuff we’ve written and published in the past (Astray has been online since 2013 – more about that below). 

Recreational travel, too, can be wildly harmful

Recreational travel is an enormous privilege that the vast majority of the world does not have access to. 80% of us will never board a flight, and the number of people who’ve been forcibly displaced from their homes and made to travel for necessity is in the hundreds of millions. Conflict, climate change and issues created by colonialism continue to make things worse with every passing day.

Additionally, though recreational travel may bring money to communities, it’s a double-edged sword, with carbon emissions from flying barely the tip of the melting iceberg.

In many places, tourism has grown beyond the bounds of sustainability to the detriment of local people, heritage and ecosystems. Our holidays can cause strains on resources, the commodification of cultural and spiritual practices, a decrease in the quality of life experienced by residents, the forcing of already-marginalised groups closer to the margins, the exploitation of animals, the destruction of local habitats and increases in pollution.

So where does this leave travel writing?

The importance of storytelling cannot be understated. Story has the power to connect us, to soothe, to teach, to spur action, to effect change. Journey is all around us – both the physical and the metaphyical: we are cobbled together from it. 

But we need diverse voices. We need multiple narratives. We need writers who act as stewards of the places they visit, who are committed to working against colonial and imperialist legacies, and who wish to cultivate curiosity and personal enquiry whilst sharing their observations and experiences with humility.

We need to talk about the histories that have shaped present-day places. We need to explore uncomfortable truths. We need to be aware that with the great privilege of being able to travel for pleasure comes great responsibility, and the need to practice sustainable, ethical travel. 

Astray students pose together in their Japanese class.
Astray students getting a rice blessing at Tanah Lot temple in Tabanan, Bali.

Astray is a takeover – a rebranding of sorts.

The publication was founded by Gemma Clarke in 2013, but Astray has not always been our name. For years, we were known as Global Hobo – the late-night-taxi-ride-in-Hanoi idea of a young backpacker and dumpster diver with a journal full of stories from people she’d met on the road. We were a collective of writers who travelled together, partied together and wrote together – but for the first few years, many of us had a limited understanding of the problematic genre we were grappling with.

Since our inception, hundreds of writers have been kind enough to share their stories with us – and for some, their family’s stories also. Though most of these tales have lasted the test of time, others have not. Our old website no longer exists, but we shudder to think what made it through our inexperienced editorial lens in the early days: reinforcing rather than challenging racist, imperialist, misogynistic and whorephobic tropes. The more we move through the world, the more we realise there is a hell of a lot to learn and unlearn, and it will continue to be a journey for us.

As for the name change, the “hobo” in our old moniker was intended to reference an itinerant worker, one who travels from place to place and lives a life on the road. But the more we realised our own privilege and understood the power of language, the more uncomfy we grew with our brand.

One snow-dusted afternoon in the alpine moorlands of lutruwita / Tasmania, we were happily and unknowingly strolling in the wrong direction when one of us stopped in their tracks. “You’ve led us astray!” she scolded the other, laughing. It was instantly decided.

“Ashtray?” some people ask when we tell them what we’re called.

Whatever. We like it.

So here we are, Astray: a journal that strives to build an accessible community around storytelling and provide a space for writers to share original, thoughtful views on journeys and all that they encompass. 

Our ethos is a collage of conscious travel, thriftiness, connection, and liberation. Seeking to work from an intersectional feminist framework (and very willing to have conversations about problems within feminist movements), we aim to open people’s minds to fresh perspectives and show them parts of the world they never knew existed – whilst also having a good laugh at ourselves. 

In a world of grotesque media bias (we wouldn’t even wipe our asses with most of the publications we used to strive to write for as baby journalists – whose one-sided coverage of Palestinian struggle continues to enable genocide and colonial violence) and branded content, we are fiercely independent: self-funding as best we can and paying all our contributors. (If you were ever at one of our kissing booths in the early days, please know that the funding model has changed over time.)

We also run immersive cross-cultural travel writing, freelance and investigative journalism workshops in Australia, Indonesia and Japan, working closely with local language schools, accommodation providers and businesses to provide extraordinary experiential learning. These programs have been accredited by many universities in Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Canada, the US and the UK (but are not just for students, and not just for people from those countries either). We strive to work as ethically as possible in all that we do, and are always interested in learning how we can be better, so don’t hesitate to drop us a line if you’d like to chat about it via our contact page.

To the journey!

Logos by K~SUT STUDIO, collage by Jada De Luca

Astray is run by a team of writers who mostly live, work and play in nipaluna / Hobart. With reverence, we acknowledge the Tasmanian Aboriginal people as the traditional and ongoing custodians of trouwunna / lutruwita / Tasmania: land that was stolen and never ceded. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging.