Yves Rees’ Travelling to Tomorrow opens in San Francisco in 2011 – what Rees calls ‘Obama’s America’, a moment suspended between the promise of progress and the disillusionment that would soon follow. Ferries crisscross a vast bay, eucalyptus trees stretch to blue skies, and Foster the People’s ‘Pumped Up Kick’ pulses through Manhattan warehouse parties.
It is in this pre-Trump, pre-George Floyd era that Rees first falls for the US, a seduction that mirrors the journeys of countless others who crossed oceans in search of a larger life. This is the premise of Rees’ latest work – a historical exploration as much as it is a narrative of ambition and love.
Rees, an Australian researcher, podcaster and author, has already demonstrated a clever ability to combine history with personal insight in anthologies like Nothing to Hide: Voices of Trans and Gender Diverse Australia (2022).
Travelling to Tomorrow follows in this tradition, tracing the lives of 10 Australian women whose aspirations carried them across the Pacific. These women – figures largely forgotten in the grand narratives of national history, which tends to orientate through male icons, such as the Gallipoli digger or the bushranger – embody a particular kind of transoceanic yearning. They sought modernity, reinvention and the promise of a freer life in a world that offered little space for them at home.
With the meticulousness of a historian and the intimacy of a memoirist, Rees unfolds the stories of these Antipodean women – lawyer May Lahey, decorator Rose Cumming, pianist Vera Bradford, economist Persia Campbell and others – whose lives intersect with American modernity between the late 1800s and the 1980s. Each woman, in her own way, brought back ideas and influences that would reshape Australia’s cultural, scientific and artistic landscape.
The book is rich in prose that remains deeply attuned to the finer details of time and place. Rees is at their best when describing the subtleties: the shimmer of wallpaper, bronze arms tucked into a sundress, the sparkle of an eye, the small moments where history comes alive. Here, the book sheds its guise as a mere historical account or academic exploration, revealing itself as something more intimate: what Rees calls a “romance between Uncle Sam and modern women from Down Under”, fuelled by the seductive allure of 20th century faith in progress and the promise of modernity.
Despite initial wisps of Land of Dreams romanticism, Rees’ eye is simultaneously critical, exposing tensions: a dream predicated on progress yet built on the foundations of colonisation, slavery and environmental destruction. The author also acknowledges the limits of their cast, noting that these women were predominantly white, and the opportunities available to them were largely inaccessible to Black, Indigenous, immigrant and working-class women.
Historian Emma Shortis’ critique of the Australia-US alliance as being grounded in “shared whiteness” lingers over the narrative, underscoring the ambiguities that have long shaped these transnational connections.
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Yet, for all this time’s complexities, Rees reminds us that it, however illusory, “still made history”. The journeys chronicled in Travelling to Tomorrow speak to an era defined by its faith in progress – the stories are informative, entertaining and very tender.
Travelling to Tomorrow, Yves Rees
Publisher: NewSouth Books
ISBN: 978174223813
Format: paperback
Pages: 240pp
Price: $34.99
Publication Date: September 2024
