Name: Adventures of a Compulsive Traveller
SKU: 9781921924316
Price: 29.95 AUD
Availability: InStock

Description

Journalist Dominic Dunne’s travels have rarely been ordinary, despite his best intentions. He has been travelling all his life, from the time his parents started their annual pilgrimage to the opal fields of Lightning Ridge. Since then he has trekked all over Australia and to some 60 countries, spending his life trying to satisfy his insatiable appetite for travelling, an addiction that has taken him to wonderful and sometimes dangerous places where he has met all manner of people. In this book Dominic uses insight and wit – and a good dollop of gossip – to capture the highlights (and lowlights) from destinations the world over. Dominic takes readers backstage with Nana Mouskouri in Greece and in search of the ghosts of Elvis Presley in Mississippi. He escapes marauding Americans at Noël Coward’s Jamaican sanctuary, crosses cranky guards in North Korea, rubs shoulders with Hillary Clinton in Washington and solves a life-long mystery in Zimbabwe. And he meets his namesake, the best-selling American author Dominick Dunne, with whom he forges an enduring friendship.

“Dominic Dunne has had a surfeit of quirky travel experiences, and amazingly, has lived to tell the tale. Now would someone please confiscate his passport?’ Pamela Stephenson-Connolly

“Funny, exciting and weird. I’m so jealous of his adventures.” Jane Caro

“You certainly know how to write!” The other Dominick Dunne

Dominic Dunne

Dominic Dunne is an award-winning journalist who has worked on major newspapers including The Australian. He started his career as a cadet reporter on The Courier-Mail in Brisbane in 1984 and later moved to Sydney to be News Limited’s interstate correspondent. He was recruited by Qantas Airways to work as Assistant to the CEO and in 2004 relocated to Washington DC where he was employed by the Australian Embassy as a communications consultant before returning to Sydney. Dunne and his twin brother were born in Brisbane in 1966 and raised with their five siblings on the Sunshine Coast. He is a keen traveller, having visited more than 60 countries, and has written about many of them. Adventures of a Compulsive Traveller is his first book.

More at www.adventuresofacompulsivetraveller.com

This is a collection of travel stories from Australia and the world, told in a fresh, witty and intelligent voice.
Qantas News, October 2012

Dominic Dunne has been everywhere and he wants you to know it. From a visit to North Korea (“the heart of darkness”) to more than 60 other countries including the US, Britain and even tiny Panama, Dunne has certainly been there, done that.

The Examiner, 13 October 2012

A wild and humorous ride in search of the famous and the infamous in the world’s strangest locations.

Think Australian, Bookseller+Publisher, Australia, 2012

Dunne is an Australian journalist and globetrotter. This book comprises bite-size fragments of his travel experiences … His great gift is a boundless curiosity. He also tests boundaries. There is material here for most tastes. For the armchair traveller.

Lucy Sussex, The Age, 2 December 2012

‘I must admit to not having read a great deal of travel writing, having been restricted to the odd P.J. O’Rourke and Bill Bryson. However, I think Adventures of a Compulsive Traveller by Dominic Dunne could sit well in their company.

Dunne grew up in Queensland in the 1970s. His early employment was as a cadet journalist for Brisbane’s Courier Mail, and he later worked as assistant to the CEO of Qantas, as well as a communications consultant for the Australian Embassy in Washington (all of which obviously helped him amass a few thousand air miles). Now, he has put together these experiences and encounters into an extremely amusing and intelligent collection of travel stories.

The gift of a good travel writer is to be self-deprecating while at the same time giving the reader a little bit of history about the subject. On Dunne’s many travels, we get to hear of his hobnobbing with Hilary Clinton and his inability to converse with Yoko Ono (she renders him frozen with fear), as well as a hilarious trip to Graceland and his preference for Japanese baths. On many occasions we observe how insular Americans can be.

When Dunne talks about standing on the very balcony in Hawaii where the opening sequence to the original 70s TV show Hawaii Five-O was filmed, you get this tinkling of nostalgia.

Some of Dunne’s stories are so outlandish – like his encounters with singer Nana Mouskouri or a certain liquorice incident with Gene Pitney – that you’ll chuckle to yourself, amazed that these things actually happened. The most touching part of the collection is the author’s 20-year friendship with his namesake: former Hollywood producer, novelist and Vanity Fair writer Dominick Dunne.’

Michael Awosoga-Samuel, Readings Monthly, November 2012

Adventures of a Compulsive Traveller