AustLit

'Unlike Lyn Drummond's previous book, Where To Go For a Seven-Year Cycle, which mainly focused on her travels from 2003 to 2010 in a specific region (Central and Eastern Europe), this companion covering the years 2011 to 2018 highlights more random locations. Painters, Philosophers and Poets Sustain a Seven-Year Cycle tells stories of how she shared her footprint with the ghosts of famous people who coincidentally lived in the same places as she did, often eras apart from one another. The books' titles are based on philosophical views that seven years of our lives represent a particular cycle. Follow the author's journeys from the bleak reality of war crime trials at The Hague's International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia to the cobbled charm of Arles, the French city where the Dutch painter Van Gogh flourished. To places as diverse as Vietnam and Ecuador, North Macedonia and Louisiana, the Netherlands and Hungary. Uncovering facts hitherto unknown to her about historic figures such as Tsar Peter the Great of Russia, Albert Einstein, Ho Chi Minh, Alexander the Great, Mata Hari, the last Creole plantation owner, Laura Locoul Gore, and the Hungarian pioneer of Covid-19 vaccines, Dr Katalin Karik³. What she learned from some of the people in this book affected her own perspectives. For example, researching the work of seventeenth-century philosopher Barach Spinoza, who lived near her home in The Hague, resulted in scrutiny of her own beliefs about religion, nature and spirituality. Searching for reasons why Paul C©zanne was so enamoured with Mont Sainte-Victoire, which overlooks the artist's home city of Aix en Provence, triggered strong reactions to compelling landscapes. As well, the book probes the influence American poet Robert Frost had on Edward Thomas, the British poet, essayist and novelist who wrote a poem that struck an evocative chord with a nation on the brink of World War I. This second memoir delves further into the author's quest to achieve individuation, a term often associated with Carl Jung and his psychology. Jung believed individuation - a deep understanding of oneself - answers the question of who we really are beneath our responsibilities and social roles, once we face up to our hidden secrets and make peace with our darkest corners. Daring to be ourselves no matter how different we are from others. ' (Publication summary)

'A philosophical, often off the main tourist beat travel book based on the author Lyn Drummond's seven years' travel experiences working mainly in central and eastern Europe. The book's title is based on a Jung philosophy that seven years of our lives represent a particular cycle and she has just completed such a cycle.

The seven years began when she left Sydney in 2002 to work in Chuuk in the Federated States of Micronesia as a volunteer for an aid agency. The journey continues in 2003 to Hungary and a three year contract at the Australian embassy in Budapest, and later as a teacher and journalist in other parts of the region, such as Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia and Albania. It is not a travel book in the sense that it lists places and contact details, but an exploration of a region she previously had no particular interest in, a renewed discovery of her European heritage, a strong relationship with a city (Budapest) she has no traditional or family connection to and a contemplation of the strong feelings she once had for Australia. The book also examines elements of exile, and anonymity in foreign countries which can create a rather contented bubble of living, sometimes immune from more deeper emotions - including in the context of her long friendship with the late Australian writer Randolph Stow, who settled in her home town in England and whose books dwelt on these themes.' (Publisher's website)