Searching for Australia’s first novelist in the foothills of the Himalayas

The former British hill station of Mussoorie, in the foothills of the Himalayas, affords the visitor two extraordinary views. Facing south, one takes in the seemingly endless Doon Valley, lit up at night by the city of Dehradun. That city is only 36 kilometres away as the crow flies, but it’s also several thousand metres below, should the crow in question plummet. Turn north and the mountains predominate. Indeed, from a certain vantage on Camel Back Road, snow-capped peaks can be glimpsed, several sources of the Ganges among them, through trace elements of cloud.

At the eastern end of the town’s 1.6 km-long mall, along which civil and military men and their wives once took their evening constitutionals, the Hotel Himalaya Club is grandly situated to take in both views, which is to say that its original building is. My own lodgings are across the road, in the Hari Niwas Block, which was built long after the original. But my hosts assure me that the block was here in ‘the old days’ too, by which they mean the days prior to Indian independence. Indeed, there is still something of the old mess hall about the dining room, with its communal seating and collegial atmosphere. As I sit at my table and sip gingerly on a lassi, I open John Lang’s Wanderings in India and Other Sketches of Hindostan. It opens in this very room, or, at least, in its equivalent across the way: