Hardie Grant, 2012

Still wrestling with her own experience of growing up in India as the child of Australian missionaries, Kate James is haunted by the story of murdered compatriot Graham Staines. Along with his two young sons, the manager of the mission at Baripada (who helped establish the Mayurbhanj Leprosy Home) was burned alive by Hindu fundamentalists in Orissa while asleep in his car. In search of the man behind the 1999 headlines – and the context behind the conflict in a country known for its religious tolerance – Kate returns to the subcontinent where she grew up. She travels from the hill station of Ooty to Darjeeling via the steamy Coramandel Coast, visiting Catholic shrines, an atheist ashram, a temple to Hindu missionaries and the Kolkata slums, as well as Staines’s Home and her own childhood school. Part detective story, part personal journey, Kate’s engrossing reportage explores India’s complex tapestry of religion and mysticism, assessing its Christian, Buddhist, Hindu and atheist heritage as she comes to terms with the faith she has rejected.

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Kate is a travel writer and editor based in Melbourne, Australia. A former print journalist and the author of two travel memoirs, she works as a freelance editor. She lives in the northern suburbs with her partner and dogs. Contact Kate at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Pluto Press, 2006

Armed with a copy of Monkey and a Mandarin phrasebook and with a craving for skewered lamb, Australian writer Kate James travelled across the deserts of northwest China in the footsteps of three early-20th-century Christian missionary women and their adopted daughter.
Kate had became drawn to the writings of three extraordinary women, Mildred Cable and the sisters Eva and Francesca French, who spent most of their lives in China, adopted a deaf Mongolian daughter called Topsy and braved sandstorms and warlords to cross the barren Gobi desert on a Bible-laden donkey cart five times between 1923 and 1936.
Tired of aimless travel and the backpacker scene, Kate decided to follow the Trio through the sands, from their girls school in central China along the Silk Road into Central Asia, the monasteries of Tibet and into China’s Muslim provinces.
Along the way she met a young Living Buddha who liked to draw cars, ate yak hot-pot, was groped by a monk, went briefly mad with altitude sickness, breathed in too much second-hand cigarette smoke and watched China knocking down its historic neighbourhoods and brushing up on its English skills in preparation for the Olympic Games.
Throughout the journey the lapsed evangelical was surprised at how much she drew inspiration from the three women missionaries of last century. She also discovered something amazing in following their footsteps: religion was now thriving in China. Their legacy was alive in spite of nearly sixty years of communism. Like socialism, it had taken on Chinese characteristics.

Women of the Gobi is out of print; contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. if you'd like a pdf or a print copy.