Feminist trailblazer Gloria Steinem with Natasha Mitchell and guests on travels that transformed them

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Gloria Steinem (0:46)

And I mean, I learned from her, this is my conclusion. We all have a Purple Harley inside of us.

We just have to get on it and ride.

Natasha Mitchell (0:57)

Yes, let's imagine her riding that Purple Harley now, with Dolly Parton in the sidecar, the trailblazing feminist, political activist and organiser, journalist and founder of the influential Ms Magazine, Gloria Steinem, died last week at age 92, after a very big life, changing lives. Gloria joined me in 2015 at the Sydney Writers Festival on Gadigal Country to chat about her memoir, My Life on the Road and with two other illustrious guests to explore how travel can be truly transformative. Welcome to ABC Radio National's Big Ideas. Natasha Mitchell joining you today to remember the late Gloria Steinem.

I can't think of a better way to introduce these three incredible souls and this discussion than with a quote from Gloria Steinem's enlivening new memoir, On the Road. I've got a lot out of this book right now in my own life. It was superb. This is the quote, and I have a feeling you'll all connect. Taking to the road, by which I mean letting the road take you, changed who I thought I was. The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories, in short, out of our heads and into our hearts. It's right up there with life-threatening emergencies and truly mutual sex as a way of being fully alive in the present. Please welcome Gloria Steinem.

Activist, organiser, lecturer, journalist, how do we sum her up? Founder of Ms Magazine, winner of the Presidential Medal for Freedom. Please welcome Ali Cobby Eckermann. Poet, extraordinary, novelist, winner of the Kenneth Slesser Prize for Poetry. Ali's latest book is Inside My Mother. Please read it. It is extraordinary. Her memoir was too afraid to cry. Jean-Christophe Rufin.

Doctor, writer, historical fiction novelist. Somewhere along the way, he's also managed to be a co-founder of Doctors without Borders, MSF. Can you believe it?

Changing worlds, all three people, changing their own world as they travel, but changing the world in really powerful ways as they travel. And Jean-Christophe's latest book is The Santiago Pilgrimage. If you read French, you can read all his novels. Gloria, you talk about an on-the-road state of mind and that we don't actually have to be on the road to cultivate it. What is that state of mind? Why is it so vital?

Gloria Steinem (4:19)

For me, it's living in the present. It is talking to the person standing next to you on the curb. It is discovering that my garbage man is the political expert of Manhattan.

I don't know, I realize, I think other people may find this state of being alive in the present through meditation. I have taken several courses in meditation and never managed to build it into my life. But being on the road for me is like that. It is utterly living in the present, which happens to be the only time we can be alive with all five senses as opposed to in the past or in the future.

Natasha Mitchell (4:58)

I mean, you certainly have had that living in the present feeling in the latest big adventure you had. Some of your travels, though, would not have allowed for any kind of meditation.

Jean-Christophe Rufin (5:09)

Now, I have chosen, you know, I have chosen medicine when I wanted to choose my studies in reference to my grandfather because I thought that medicine was a way to travel, travel in the sense, in a global sense, I would say. Travel in the minds, travel in the physical diseases of the people, but travel also, my grandfather was part of these doctors who were, you know, at war during the First World War.

As a surgeon in the front and the Second World War, he was involved in resistance movement and deported to Germany for two years. So I thought medicine was that. And then when I studied, I found something different. Medicine has become a science, and I was about to stay all my life in the same place, a hospital, and I decided that I could not, and I was in need of this movement. So that's why I have chosen to practice medicine in the way that I was thinking it was originally on the road, I should say.