'When young men approach me,' writes Peter FitzSimons in his Sydney Morning Herald article 'Plenty to Write Home About', 'I give them a brief speech that runs along the following lines. If you want to write, you have to have something to say that people will give a stuff about ... you need to get out of the safe bubble of your existence and broaden your experience.'
Then, tongue in cheek, he lists the possibilities, which include hitchhiking around Australia, contracting the clap in Amsterdam and driving through Uganda with some drug-addled truck drivers.
And no, he says, he doesn't give the same advice to young women. 'I push the same theme, with different specifics, and then steer them towards my wife.'
It's true that adventure and travel writing has long been the domain of males; males like the free-wheeling James Hamilton-Paterson, who, in his book, Playing with Water, talked of messing around in the Philippines, along lava-strewn tracks, in a tropical jungle and far from home.
Discovering a deserted island, he decided it was just the place to live for a year and write a book. The local chief granted permission after they had drunk enough liquor between them to lay them flat. A young woman would have been hard-put to do that, for in this part of the writing jungle, biology has traditionally dictated destiny.
An uncertain stream of women travel writers has meandered through history, but even the indomitable Freya Stark braved foreign climes with an enormous entourage, while Rose Macaulay had a car and bank account to keep her out of strife, and probably didn't walk out at night. Even the more recent travellers, like the wonderful Alice Steinbach, stick to well-trodden places like Paris, London and Florence.
So, in the past, most feats of derring-do were achieved by men; gentlemen travellers exploring lonely places: Wilfred Thesiger crossing the Sahara in Arabian Sands; Paul Theroux striding down a blighted continent in his Dark Star Safari; Colin Thubron adrift in The Lost Heart of Asia after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Norman Lewis, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Bruce Chatwin, Jonathan Raban, Peter Matthiessen, Simon Winchester and Pico Iyer also belong to this illustrious band of adventurers, all now gone, or hanging up their walking boots.
However, as British explorer Benedict Allen points out in his recent Guardian review of The Great Explorers, by Robin Hanbury-Tenison: 'From the point of view of our dear old absurd and shrunken planet they (the explorers) do