Barbara Toy

Barbara Alex Toy FRGS (11 August 1908 – 18 July 2001) was an Australian-British travel writer, theatrical director, playwright, and screenplay writer. She is most famous for the series of books she wrote about her pioneering and solitary travels around the world in a Land Rover, undertaken in the 1950s and 1960s. Toy was drawn to deserts, and so the majority of her journeys were in the arid lands of Northern Africa and the Middle East. Toy's first solo journey took place almost five years before the perhaps more celebrated six-man team Oxford and Cambridge Far Eastern Expedition, a London to Singapore overland trip between September 1955 and March 1956 that was also undertaken in Land Rovers.

Toy was born in Sydney, on 11 August 1908 to Bert Frank Claud Toy and Nellie Frederica Toy, née Lowing, one of two daughters born to the couple. Her father, Bert Toy (1878–1931), was a newspaper editor and war correspondent. He had reported from the Boer War in South Africa and had worked on and edited newspapers in New Zealand and in Australia, including the Wairarapa Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, The Sunday Times, The Sun, The Bulletin (where he was literary editor) and the Australian Woman's Mirror. The family were well-read and eschewed formal education; consequently Toy was largely self-taught, although she did attend Neutral Bay School in Sydney for a time. Her father encouraged Toy's interest in writing from an early age. In 1930 Toy married Ewing Rixson, a member of a well-known New York Quaker family. At the time of her marriage, Toy was a librarian at the Roycroft Library, a bookshop and library established by Frances Zabel in Rowe Street, Sydney, in the 1920s. Rixson had a passion for books and travel, (at the time of their marriage he was already a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society), and introduced Toy to the world of travel. However, the couple gradually drifted apart, and separated from her husband, Toy moved to London in 1935.

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