RailEnquiry

Snaking across the length and breadth of the subcontinent, India's railway system has often been likened to veins feeding the beating heart of a large and complex nation.Over more than 160 years the system has chugged away, adapting to change as India itself has faced it: from simple, overcrowded carriages frequented by the poor to tourist-targeted luxury services that evoke some of the grandeur of the country's colonial past.Amid these hugely divergent choices, a group of Australian and Indian authors last year crowded into a sleeper car in Mumbai and embarked on an unusually intimate 3½-week journey, of an AsiaLink program that took the traditional concept of an overseas writer's tour and turned it into something more immersive and ''real''.''It was a bit like a literary lasagne,'' says children's and young adult fiction writer Kirsty Murray. ''There was me and Ben Law and Sudeep and Annie and Georgia and Chandrahas and all of these layers of authors and designers and thinkers, which was nice, though occasionally arduous. A great way to get to know people is watching them wake up. Watching them wake up and listening to them snore is a very intimate experience with another writer.''Advertisement With them were six handcrafted travelling cases, home to a cleverly designed portable library filled with hundreds of Australian books. Created by Melbourne duo Georgia Hutchison and Rob Sowter, the cases were originally intended for the comparatively gentle task of rolling into and out of a few hotel lobbies along the group's 4000-kilometre journey across southern India.

Instead the cases, handmade in a Brunswick workshop of Australian hardwood, plyboard and vegetable-dyed kangaroo leather, were taken aboard the trains, too, where they were accidentally doused in the juices from defrosted fish, were temporarily misplaced for days on end and, in one instance, shared storage space with an in-use coffin.

''We didn't imagine that they would have to go through as much trauma as they did,'' Hutchison says. ''I had been and lived in India before so I do know what it's like, but there are so many different types of India and the type of India that we went to was different to the described. But they held up.''

Both affiliated with RMIT's Design Hub, Hutchison's and Sowter's initial brief from AsiaLink's writing programs manager Nic Low was vague - he knew he wanted to create a travelling library, but didn't know how that should look or what it should mean.

''We worked with him to develop the shape of the project … suggesting that maybe we create a space, that maybe a library needs to be somewhere that you can physically sit down and read a book or where you can sit around and have ideas about books,'' Hutchison says.

The result is a collection of deceptively simple cases on wheels, some of which house components for modular wooden bookshelves that can be adjusted for height and length, and braced to each other for support. In events in Mumbai, Goa, Bangalore and Chennai the five authors - Australians Kirsty Murray and Benjamin Law, and Indians Annie Zaidi, Chandrahas Choudhury and Sudeep Sen - would set up the library filled with offerings from classic and contemporary Australian writers, using the cases as seats and referring to the books on display to discuss aspects of Australian culture and literary history. In each city, a complete set of the books was donated to a major library and the authors also visited numerous schools along the way.

''In a way I was really blown away when I went to India and discovered so much amazing Indian literature that I had not been able to find in Australia,'' Murray says of her first trip to India in 2007 to research her young adult historical fiction book India Dark.

''I was completely gobsmacked at this huge divide of each culture being in a colonial narrative and yet so little understanding of each other's stories.''

In August, the literary exchange that began with last November's Bookwallah tour of India will continue on to Australia as Zaidi and Choudhury appear as part of the Melbourne Writers Festival. They will later join Murray and Law on a train journey taking them from Melbourne to Sydney and on to Brisbane for the Brisbane Writers Festival.

The cases, meanwhile, are staying put. Their materials, such as brass fittings and the kangaroo skin exteriors, were chosen for their ageing qualities - and they are now beginning to show some wear. ''Like a well-travelled pair of jeans,'' says Hutchison.

A documentary about the Bookwallah project will screen at Federation Square on July 30 and run every Tuesday in August. The cases are on display in the State Library's Cowen Gallery until September 1.