Elected a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 1950 for her visits to Iceland, Yugoslavia, Greece, and Lebanon, Barbara Toy later became the first Westerner to set foot on the summit of Mount Wahni in Ethiopia and received the Rover Award for her transit of North Africa from the Niger River northeast to the Mediterranean, a journey “of outstanding initiative and enterprise.” This award had only been granted once before by the Long-Distance Land-Rover Association. Described by Phillip Llewellin, who interviewed her in 1962 for The Observer (London), as a “traveller in the most full-blooded and old-fashioned sense of the word,” she has recorded eight of her journeys in informal and highly readable books.

Toy was born on 11 August 1908 in Sydney, Australia, to Bert F. Toy, literary editor of the Sydney Bulletin, and Nellie Frederica Toy, née Lowing. In an unpublished letter of 11 October 1994 Toy says that...