Clichés cling to travellers it seems, I feel like I have pretty much nailed them all. The first one is kind of cheating: I loved to write before going away, however the distance from loved ones seemed to give me a drive and a reason to thrust my ideas onto the internet, and down the three remaining interested family member’s throats. The next one wasn’t ‘technically’ my fault either. Me AND Lisa made a decision to buy a half decent camera. We wanted to turn this trip into “something we remembered”, or some other emotionally charged excuse people come up with when spending twice what they budgeted because the guy in the shop said it was: ”one step away from professional.” He saw me coming a mile off. Turns out I immediately became fascinated with learning how to take pictures in a way that would make all five of the people on my face book hit the ‘like’ button. It’s as though I have a need for praise and assurance... Well I would like to introduce you to cliché no.3: People.
It’s my favourite thing in the world to do. Watching and learning about the people who surround you. I used to think I was good at ‘reading people’, until I realised that there is seemingly no end to the levels of deception they place between themselves and any other living human being. Seriously, the self awareness that allows human nature’s largest leaps forward also constricts around our personalities in a web of insecurities and self doubt. Travelling adds both advantages and disadvantages to this hobby: firstly, people seem slightly disarmed with the knowledge that their interaction with you will be brief, and you will not bring the information to bear against them in the future. This allows them to reinvent themselves in front of your eyes, good because this if often when people show who they want to be without the influences of home or family or culture. But bad, as they are still changing their skin constantly and you might have met the person for who they were in that single conversation with you.
The second advantage to travelling is you both have information to exchange. You have hopefully been to interesting places and have stories to tell, the local person normally knows more about where they are from. Most of the people are put in a position above you immediately, because they get to teach you something you don’t already know. You are automatically at a disadvantage as it were, standing in their ‘back yard’. This therefore allows them to be less guarded and forthcoming with whom they really are. Immediately mutually non threatening. Likewise, if they are another traveller you immediately have a link and a way to engage them. Although: “Oh where have you been so far?” or “where are you heading next?” gets very dull, very quickly. it seems quite hard to avoid a strange competitive element, as each person seeks to add a sheen of individuality to their experience. It is another over used cliché that when you travel it is normally best to avoid other travellers as much as possible.
The disadvantages however are also apparent. Firstly these people are alien; the patterns you learn from people at home mean nothing. You can’t lay the stereotypes across them to see how many points fit. Without this reference point acting as an extra sense, you have to either make judgements broader (huge common psychological sign posts) or make comparisons within limited information. I suppose you could always just ask.
Secondly backgrounds are so different in foreign countries that the experiences you draw from your own past do not fit the same conclusions later on in life. An important part of people watching is often unravelling the adult traits back to past experiences, and the easiest comparison is normally my own. For example: how was I to know that casual confidence in a newly made friend, might trail back along a line and begin with three years spent at university spearing fish on a weekend and trading left over’s for favours? I didn’t even know that was a thing people could do.
Secondly backgrounds are so different in foreign countries that the experiences you draw from your own past do not fit the same conclusions later on in life. An important part of people watching is often unravelling the adult traits back to past experiences, and the easiest comparison is normally my own. For example: how was I to know that casual confidence in a newly made friend, might trail back along a line and begin with three years spent at university spearing fish on a weekend and trading left over’s for favours? I didn’t even know that was a thing people could do.
All that being said: cliché included, I love it. People are the one thing that makes the places we are seeing what they are. The humanity changes constantly no matter whether you are in a different suburb or country. I would really like to share a few human beings that have really stood out in our experience. A couple I have fallen in love with and some with whom I am glad our time was transient. The first person I would like to talk about, we met just a few weeks ago. A wonderful woman who has carried a torch that flickers as much in reflection of her own childhood and love for her father, as it does down the corridors of history. She was our guide of the convict settlements on Sarah Island. This was a lady who brought to mind my mother, through her eccentricity and blind passion for what she did. Her large ranger style hat bobbing and her wax covered coat thrown back in the wind as her arms were wide; as if she was welcoming us to Jurassic Park itself. Her eyes beamed with pride regardless of the stifled uncomfortableness that is always apparent when boringly normal people are confronted with someone who loses themselves in something. It’s sad how difficult it is to observe true passion. She painted a picture of her childhood subconsciously. A beautiful tapestry of her father and the love that came so naturally entwined with her paternal figure, that it became hers whether she liked it or not. She loved history as much as history was a part of him. “It took thirteen years of his very own research to put this story together.” He had died the year before and without knowing it had lived both their lives.
The next guy was amazing: we had planned a beautiful morning for climbing Cradle Mountain with our friend and fellow platypus hunter, Neil. It turned into me bribing the owner of a ninety year old steam train to let him ride in the driver’s seat. It was pissing down and Lisa wasn’t the only one who was sick of being wet and cold. Cue the “longest pub in Tasmania.” What a claim. All we cared about was that it had a fire and served wedges with sweet chilli and sour cream. Lisa was over at the pool table frustrated that Neil had “too many balls on the table for me to pot the black.” Obviously I wanted to talk to the locals. One reason was because we were hot on the tail of the elusive platypus, and secondly because people that live out in a regularly snowed in part of Tasmania fascinated me. I thought I would play it safe. I used some information I had gleaned from the front page of an idle newspaper to start a conversation to do with football, mistake. A kindly old man welcoming us to warm ourselves through by the fire became hateful in seconds. “I don’t know why anyone gives a shit about anything that suk has to say.” I honestly didn’t know enough to carry on the conversation and was not interested in landing on the wrong side of public opinion, so I kind of pretended to be distracted by the TV. This is the problem with starting conversations you don’t know much about. He carried on regardless... “Well he’s a coon ain’t he?” I stared at him and was struck by the fact that living in England I had not come across open racism for racism’s sake for a long time. At least, I thought, in England our racism is served with a side of apology, embarrassment or just smeared in just enough humour to be allowed on stage. People have opinions and stereotypes and I have had a fair share of conversations with kids spouting parent’s rhetoric against Muslims and blah, but the word still hit me pretty hard. Obviously I started laughing. He looked at me blankly and I honestly couldn’t think what to say. He ploughed on, I think, but I can’t really remember the rest of it. I was caught up in reflecting on another aspect of Australia that seems odd to me. The government has not handled the integration of aboriginals well.. At All. We decided that it had cleared up outside after all. Time to hit the mountain.
The last person I want to write about is black. Not Aboriginal black, but African black. This, it seems, is important. The reason I began our conversation was different this time. I was feeling insecure and wanted reassurance and fake compliments to boost my ego. I also needed a distraction from feeling sick. I had dragged poor Lisa along to one of Melbourne’s last surviving poetry nights. As always with these things (he says having read at two his whole life... including this one) it was out of the city centre and so uninterested in the rest of the world, we walked past it once. As we arrived I immediately noticed the organiser. Who else would be wearing a beret, long dangly earrings and a waistcoat and white shirt combo that Keats himself would have approved of? His name, obligingly, was Gizmo. It was odd, everyone says that Australia is like England was fifty years ago. Fashion is slower here, lots of things are. This however was a whole underground scene lost back in the days where lethario poets had to be white, unwashed, alternatively dressed and most of all distinctly poetic. The last event (the first) I had been to was in London and oozed of over enthusiastic, modern young people, eagerly clapping the good and bad alike to show the support of the arts. But the people were all distinctly normal people. Here everyone was distinctly a poet. The odd thing was, in a bar full of feather earrings and matted hair, my zipped up hoody and jeans made me feel uncouth and out of place. We sat at the bar because apart from Lisa, my other crutches were thousands of miles away, and the one that travels best of all is wine. Two glasses down, I leaned over with half an interest: “are you planning on reading?” The woman replied with largeness to her confidence that immediately put me at rest. “I will before the end.” What knowledge. She knew herself; her identity seemed to stand in front of her, pour out from her without the normally necessary words. Her passions were clear; history in Australia was keen to sweep the guilt that a modern generation felt under the carpet. It was raw, recent and bled out of her completely wiping my nerves from memory. She talked about how wrongs were not yet righted in Australia, how the youth felt a strange absent guilt, and yet battled with a full understanding that it was not their fault. She understood both sides. Racism was still rife, and it was odd how a government so keen to bring people together refused to accept responsibility for what it had done. I didn’t talk, I listened and she and Lisa discussed. She taught us history, African history in Australia as well as the Aboriginal. She ran a radio event and hosted a poetry night dedicated to African culture. I rankled at the exclusivity, but then again I didn’t feel I had a right to complain. It’s strange being the face of all the evil in the world while discussing the past crimes of a nation with a woman who has nothing but passion and smiles in her eyes. The detached guilt and the welcoming nature of her were emotions that seemed to bleed together as well as oil and water. I wasn’t sure which was the denser of the two. The thing that had been jarring me hit me all of a sudden. We were talking about now. The strangeness of past wrongs being within a couple of generations is unnerving. I was wandering through life with the blissful ‘get out of jail free card’ that says: all the evils committed were so far in the past that we only commemorated them to stop them happening again. I was wrong, in Australia the conflicts and the misunderstandings are happening now. It is now. Both senses of injustice: The young white generation unable to fully take the blame nor completely shrug it off, and the young black generation given the option to assimilate into a culture their grandparents still don’t have the tools to become a part of. Even the do-gooders that try to offer a future to young indigenous people have modern western cultures held out in the palm of their hands. It was my turn to talk... I stood there in silence because I had the wrong poem up on my phone. I felt like I had not much to say next to her. When she got up I sat down knowing I had made a poor effort and looked forward to her powerful message. She opened her mouth to read and sang.
Be it an old racist man who helps run a pub, an emblazoned young woman who feels she belongs in a modern black panthers or just a bushwhacker who stole both our hearts; the message has been the same. The people around you teach you the things you learn. They don’t mean to teach you and you don’t mean to learn but it happens. Groups of people talk the same way, use the same vernacular and share the same beliefs and opinions. It’s no coincidence. It’s obvious when we are younger, each wonderfully open teenager a pituri dish of their surroundings. However I had forgotten that there were things to learn. I had learnt it all and was ready to just teach. It turns out I was wrong.