Travels
“What you remember saves you.”
— W. S. Merwin
Blame my parents, lovingly of course. Partly necessity, partly temperament, they raised me to keep a bag by the door and an eye on the horizon. When your baseline shifts every year or so, “home” becomes less an address than a state of attention. Revisionist history is a tempting sport, but it’s a poor memoirist. I will try to tell it straight. The places, the work, the people who gave each stop its colour.
Curiosity is a tractor beam. “What’s over that hill?” has dragged me along more roads than any career plan. It hauled me out to remote communities where red dirt finds its way into your boots and your bedding and to the bush tracks. Work there is elemental. You count diesel drums and daylight, you learn the language of generators and the etiquette of long distances. A converted garage can be a clinic, a boardroom, a refuge. The coffee might be instant, but the welcome is often brewed strong.
Then came the great offshore revelation. I like to say I was dragged kicking and screaming into Asia, but only the first week fits the statement. Singapore cured me of complaint.
I never looked back, but I never exactly left either. The mind learns to hold opposites, boardroom polish and bush pragmatism. Asia taught me. Remote Australia kept me honest. “Never miss an opportunity,” someone old and wise told me once. “They can’t take experience from you.” I wrote that line down and have been trying to live it ever since.
Airports became my unofficial office. I’ve outlined programs, written grant pitches, mended friendships, watched families say things with their eyes they couldn’t say out loud. Railway stations taught me patience; autobahns taught me trust; Sri Lankan roads taught me patience. India sharpened my appetite for the improbable. China trained me to look sideways. New Zealand was a step back in time.
Back home, remote Australia was unimpressed by my loyalty to air-conditioning. The desert teaches constraint, and the tropics teach forgiveness.. You learn to ask better questions, to listen until you’ve stopped hearing your own voice in your head. Respect arrives on time or not at all.
Between these worlds, suites and bush tracks, lives a small registry of private rules. Don’t walk if you can ride. Save your legs for when wheels fail. If in doubt, turn in the opposite direction to the way you think. Counterintuitive routes have delivered me more than once. Pack light except for patience. Keep a clean copy of your passport and two languages in your pocket. The formal one for rooms with glass and the frank one for rooms with corrugated iron.
Buses, trains, taxis: the holy trinity. They will break down on you, and you will bless them anyway.
Of all the places stamped into my passports, Asia, Europe, New Zealand, India, Sri Lanka, China, it’s the unglamorous corridors that made a life
