On that particular holiday you reward their invitation and goodwill by sneaking out of your LA hotel room and going out driving with some twenty-something college student you meet in a hamburger restaurant after insisting that your parents sit at another table on the other side of the room and pretend they’ve never met you before. This man may or may not be a rapist or a serial killer, you don’t really bother to check his credentials before getting into his jeep and gaily taking off into the balmy Los Angeles evening. After returning miraculously unscathed and unpenetrated, you spend the remaining two months and seventeen days lurching from tourist mecca to glorious landscape with a surly expression and a faceful of Judy Blume. Hapless, hollow-eyed guardians forced for some incomprehensible reason—bribes, perhaps, or a death threat against other members of the family—to ferry shrieking infants on long-haul flights have nothing on the hellishness of travelling with a teenager.
I was five years of age when my parents had first decided I was ripe for a twelve-week overseas journey. ‘It will be good for her,’ they told themselves whilst performing water aerobics and protesting against Reagan and drinking Tab and whatever else it was people did for amusement in 1981. ‘It will expand her mind and free her from her slightly bookish and eccentric fantasy world.’ Obviously at some additional point they must also have shrieked in delighted unison, ‘AND SHE CAN BEGIN HER SCRAPBOOKING CAREER’ as an unbridled demonic insistence on cataloguing our journey came hand-in-hand with the plane ticket.
Scrapbooks. Scrapbooks. They seemed to be obsessed with scrapbooks. Everywhere we went, every little road trip, every beach jaunt, there my parents were, pulling out the craft scissors and the Clag, collecting postcards from hotel lobbies, plane tickets, bus tokens, used tissues. They insisted I spend at least an hour a day carefully documenting the previous twenty-four hours in a combination of layered cuttings and prose, leaving no detail un-noted, no anecdote untold.
‘You can’t sleep yet,’ my mother would announce with horror as I crawled into the fold-out hotel bed, exhausted from a day of frolicking in the snow in Lucerne, or having my face garishly painted by a Dutch clown, or pretending I was Superman on the Eiffel Tower, ‘you haven’t done your scrapbook.’
They even, god help them, tried to enforce the scrap-booking regime in those later years when the merest mention of a sit-down family activity was greeted with colourfully disrespectful displays of mimed vomiting. I did as I was told, though. My teenage travel scrapbooks may have been filled with derogatory snarls such as ‘Went to Centre Pompidou. Gay’ or the more unintentionally apt ‘Went to San Francisco. Gay’, but they were still duly filled and exist to this day as a memento of the trip.
Have you ever really experienced a road trip or holiday if it’s not documented in some fashion? Modern roamers utilise Flickr accounts or blogs or Facebook as a sort of show-offy collection of look-at-the-fun-time-we’re-having-while-you’re-at-home-indulging-in-a-little-cry-into-your-biscuit photographs. Punk cabaret artist and prolific Twitter user Amanda Palmer once bemoaned, ‘It’s a tragedy that my reaction to seeing something interesting is turning away to grab my camera. The first thought is that there is something beautiful happening, and the second thought is that it will be meaningless if I don’t share it. Those are frightening moments. The ones when you go, “God, I’ve been living for everyone else.”’ At the very least scrapbooking is a private exercise, or it is for most people who don’t get drunk with a boyfriend and demand he sit on the living room floor reliving every precious memory and superglued serviette. (‘Look, and here’s me accidentally touching Snoopy’s testicles at Knott’s Berry Farm.’)
I travelled a great deal with my parents. We went to Europe and America and Adelaide. I don’t know where this burning desire for me to scrapbook came from. Possibly they felt if I were bent over a creamy pair of inviting A3 pages, immersed in the task of cutting and pasting and slyly ingesting the odd bit of Clag I wouldn’t keep humiliating them in public. In Ireland I had witnessed some gypsy children begging for change in a crowded market and clearly felt the practice had merit. For the remainder of that trip, whenever my parents lost sight of me they would inevitably stumble upon me moments later standing on a corner with sad eyes and an upturned palm. I begged outside the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, I begged at Universal Studios. When in mortified tones they tried to impress upon me that I couldn’t just stand in public places randomly asking people for money I started drawing pictures in my notebook and attempting to sell them instead. When this activity too was inevitably forbidden, I began marching up to strangers and singing ‘God Save the Queen’ and requesting loose change at show’s end. I was nothing if not creative, and probably could have funded an extra twelve weeks of travel if my folks hadn’t been such oppressive buzz killers.
Outside of all the begging and the tireless scrapbooking, that particular trip was wonderful, what I can recall of it. We saw the Louvre and Anne Frank’s house and experienced a not unlively moment where we went to visit Nana Mouskouri backstage after a concert and she sang to us. I demanded to feed the pigeons in Trafalgar Square and upon receipt of a breadcrumb bag instantly managed to explode it between my tiny hands, leading to an avian frenzy my father still refers to with a haunted expression as ‘that time you were nearly killed by pigeons’.
The scrapbooking gene somehow stayed with me and as I grew older and holidayed with boyfriends I would insist we document our journeys together. My first love Christopher and I used the scrapbook of our American trip mostly to have arguments with each other (‘I was being a dick and Chris threw a book at me, which smacked me in the face’ read one entry of mine, while another in his hand reads: ‘Hello. My name is Marieke Hardy. I am a gullible, awestruck Australian tourist. Please take all my money’). We fought the whole way up Highway 1. We fought in Hearst Castle. We fought at Disneyland. We spent Christmas Day in the high-kitsch surrounds of the Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo watching the Star Wars trilogy from the comfort of a novelty bed and we fought there too. It was a volatile pairing, a bad combination of zodiac signs. Travelling together brought out the worst in us, the overtired, poisonous, insecure parts of our personalities, and we documented each and every bitter falling out. As a postscript to the scrapbook we wrote a Q and A for each other to complete, with topics like ‘Favourite person on the trip?’ and ‘America at its most kitsch!’ Under ‘Moments You Wanted to Chuck in the Towel’ Christopher wrote simply: ‘When Marieke was being a dickhead.’
Undeterred, I kept up the tradition in later relationships.
My then husband Sime and I scrapbooked our trip to East Timor and Bali, an odd little holiday that included a musical tour he did of the Timorese jungle. I met with him over there, accompanied by armed guard, and we stayed in a hotel riddled with bullet holes and staffed by one-armed bellboys.We ate fresh calamari and drank cold white wine on one of the silent, still beaches, and looked out over an enormous ball of sunset. The air was thick and warm. The sand, a mandala beneath our toes. Sime was burnt a beautiful brown, sleepy and full of love. We had been married about a year. I scrapbooked the moment with great sentimentality.
‘In the future, when I feel dreadful and things are going badly,’ I wrote, slowly and carefully, ‘I want to think of this moment. Of us, sitting together on this beach in Timor, full and content and madly in love. There is a chance that this may be the happiest split second of my life.’
Sime obediently reminded me of it, in later years, when we were no longer together, when I was raging with passion and pain over some other gentleman caller, when the night terrors started up again and I went for weeks without a proper sleep.
‘Remember our beach in Timor. Remember the scrapbook,’ he would text.
Our time in a Balinese spa on the way home to Melbourne was somehow glossed over in the scrapbook, possibly due to the abject horror we felt whenever the memory was raised. There is just one small reference to it—‘Went to day sp—’ reads an entry on 23 May, as though the person writing
had begun trembling so violently with the recollection they were physically unable to complete the word ‘spa’ and had instead taken themselves off to shock therapy.
We had entered the treatment area full of shy smiles, wearing all over our faces the presumption that ‘people like us’ don’t really go for spa treatments. We never really went for pampering.
The day spa was a discreet little high-design enclave next to a resort swimming pool and we were ushered in with polite nods and the universal ‘right this way, Sir/Madam’ gestures that day spa employees worldwide are apparently taught in a secret underground laboratory. Our treatment room was beautiful, cool mosaic tiles, two massage tables, an open-air bath surrounded by deep green palms. Every towel corner was lovingly and fastidiously triangled. The musky aroma of the ocean permeated through the burning essential ‘Harmony Blend’ oils, and a not abhorrent form of lilting panpipe murmured through speakers at a low level.
We had extravagantly chosen a half-day treatment that seemed to involve every form of body prodding and caressing one could imagine. Our feet were to be bathed in bowls of fragrant water and flowers, we would be stroked, simmered, covered in hot oil, towelled down, slathered in mud, and finally rubbed gently around the facial area before being left alone to sit in our open-air bath with a glass of champagne and foolish hair. Given the opulence on offer there was likely the additional option of marrying the masseuse and taking her home with us as a kindly and beaming love slave, though as idealist left-wingers we of course didn’t follow this up and instead probably justified our half day of self-absorbed tending to by giving Médecins Sans Frontières a gold coin donation at the airport.
We were introduced to the two very sweet young ladies who would be taking care of us, and the four of us smiled and nodded and nodded and smiled and Sime and I made some benign, joking small talk at which we laughed too hard to compensate for the silent, blank-faced reaction from our audience, and the young ladies smiled incomprehensibly and kindly and everyone nodded again and thus time passed. Eventually we were handed a white robe and a paper shower cap and with more nodding and smiling and bowing and pointing it was suggested wordlessly that we might like to shower our filthy tourist bodies clean from the scum of cocktails and cheap hotel sex and middle class guilt we had accumulated over the past week and once we were ready to begin our treatment to let them know.
They left the room backwards with more smiling and bowing and Sime and I looked at each other with helpless, embarrassed smiles. There was nothing comfortable about this. Neither of us was revelling in an aura of relaxation and bliss. We felt sorry for the people who would have to touch us and we thought of our crummy, overstuffed rental house in North Fitzroy and our blocked washing machine pipes. Nobody in their right mind enters a room with gilt taps and a musical water feature and thinks ‘By god, I deserve this idiotic affluence’ outside of Gianni Versace and just look what happened to him.
‘Well,’ said Sime, trying to make the best of our blushes and regrets, ‘I guess let’s just shower and bung these on and try to unwind.’
The robes themselves were gargantuan, swallowing up our puny frames in soft, pillowy swathes. We resembled monks from a special monastery for dwarves. I glanced dubiously at the paper shower caps in their neat little cellophane packets and decided I’d rather not spend the rest of the treatment looking like a comatose Laverne or Shirley.
‘Do you think they’d mind if we don’t wear the hats?’
‘Oh god no,’ replied Simon. ‘They’ll understand. I mean, it’s not as though we have dreadlocks.’
We sat stiffly and awkwardly on the cane chaise longues, naked beneath our robes, waiting for our new friends to return. They did, in another Moomba-esque parade of nodding and smiling, before coming to a disconcerted stop directly in front of us.
One of them pointed to the unopened shower cap packets.
‘Oh yes,’ I replied. ‘We’d rather . . . we’d rather not wear those if that’s okay with you.’
‘We’d just feel . . . more comfortable without them,’ Simon added helpfully, smiling and nodding to support his case.
The two lovely ladies stopped smiling for the first time since we’d met them. They turned to each other with worried frowns. We had clearly upset the program.
I glanced at Simon, who shrugged his confusion. Our masseurs consulted with each other in urgent Indonesian whispers.
‘Please . . .’ one of them said, holding up the packets.
They were obsessed with shower caps. I held out my hands in a gesture that seemed to say ‘We’re all adults here, let’s just get some perspective.’
‘It’s just . . . not really our thing,’ I stated brightly.
More urgent whispers. Things were growing more uncomfortable. There was the sense that any moment somebody unseen would press a buzzer and we’d be marched from the room in disgrace, our sunscreen-stained beachwear tossed out after us.
‘Maybe we should leave,’ Simon murmured worriedly.
The ladies turned to us again. Pointing to the packets once more.
‘We just . . . for hygiene.’
If it was so important to them we would put on the fucking party hats.
Simon was the first to open his. I saw the blood drain from his face.
‘Oh dear,’ he whispered.
They were not shower caps. They were paper underpants. Disposable paper underpants that all tourists having spa treatments must wear for the sake of hygiene, modesty and the general dignity of all involved. The last ten minutes suddenly replayed themselves through my brain. How we must have looked to these nice young women, sprawled out half naked on the chaise longues, refusing to wear the underwear they had given us.
It’s not really our thing, I had insisted sleazily. No, we don’t ‘do’ underpants, ladies. And if you or the management at Ying Glory Day Spa have an issue with that we’ll just take our festy genitals elsewhere to be revered in full-frontal glory.
When I told my mother what had happened, she tried to put a positive spin on it.
‘At least,’ she said, ‘they didn’t come into the room and find you wearing disposable underpants on your head.’
We tried to buy drugs on that trip. Likely it was to erase the memory of terrorising two perfectly nice day spa workers with intimations of happy ending massages. Thankfully all we ended up with was a foil wrap full of henna that we tried briefly to smoke before realising we were trying to get high with something teenage girls used to look like Tori Amos. This was years before that poor idiot Schapelle Corby misguidedly grabbed her boogie board and announced to friends, ‘Ready! Anyone else got anything they want me to pack?’ but even still we should have known better. It was the arrogance of the young, combined with the recklessness of a traveller. Nobody knows us here, the passport whispers from the safety of your travel pouch, dizzy with the power of authority and anonymity. We can do whatever we want.
On a trip to Thailand with another boyfriend I had spent a long night doing tequila shots with friendly prostitutes in a bar before my partner loudly and cheerily agreed to get on an undersized motorbike and meet a drug dealer to buy some speed. This was an excellent idea, two highly intoxicated and fairly pint-sized tourists parting company in a seedy area of Koh Samui while one straddled a toothless, bike riding drug mule called Yick.
‘You stay here with our new frens,’ my boyfriend slurred, gesturing vaguely to the beaming whores over the other side of the bar. ‘I’ll be righback.’
I found him again, seven months later and living in an ashram. He seemed content.
When I went to Europe with my last boyfriend Tim, our trip was filled with afternoon craft moments in Barcelona and Parisian bars.
‘Drink your beer,’ I would order him, ‘and then we’ll scrapbook.’
The scrapbooking urge had remained, but I was an adult now and holidayed with whomsoever I chose. In a necessary surge of independence I spent my twenties roaming the world with friends and lovers. I saw my parents for
summer weekends or day trips. It seemed we had silently agreed to leave our family vacationing in the annals of childhood.
I was thirty when they asked me to holiday with them again. My father wanted to go on a pilgrimage to visit an indigenous community, Kalkaringi, that his father helped set up in the late 1960s.
When we set out, I was hungover after a night seeing loud rock’n’roll bands at the Rob Roy. A smear of ink on my wrist and Jägermeister remnants aching through my blood. More importantly, I was now a grown woman and would be sharing a campervan with my parents for the better part of two weeks. And I had a head like Rick James after a four-day bender. It was not an auspicious beginning.
They met me at Darwin airport, full of smiles and hugs and won’t-this-be-just-like-old-times jolliness.
‘Did you bring your scrapbook?’ asked my mother, only half joking.
We hired a ridiculous-looking campervan, an insistence on the part of my father, the only heterosexual man I knew who actually understood and admired the term ‘glamping’. The van had a television and a microwave. The only thing missing was an eight-person jacuzzi and personal butler. As my parents inspected it, my father climbed inside with a grin.
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