‘They’re a hundred a piece to sharpen,’ he said.
‘And if I give you ten pieces?’
‘Ten at once? Two thousand.’
I paused to let the maths sink in and betray his mistake to him. But he just grew impatient: ‘Do you want something sharpened or not?’
‘I think the figures are wrong. You quoted double apiece for ten compared to one.’
‘Yeah,’ he scanned the sea for less difficult clientele. ‘Because it takes me longer, see? Do you think I want to sweat here all day over your knives? Ten is more work than one, it’s ten times the work. Do you take me for an idiot?’
Well. I did take him for an idiot. My knives stayed blunt but his idea stuck with me, and I’m stuck to this day with the regret that I didn’t ask if he’d thought of it himself. It was in a different category to the ideas of the taxi driver in the bar 300 feet up the hill, who launched a stand-up argument against my doubts that there were kangaroos at Malaga airport. The word kangaroo follows the word Australia in all foreign lands, but this driver also put down his beer to say that there were plenty of them at Malaga airport, he’d seen them himself. He was serious. It confounded me until I recalled that the Spanish word for crab is quite similar to the word for kangaroo. Today I presume that there are crabs at Malaga airport.
But then who knows. If there are condors there can be kangaroos. Slowly these things made me aware of an unaccounted feature of travel, given that much of its experience lies in subject meeting object and melting away: that not only can a place be different than we imagine, it can be different from how it imagines itself. And both diffractions together can make a mirage. The seasoned traveller might look forward to subjective preconceptions being dashed on sands of fact, but rarely allows for them meeting other subjective preconceptions.
Then it gets interesting. The ideas we travel with form a bubble. This is why tourists are fun to watch, or better still – expatriates. The first of these might only negotiate obstacles to cheap beer, but the expat, especially the one who stayed on for a longer dose of sun and beer, has a workload. He came to live not in Spain but in his Spain, built largely from the ideas that propelled his first yearnings to come. Now he’s forced to furnish reality with biases and illusions that most maintain the yearning’s freshness – ‘Buenos dias, Miguel!’ – and the inverted U-curve that all illusions follow soon compromises his dignity with the amount of altruism it takes to avoid admitting that humans are designed across millennia to match their settings, and that the reason we are violent is that our ideas about settings differ.
Without this effort the wonder of travel can be short-lived. The decline of preconceptions meeting reality, along with acclimatisation, will build a home there – just what we travelled away from. A week on an atoll can do it.
So the first key to travel must be to return from it. Otherwise it can cause a gradual doubling of the disillusioning effects of loss of innocence.
It’s been said that the English feel at home overseas as long as all the locals are waiters. Once they’re dealing with authorities and peers of greater clout than they, their workload begins. Among expats I’ve observed a proportionality between the strength and length of their dreams to go to a place, and the amount of evidence they ignore in order to live the dream as dreamt. Which means they’re not living external reality but feeding an idea with it, to a larger extent than we usually do. In case you propose to be that expat, one tip I can pass on from observation is to be slow to learn the language. This keeps things down to a manageable ‘Hola, Dolores,’ and keeps the biggest of your windows shut to challenging ideas. Beyond this the only eventual harbour for an expat up against entropy is the role of the grateful houseguest.
Where he soon finds himself lying through his teeth.
Of course these musings shamefully minimise the potential outcomes in travel, as its mental allure must be a sum involving all the world’s people and places. But the effects I describe have exploded since travel as an industry learnt to sell us ideas. Empty white beaches, not vomiting backpackers, sell travel; sun-kissed terraces laid with fruits and champagne, not snakes in the bath. Precisely that market of travellers now has to compensate and insulate to match packaged ideas. It has to edit. So as a student of ideals versus realities, or perhaps just for contrariness, I’ve come to embrace a new form of travel, which is existential tourism. It involves starting the trip at the finish, de-imagining the early discoveries and going to where we’d end up after years. It means sitting with your back to the Eiffel Tower watching Sponge-Bob on a bar TV, or going to the football instead of the pyramids. It’s about setting off to the place behind the ideas, which is also a cure for that paradox of modern tourism – hating to see authenticity spoiled by foreigners, when you’re a foreigner.
All this might beg the question: why go at all if it’s just to break ideas that work at home? But perhaps it’s for this: we try to leave ourselves at home. That’s us on the beach in our minds, that’s us at the top of the Eiffel Tower – but not simply us, look closely – our best us. A new us, shining, worldly and spontaneous, without the chains and triggers of home. It’s us delighting in change, us with the awe of children. And probably explains why we have to enjoy it fast; our old selves are on a flight just behind us, with kitchen sink in tow.
As for Vincent, after chewing his cigar for a while he eventually hauled the big bird up the beach and phoned the local policeman, who was a keen taxidermist. Weeks later the bird returned in its glory, sharp-eyed and proud, wings outstretched to eight or nine feet. Vincent mounted it on a shelf behind the bar, where it probably still glowers today, watching over his sons as they argue whether the English or Germans are the worst foreigners, and glaring at the English and Germans muttering that the bread tastes old, and debating whether to finally scold someone.
A vulture turns condor, away from home.
Just like us.
New Philosopher
Publication Details
James Bradley’s ‘Strange Weather: Writing the Anthropocene’ appeared in The Weekend Australian, 24–25 January 2015.
Anwen Crawford’s ‘The World Needs Female Rock Critics’ appeared in The New Yorker, 26 May 2015. [Credit: Anwen Crawford/The New Yorker; © Conde Nast.]
Alison Croggon’s ‘Trigger Warning’ appeared in Overland, vol. 218, Autumn 2015.
Sophie Cunningham’s ‘Staying With the Trouble’ appeared in Australian Book Review, no. 371, May 2015.
Tegan Bennett Daylight’s ‘Fully Present, Utterly Connected’ appeared in Sydney Review of Books, 31 October 2014.
Ceridwen Dovey’s ‘The Pencil and the Damage Done’ appeared in The Monthly, November 2014.
Gerard Elson’s ‘Bibliomancer: Nick Cave, Writer’ appeared in Island, no. 138, 2014.
Delia Falconer’s ‘Seven Poor Men of Sydney’ was a talk delivered to a Sydney Ideas forum in April 2015. It first appeared in slightly different form as the introduction to Melbourne University Press’s 2015 edition of Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney.
Tim Flannery’s ‘How You Consist of Trillions of Tiny Machines’ appeared in New York Review of Books, 9 July 2015.
Helen Garner’s ‘The Insults of Age’ appeared in The Monthly, May 2015.
Rebecca Giggs’ ‘Open Ground’ appeared in Griffith Review, no. 47, January 2015.
Ashley Hay’s ‘Mirror Rim: Lost and Found on the Abrolhos’ appeared in Griffith Review, no. 47, January 2015.
Karen Hitchcock’s ‘Too Many Pills: On Lifestyle Diseases and Quick Fixes’ appeared in The Monthly, September 2015.
Anna Krien’s ‘My Granny’s Last Wish’ appeared in It Happened in a Holden, edited by Paddy O’Reilly (Affirm Press, 2014).
Matthew Lamb’s ‘The Meeting That Never Was’ appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, 13 March 2015.
Mungo MacCallum’s ‘Malcolm Fraser: Obituary’ appeared in The Australian, 20 March 2015.
Mark Mordue’s ‘The Library of Shadows’ appeare
d in The Weekend Australian (under the title ‘The Art of Darkness’), 16–17 May 2015.
Drusilla Modjeska’s ‘The Informed Imagination’ appeared in Meanjin, vol. 74, no. 2, 2015.
Noel Pearson’s ‘Remote Control: Ten Years of Struggle and Success in Indigenous Australia’ appeared in The Monthly, May 2015.
DBC Pierre’s ‘Leaving Ourselves at Home’ appeared in New Philosopher, no. 8, 2015.
Felicity Plunkett’s ‘Sound Bridges: A Profile of Gurrumul’ appeared in Australian Book Review, no. 372, June–July 2015.
Stephen Romei’s ‘An Uneasy Masterpiece’ appeared in The Weekend Australian Review, 1 August 2015.
Nicolas Rothwell’s ‘The Northern Wilds: How to Build History into a Coastline’ appeared in The Weekend Australian, 7–8 March 2015.
Guy Rundle’s ‘L’état, C’est Charlie’ appeared in Arena, 1 February 2015.
Christian Ryan’s ‘The Thirty-ninth Summer of DK Lillee’ appeared in The Cricket Monthly, May 2015.
Sebastian Smee’s ‘Confronting the Unthinkable in Goya’s Art’ appeared in The Boston Globe, 10 January 2015.
Jeff Sparrow’s ‘Re-reading the Famous Five and Biggles’ appeared in The Guardian, 25 November 2015.
Kirsten Tranter’s ‘Go, Little Book’ appeared in Overland, no. 217, Summer 2014.
Maria Tumarkin’s ‘No Dogs, No Fruit, No Firearms, No Professors’ appeared in Right Now, no. 1134, 11 May 2015.
David Walsh’s ‘Skin in the Game’ appeared in The Monthly, February 2015.
Nadia Wheatley’s ‘Belsen: Mapping the Memories’ appeared in Griffith Review, 23 June 2015.
Tim Winton’s ‘Havoc: A Life in Accidents’ appeared in The Monthly, May 2015.
Notes on Contributors
THE EDITOR
Geordie Williamson has been chief literary critic of The Australian since 2008. He was awarded the Pascall Prize for Australian Critic of the Year in 2011, and published his first book, The Burning Library, on some neglected figures from Australian literature, in 2012. He is currently working on his second, an account of his Scottish family and their half-century relationship with Easter Island.
CONTRIBUTORS
James Bradley is a novelist and critic. His books include the novels Wrack, The Deep Field, The Resurrectionist and most recently Clade, a book of poetry, Paper Nautilus, and The Penguin Book of the Ocean. In 2012 he won the Pascall Prize for Australian Critic of the Year. He blogs at www.cityoftongues.com.
Anwen Crawford is the music critic for the Monthly. Her essays have appeared in publications including Overland, Meanjin, the Age and the New Yorker. Her book, Live Through This, is published by Bloomsbury.
Alison Croggon’s writing includes novels, poetry, opera libretti and criticism. She has won several prizes, including the 2009 Pascall Prize for Australian Critic of the Year and the 2015 Art Music Award for Best Vocal/Choral Work. Her most recent novel is The River and the Book (2015).
Sophie Cunningham is the author of two novels, Geography (2004) and Bird (2008), and two non-fiction books, Melbourne (2011) and Warning: The Story of Cyclone Tracy (2014), which was shortlisted for several major awards. Her essay ‘Staying With the Trouble’ was the winner of the 2015 Calibre Prize.
Tegan Bennett Daylight is a fiction writer, critic and teacher. She is the author of three novels: Bombora (1996), What Falls Away (2001) and Safety (2006), and the short story collection Six Bedrooms, published in 2015. She lives in the Blue Mountains with her husband and children.
Ceridwen Dovey is the author of the novel Blood Kin and the story collection Only the Animals, which won the inaugural Readings New Australian Writing Award. She writes regularly for the Monthly and the New Yorker online, and lives in Sydney.
Gerard Elson is Interviews Editor for Kill Your Darlings literary magazine and the 2015 recipient of the ABA Penguin Random House Young Bookseller of the Year award. His writing has been published in The Review of Australian Fiction, the Big Issue and Higher Arc.
Delia Falconer is the author of two novels, The Service of Clouds and The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers. Her most recent book is Sydney, in New South’s Australian cities series. Her essays and stories have appeared in many anthologies, including the Penguin Century of Australian Stories and the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature. She is a senior lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney.
Tim Flannery has published over a dozen books, including The Future Eaters, The Eternal Frontier, The Weather Makers, Now or Never: A Sustainable Future for Australia?, Here on Earth and Atmosphere of Hope. He was Australian of the Year in 2007.
Helen Garner was born in Geelong in 1942 and lives in Melbourne. Since 1977 she has published eleven books of fiction, essays and long-form non-fiction, including The First Stone and Joe Cinque’s Consolation, as well as screenplays and feature journalism. She won the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature in 2006. She is a frequent contributor to the Monthly, and her most recent book is This House of Grief, which won the 2015 Ned Kelly Award for Best True Crime book.
Rebecca Giggs writes about ecology and environmental imagination, animals, landscape, politics and memory. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Aeon, Overland, Meanjin, and Australian Book Review, while her stories have also been widely published and anthologised. Her first book is forthcoming from Scribe.
Ashley Hay’s most recent novel, The Railwayman’s Wife, won the Colin Roderick Award and the New South Wales Premier’s Prize People’s Choice Award. Her earlier books include The Body in the Clouds and Gum: The Story of Eucalypts and Their Champions. She writes regularly for publications including Griffith Review and the Monthly, and edited Best Australian Science Writing 2014. She travelled to the Abrolhos ahead of Geraldton’s Big Sky Readers’ and Writers’ Festival.
Karen Hitchcock is a doctor and writer. She writes a regular column for the Monthly, and is the author of a collection of short fiction, Little White Slips, and the Quarterly Essay Dear Life: On Caring for the Elderly.
Anna Krien is the author of Night Games: Sex, Power and Sport, Into the Woods: The Battle for Tasmania’s Forests and the Quarterly Essay Us and Them: On the Importance of Animals. Anna’s work has been published in the Monthly, the Age, the Big Issue, The Best Australian Essays, The Best Australian Stories, Griffith Review, Colors, Frankie and Dazed & Confused.
Matthew Lamb is founding editor of Review of Australian Fiction, and editor of Island. He lives in Tasmania.
Mungo MacCallum has been a journalist and commentator for more than fifty years. He was based in the Canberra press gallery from 1969 until 1988, and covered the rise and fall of Malcolm Fraser in the process. He is the author of thirteen books, including The Good, the Bad and the Unlikely: Australia’s Prime Ministers (2014).
Drusilla Modjeska’s books include Exiles at Home (1981), Poppy (1990), The Orchard (1994) and Stravinsky’s Lunch (1999), all of which won major Australian literary awards. The Mountain (2012) was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. Her most recent book, a memoir, is Second Half First (2015). She is the founder of SEAM Fund, which supports literacy in remote Papua New Guinea.
Mark Mordue is a writer, journalist and poet based on the New South Wales south coast. He was winner of the Pascall Prize for Australian Critic of the Year in 2010. His publications include the travel memoir Dastgah: Diary of a Headtrip (2001) and the poetry folio Things That Year (2014).
Noel Pearson is a lawyer, activist and founder of the Cape York Partnership. He has published many essays and newspaper articles, as well as the book Up From the Mission (2009) and two Quarterly Essays: the acclaimed Radical Hope: Education and Equality in Australia (2009) and A Rightful Place: Race, Recognition and a More Complete Commonwealth (2014).
Known as much for youthful scandal as for books, South Australian-born DBC Pierre was an artist before writing his first novel in 2001. His debut, Vernon God Little, became the first book to win both a Booker and a Whitbread prize, and went on to be published in forty-three te
rritories.
Felicity Plunkett is a poet and critic. She is the author of Vanishing Point (2009) and Seastrands (2011), and the editor of Thirty Australian Poets (2011). Since 2010 she has been Poetry Editor with University of Queensland Press.
Stephen Romei is a writer, editor and critic. He is literary editor and film critic for the Australian.
Nicolas Rothwell was educated in European schools and was a classical scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford, before becoming a foreign correspondent. He is the author of Heaven & Earth, Wings of the Kite-Hawk, Another Country, The Red Highway and Journeys to the Interior.
Guy Rundle is correspondent at large for Crikey.com.au, Australia’s independent online daily. His most recent books are Inland Empire: America at the End of the Obama Era, and A Revolution in the Making: 3-D Printing, Robots and the Future. At various times he has been a stage writer (for Max Gillies), a TV producer (don’t ask) and editor of Arena.
Christian Ryan is the author of Golden Boy and the essay/photographic collections Rock Country and Australia: Story of a Cricket Country. His recent essays include ‘Two Thursdays’, ‘13th Man’, ‘The Wow and the Sheesh’ and ‘Man Walks Into a Bar, Watches Afghanistan’. He is a former editor of the Monthly.
Sebastian Smee is the Boston Globe’s art critic. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2011 and was runner-up in 2008. He was national art critic for the Australian from 2004 to 2008, and is the author of five books on Lucian Freud, as well as the forthcoming The Art of Rivalry.
Jeff Sparrow is a writer, editor and broadcaster. He’s the author of a number of books, including Money Shot: A Journey into Porn and Censorship, Killing: Misadventures in Violence and Communism: A Love Story.
Kirsten Tranter is the author of the novels A Common Loss and The Legacy, and a co-founder of the Stella Prize. Her short fiction appears in The Best Australian Stories 2014, Island and numerous anthologies, and her third novel, Hold, is forthcoming in 2016.
The Best Australian Essays 2015 Page 40