Go to some lost, dusty and forgotten corner of the world and it’s likely that the only other person you’ll find there is Australian.
We are people at home in the world.
Australians are everywhere – you hear their accents from Nepal to Nolita, Berlin to Bangladesh.
Everywhere ... except for Australia’s most famous tourist destinations.
I am writing this from central Australia, where this morning I got up before dawn and took a tourist bus out to view the sunrise over Uluru. The place was hectic with people setting up tripods in the dark, posing with selfie sticks and talking in a variety of accents that seemed to come from everywhere except Australia.
At the launch at Uluru of the Field of Light art installation this week, I met half a dozen Australian journalists, none of whom had ever been to Uluru before.
UK installation artist Bruce Munro summed it up when told me that while living in Australia in the 1990s: “My Sydney friends kept on saying ‘go to Uluru’ – but of course none of them had actually been here.”
The way Australians generally travel is to leave the country as quickly and as frequently as possible – to “do” Europe, North America, South America or Asia and then to leave Australia until last. They travel as grey nomads, making an almost morbid turn around the country – a sort of valediction or last lap – before the driver’s licence is taken from you, and an aged home beckons.
In this, there is a sad sorting of priorities. We only get to know our own country after we’ve spent all our time elsewhere – in more glamourous parts of the world.
We’ve eradicated cultural cringe from so many parts of our life – but there is still something stubborn in thinking “real travel” is something that happens outside our own country. Part of me has always winced when I’ve met someone who has said “Australia is the best country in the world”. Really? This person’s obviously never seen Borobudur at dawn or taken a balloon ride over the temples of Bagan, or drunk cava in the bars of San Sebastian or swum off the islands of Croatia or walked from pub to cheery pub in a crisp autumn Cotswold’s day.
Australia, the best country? Until recently I’ve never been sure. Then I started getting to know my own country, and it really is the best.
On Sunday after a long drive from Alice Springs, we got off the bus at sunset, dusty and tired, and pulled up in a parking lot full of coaches. There before us was the Rock. There were 20 of us, mostly from elsewhere, and as the driver set up a trestle table and poured some champagne we passengers just sort of stopped, agape.
The group broke apart and sat or stood drinking it in … there was no doubt that what we were seeing was sacred and immensely powerful. It reminded me of a line from a Larkin poem: “A serious house on serious earth it is/ In whose blent air all our compulsions meet.”
I was with a group of New Yorkers who had opinions on everything.
What do you think of Uluru? I asked one of them.
He was uncharacteristically stuck. “I don’t know, I am not sure I have the words.”
It is a landscape that is beyond language. It certainly feels beyond geography: an enormous rock just plonked down in the middle of the desert. There’s flat earth for miles then this monolithic totem rising from the soil.
A few days later, walking around its base, seeing the curves and crevices, the caves a hundred metres above my head, the air dry and mild, smelling faintly of soil and flowers, I felt an almost magnetic pull – a metaphysical element – that reminded me of Picnic at Hanging Rock. The girls drawn in to a space in the rock, like an envelope being pushed through a postbox. In an instant they disappeared.
Other dimensions seem possible in this place.
It’s a strange feeling, and one I have only felt in Australia. It is the opposite of boring, it’s subtle and strange, almost otherworldly, demanding silence and surrender. I’ve experienced awe in many other parts of the world, but the awe I have experienced in my own country has a different quality – like a gong being struck whose vibration stays with you longer.
Reflecting on ten years working as a travel writer, my favourite trips have been ones in my own country: Arnhem Land, the McDonnell ranges, Dampier Peninsula, Uluru, most of them places that have a strong connection to Indigenous people.
When you get out there you realise there are places in our own country that are stranger and more exotic than somewhere we’d take a 22-hour plane journey to.
Of course, it’s not all wine and roses. Trips to more remote parts of Australia are expensive. I paid as much for a plane ticket from Melbourne to Broome as I would have to go to Europe, and the motel accommodation was pricier than pretty much anywhere I’d stayed overseas.
A straightforward room with aircon and wifi in the more remote parts of Australia will cost around $300 to $500 a night – and the décor can be a bit dated.
The level of service in Australia can also be a bit hit and miss.
The high cost of labour in Australia means that unless you want to pay a couple of grand a night, there’s not going to be butler service and someone bringing you cappuccinos to your room at 5am and folding your towel every time you jump in the pool, like you’d get in Bali.
But things are changing. The low Australian dollar means that more of us will elect to holiday at home. Figures from 2015 show a boom in domestic travel with 87.1 million overnight domestic trips, up 7% year-on-year, and $57.9bn worth of overnight revenues, up 6%, according to the Tourism & Transport Forum Australia.
So don’t wait until you are too old to climb the rim of Kings Canyon at dawn, or cycle around the base of Uluru. See your country now.
