I have done a fair bit of travelling over the years, but I was definitely more a short haul traveller, due to the logistics of running a business and needing to remain close to it.
As such I was a frequent visitor to Europe, taking full advantage of the boom in short-haul travel back through the nineties and into the noughties. The occasional visit to America, but not much further.
Australia had been fairly low down on my list of must-get-to places – simply due to the twenty-four plus flight to get there – so it was going to take something pretty special to get me down under…
We met at a mutual friends’ party in London. I was thirty-five at the time. As things started to develop she asked me to go with her to Australia for her thirtieth birthday.
I accepted the invitation and a month or two later I travelled out to Australia.
Following the disorientating flight, I was immediately whisked from the airport to her party in central Brisbane, on the river.
I’m not sure what I was expected from Australia – my familiarity with the place seemed to stem from the Aussies I knew in London, and from re-runs of Skippy, the Men at Work / Down Under music video, and Paul Hogan / Clive James / Dame Edna.
Having lived in places like Turkey and Spain, Australia seemed very familiar.
Many towns and streets were named after British towns and streets, although often the pronunciation left something to be desired.
For example one day I spied a town on the Gold Coast called Arundel. Now, I know Arundel in England – my parents live near there and it is a beautiful market town with a medieval castle.
At a function, I asked a local what Arundel was like. “Arundel?” he said. “Anyone heard of Arundel?”, he continued. The men around him look mystified until one piped up: “Arundel? Awwwww – you mean “Ah-Raaann-dull”. It seemed my pronunciation left something to be desired.
But despite the bastardisation of town names, everything else I encountered seemed very familiar, and for want of a better word – very “liveable”.
To be continued.