First-time flyer on long-distance date with destiny

Fiona Harari's diary circa 1975.

He sat with his family down the back of the plane – a Boeing 707 that to his pre-teen eyes in the mid-1970s seemed sleek and hi-tech – and from where he spent a lot of time joking with a flight attendant called Jimmy.

I sat in a middle seat near the centre of the plane, where, true to the journalistic career I would later embrace, I was far more interested in the people around me than the technology that was about to take us to the skies. (Within minutes of boarding, I had noted in my new travel diary that my seatmate, Doris, was from Malaysia, a wondrous, exotic detail for a primary-schooler who had rarely met anyone who lived overseas.)

For two school kids from Australia, this was the day our views of the rest of the world began. It was late November 1975, warm in Sydney (according to my prized diary) and a time of enormous national upheaval. Gough Whitlam’s Labor government had just been sacked by the governor-general, John Kerr, and as we waited on the tarmac that lunchtime, preparing to fly to Hong Kong, we were leaving a country where the air was thick with dissent.

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Two kids left with their families on their first overseas flights, in the 1970s. Both wrote diaries, recording their excitement. What happened next?

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I was hardly focused on this. I knew something big was happening nationally, but my attention for weeks had been fixed on the most momentous event in my short life. We were about to go away for the duration of the summer break. Unlike the biennial driving jaunts that had made up the majority of my holidays, however, this time we were heading overseas.

I was about to fly for the first time. And leave the country.

And even though that meant first undertaking a series of tasks that were not always enjoyable, the dual sense of anticipation kept growing. There were vaccinations and passport photos and a particularly brutal haircut, short enough to last the duration of our months away, such was the parental fear of untested hairdressers snipping the locks of their beloved offspring. But neither multiple jabs nor an overly long studio session for a family photo (we were all on a single passport) nor even what remains, decades later, the most unfortunate haircut of my life were enough to quell my excitement. Taking to the skies, I was about to glimpse a world I could not quite picture.

My small red travel diary, a gift from a kind relative in the days when we were farewelled by extended family at the airport, was a useful companion. In it I noted the weather (21 degrees on the first of our three-day layover in Hong Kong) and the sights that struck me most deeply: poverty (“an old poor woman with grey hair asked us to buy some mandarins off her”), geopolitics, as espoused by our tour guide (“we went to the border of Kowloon and Communist China”), and the wonder of staying in a hotel, rather than a motel, and encountering room service for the first time (“last night I had tea in my room”).

Fiona Harari. Picture: Britta Campion

The boy from the back of the plane also had a travel diary. He and his family also spent three days in Hong Kong waiting for their connecting flight, visiting the Peak via bus one way and cable car the other, and shopping for a guitar, which his family lugged with them on to their next flight, aboard a jumbo, which stopped four times before finally arriving in Paris.

Our next flight stopped repeatedly, too. I remember the humidity at Bangkok Airport as we stepped into the terminal and my mother bought me a tiny elephant encrusted with mosaics; the strange, sludge-like meal we were served in the middle of the night (I now know it was spinach paneer) after we left Bombay; Tehran appearing to be littered with fairy lights from the air as we prepared to refuel there. On each leg, there was always the wonder of seeing clouds at eye level.

It was a magical trip that I thought of repeatedly. But because foreign travel was not the stuff of schoolyard banter, it was not a subject I often raised until I was a young adult. By then years had passed, I had moved interstate and was going out with a man, who, I discovered many months later, had also travelled overseas with his family when he was a boy.

I don’t remember anymore how the conversation arose, but I know that when we started talking about our destinations, many of them matched. When we checked the approximate dates, they matched too. I found my travel diary. He found his. And so we learned that we had been on the same flights in 1975, seeing the world for the first time together, without even knowing it, our mothers briefly chatting somewhere over the Mediterranean.

I have no idea if I ever spoke to him on that momentous trip. But I have often wished someone could invent a retrospective video of that journey and that I might see where our paths really crossed the first time I met my husband.

Fiona Harari is a writer for The Weekend Australian Magazine.