The tyranny of distance: can’t you feel it too?

Prescient: Professor Geoffrey Blainey. Picture: Mathew Farrell

More than half a century ago historian Geoffrey Blainey popularised a phrase that I think perfectly encapsulates the essence of being Australian: “the tyranny of distance”. This is the idea that immigrants to this continent were uniquely deprived of access to the societies from which they came. That pervading sense of remoteness very much applied to the First Fleet (1788) but I think it was also evident in everyday life in regional Australia well into the 1960s.

My childhood in western Victoria played out in the towns and on the sporting fields that stretched along the Princes Highway between Colac and Port Fairy. It was an elongated bubble that delivered schooling, church, work, holidays, friends and family. A two- to three-hour road trip to Melbourne was rare for my parents. Dad worked on Saturday mornings, plus the sheer cost of driving that far and back on a Sunday, in a clapped-out Chevrolet, made such trips a significant undertaking.

In the late ’60s my oldest brother moved to Mount Gambier for work and we would visit him. That, too, was a long drive; it involved crossing a state border. We learnt that South Australians don’t have timber power poles; they have “Stobie poles” made of steel and concrete! We were sold on the exotica of travel.

By the early 1980s the tyranny of distance we’d felt was loosening. The Gold Coast with its Sea World and other attractions was within reach, thanks to affordable flights. More women had entered the workforce and household spending surged as a consequence. Soon, people on the edge of our social circle were travelling to a place called Bali, and destinations such as Byron Bay and Hervey Bay started to register on the radar. The advent of low-cost carriers opened up other exotic locales such as Phuket and Fiji to Australian holidaymakers. Even far-flung cities such as London, Los Angeles and Hong Kong came within reach of everyday Australians if they saved up enough.

Generation Xers and then Millennials started postponing commitment to marriage, mortgage, children and careers in their early 20s, and took off on a “gap year”. Here was a chance for young Australians to finally shake off Blainey’s tyranny of distance – perhaps our most enduring link back to the First Fleet – and explore the world.

Indeed, there are none so addicted to worldliness, to travel, to exotica, than a people who are geographically isolated. Travel matters to the people of this nation, and the average Australian is now exceptionally well travelled, or at least this was the case leading up to the coming of the coronavirus. But the act of closing our borders – as necessary as that may be to contain the spread of Covid-19 – shunts us back to an earlier time when even going interstate was a rarity.

I can’t recall hearing the term “tyranny of distance” when I was growing up in Terang, and even if I did, it mattered not. My world was rich, meaningful and cosy within that highway-town bubble. But to a people well used to travel, to movement, to connecting with family and friends interstate and overseas, and with the spending power to make that happen, this is one of the great trials of our pandemic experience.

The pandemic has painfully reminded Australians that Geoffrey Blainey’s prescient observation about the essence of being Australian still holds true. We can only shake off the tyranny of distance in the good times.