Have we lost the taste for globetrotting? Travelling not all that glamourous

Travel is travail. It is hard work, for which I now realise I was very well paid - but you would want to be, explains Charles Wooley.

For 30 years I had a job which involved getting on a plane and flying around the world.

Covid stopped all that and after two years of decompression on a Tasmanian beach I have somehow lost the taste for globetrotting. Maybe a working life of travel wasn’t a vocation after all but just a bad habit hard to break.

I wonder, as restrictions are lifted, do airline pilots and cruise line captains really want to return to their tortuous old lives?

Even if someone would pay me as in the old days, do I really want to get on a plane this week and fly to Ukraine?

Or how much do I fancy a trip to Taiwan?

Chicken Kiev or Taiwanese Beef noodle soup?

Not bloody likely.

A Ukrainian frontier guard stands at the check point of Ukrainian-Russian border, some 40 km from the second largest Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, on February 16, 2022. (Photo by Sergey BOBOK / AFP)

Maybe you can’t quite get the real meal here in River City but the Blue Lagoon oysters at Bangor Vineyard are the best anywhere and only 20 minutes from my gate. I don’t need to fly 24 hours, queue endlessly at borders and suffer jet lag in an airless hotel room to enjoy them.

And the only shells flying are oyster shells.

Travel is travail. It is hard work, for which I now realise I was very well paid. But you would want to be.

When my flights were frequently delayed or cancelled in some remote airport lounge, I always felt sorrier for the people who were paying their own fares. Especially holidaying families with crying children, all at the end of their tether and hostage to what seemed like the apparent careless indifference of airline companies, capriciously delaying or cancelling flights to Disney Land, Courchevel or the Bahamas.

No wonder they called it “the trip of a lifetime”. You would only want to do it once.

Nothing can spoil a fun destination so much as the trouble involved in getting there.

Of course, it has all become so much worse during the pandemic but mercifully I have been spared that.

The only downside of not travelling, I have noticed so far, is I am not paying much tax.

But after a lifetime in the air even that doesn’t seem too much to forfeit for the simple delight of being able to come back down to earth.

Qantas resumes international flights from Melbourne with a plane leaving for Singapore. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Andrew Henshaw

Show me a traveller with a Qantas platinum card and 500,000 frequent flyer points and I will show you someone who is a stranger to their children and whose dog bites them when eventually they come home.

With the world drifting towards war in Ukraine and in Taiwan there may be not much travel for anyone other than those in the armed services. For any student of history, the times now are too much like 1939.

On the 7th of April of that year the Italian dictator Mussolini invaded Albania. Then on the 1st of September Hitler ordered the German invasion of Poland.

The dictators were working in concert, and today it isn’t hard to see the obvious parallels. A remorseless build-up of troops on conflicted borders was the precursor to both the world wars of the 20th century. Today the dictators Xi and Putin are testing the resolve of the West just as much as was done back in 1939.

It is the old game of totalitarian brinkmanship played all over again but this time with nuclear weapons.

We can only hope caution prevails but in the interim, this might not be the best time to get on a plane to faraway places.

Clapperland author and former Federal senator Terry Aulich. Picture: RICHARD JUPE

Tasmanian author Terry Aulich is at it again. He has just published a sequel to his very funny and prescient book Clapperland which was about how religious loonies might seek to undermine democracy.

He wrote the first one before ScoMo got involved with the divisive madness of the now shelved Religious Discrimination Bill.

That was legislation to allow Australian religious institutions to legally discriminate against other Australians who don’t subscribe to their dogma. Though I still fail to understand why non-believers would want to be involved with an arcane belief system they don’t subscribe to.

Anyway, I always thought it was the public who needed protection from religion and not the other way round.

Aulich’s books canvas such incongruities and his latest, Sete is set in the town of the same name in the south of France. It is a place he knows well, having lived there for many years. The lead characters are the same as last time; Hobart PR man Paddy Kennedy whom I think I recognise from real life and his offsider, former SAS intelligence officer, Helen Troy whom I don’t. Perhaps because there is not too much intelligence in Hobart PR.

As far as the plot goes, I am prepared to believe that happy clapper religious groups could join forces with right wing nationalists to form a new world order and bring about a coup d’etat in my favourite part of France.

So far so good Mr Aulich. What I can’t believe is that Mr and Mrs Troy would give their daughter the name Helen.

That is a bit far-fetched.

What I love about this book by former Tasmanian Labor senator Aulich, is that moderately late in life one of our many Tasmanian ex-senators has found gainful and useful employment.

I now look forward to political novels from Eric Abetz and maybe later from Jonno (the former Jonathon) Duniam, who has displaced Eric as number one on the Liberal Senate ticket.

That’s a coup that would make intriguing reading.

Senator Eric Abetz in Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

What I don’t like about Terry Aulich’s book is that he has rekindled my erstwhile enthusiasm for travel. His descriptions of a part of the world I love are brilliant and straight away I wanted to be there.

Let me indulge you with someone else’s words;

“Around us the markets were now in full swing … food glorious food was everywhere. It was as if God himself had parted the sea and the receding tide had deposited its bounty only in the Sete markets and landed gaping, bulging eyed Mt Everests of fish. Shellfish, coquillages, cascaded in waves on sloping counters as the captains dispensed the catch like masters of the world. Fish, baked bread, coffee, octopus pies and cooking chickens and ducks permeated the air and leaked into every large nose that natural selection gave the French to enjoy the fruits of hunting and gathering.”

If you don’t like political thrillers, you might like travel books. This work succeeds as both genres but suddenly I find myself preferring the latter.

Forget what I wrote earlier in this column.

Aulich, curse him, makes me want to catch a plane again and go to the south of France.

Sete by Terry Aulich

Mouse and Mind, 2021