It’s 1993 and I have a perm twice as wide as my head and a hunger to see the world so much greater than my pay packet will afford.
Each week I stuff away $80, tallying in a notebook my painfully slow attempts to raise the 2000 pounds needed for a working holiday visa to the UK. I’m shiftworking every Sunday for the double time; dodging my round at the pub because I’m saving for my big “OE”.
Then, weeks before I’m due to set off with a backpack on the overseas experience that feels so urgent when you’re born at the bottom of the world, the exchange rate plummets; my pounds are plundered. I borrow $700 from Dad – the only time I’ll ever ask my parents for money.
London, as the immigration officer warns me, is colder than a witch’s tit. But as I battle through that first winter on a diet of baked potatoes, a herringbone coat from Oxfam drawn tight over my shivering shoulders, I learn the single most important lesson of my life: it will be what I make it.
How infuriating, then, that Tourism Australia is spruiking short-cuts to this decades-old rite of passage by offering young foreigners $100,000 and what it boasts are “the best jobs in the world”.
Far from pulling pints in a pub, picking fruit or working as a jackaroo, those interested are invited to apply for jobs such as “chief funster”, “lifestyle photographer”, “outback adventurer” and “taste master”. Duties within the various roles – there is one for every state – include reviewing festivals, checking the water temperature, swimming with dolphins and eating “your way around the state”.
Seriously, what is Tourism Australia doing using $4 million of our hard-earned money to pay these kids to eat and sleep and tweet their way through the nation? Notwithstanding the cultural cringe – the campaign was launched at London’s Waterloo station complete with mock beach, lifeguard and bikinied model, it’s sending the message that Australia is some lumbering party paradise where life is handed to you on a plate.
Travel is such a wondrous, mind-broadening gift; adventures the stuff on which our souls spin. We all have stories: the taverna in Greece; diving in the Red Sea, glimpsing East Germany through a hole in the Berlin Wall; being newly in love in New York.
But travelling when you’re young is as much about discovering your personal potential as it is about the place. D. H. Lawrence calls it getting out of the “glass bottle” of our ego and escaping like the squirrels in the cage of our personality. When we journey, he writes, “things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.”
Tourism Australia is right to lure the young traveller market; the backpacker buck is worth $12 billion to our economy. But in offering six golden tickets in some Willy Wonka-esque gimmicky game show we’re not only short-selling our true attributes but guaranteeing we attract the sort of jumped-up knobs without the wherewithal to find their way here on their own. Remember Augustus Gloop? Veruca Salt? Enough said.
Surely it’s more important than ever we attract visitors with a genuine interest in our country and a curiosity for life, rather than contestants competing for a jolly on our palm-fringed beaches, a bucket of prize money at their side.
Tourism Australia managing director Andrew McEvoy argues working holiday makers tend to stay longer, disperse widely and often come back again, with their families, later in life. I’d venture they’re far more likely to return if they have a real adventure rather than a surreal one.
Me, I spun my 2000 pounds into the most extraordinary eight years of my life. I got the job of my dreams – probably because the boss saw the team-building value in taking the piss out of the Antipodean.
No matter, I fell so deeply, irrevocably in love with that cold green land and its wit and its woodland bluebells that I married the closest thing I could find to David Beckham.
We are a tourism boss’s dream, returning every three years to revisit the little bits of ourselves, as author Katherine Mansfield puts it, left “fluttering on the fences”.
If Tourism Australia wants people to visit and return then instead of filling their pockets it needs to steal a piece of their heart. There is a small corner of mine that is forever England.
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