This is embarrassing to admit but I’ve never been to Melbourne. I haven’t even set foot in Victoria. Or WA, or the Northern Territory, or Tasmania, while I’m confessing my sins. I went to Queensland once. Adelaide, too, for a wedding, and played in a football tournament in Canberra back in the days when I still had knees.
This is all to say that for someone who writes about travel for a living, I’m woefully ignorant when it comes to travelling around my own country.
Like so many things that are currently wrong with my life, this, too, can be traced back to my early twenties. A group of mates were organising a trip to the Gold Coast and between the flights, theme parks, and something called “Dracula’s”, they showed me the bill and I thought they were having a laugh. It was an extortionate amount to pay for a domestic holiday and I joked that I could go to Thailand for the same price.
Then it hit me.
I could go to Thailand for the same price, which is exactly what I did. And it was in this blissful haze of Singhas and songthaews that my dreams of domestic travel went to die. I could no longer justify travelling anywhere in Australia, not when every precious cent I saved was spent on getting as far away from here as possible.
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Much like quitting drinking and becoming financially responsible, I keep telling myself that I’ll travel around Australia when I’m older.
Melbourne was simply caught in the collateral. Which is a pity, given what I know about the city. It has good food, which dictates most of my destinations. Great coffee, which is the first thing I search on Google Maps whenever I’m deciding where I should stay. I even have this (not at all weird) fascination with historic trams, and the City Circle line in Melbourne looks particularly romantic.
But whenever I entertain the thought of booking my tickets, I’m tripped up by all sorts of mental hurdles before my credit card comes out. I tell myself that I’m too busy, or that flying domestic is a chore, or that every second I spend there is a second that I’m not going to be able to spend somewhere else. The issue is no longer economic; it’s existential, and I can’t put the same value on a domestic trip as I can on an international one.
Which is ridiculous, when you think about what the Brits subject themselves to just to stay in this country. Those poor, pasty bastards will be out in the sun picking fruit and yet here I am, too lazy to hop on an hour-and-a-half flight to go see a place that I would probably love. I’d like to blame our lack of a high-speed rail network on my woeful domestic travel record, but the truth is the only person I have to blame is myself.
For all the travel creeds that I swear by, I’m an absolute hypocrite when it comes to applying them to Australia. I try to connect with locals wherever I go and yet I avoid my neighbours here like the plague. I pride myself on being able to find beauty in the ugliest corners of the world and yet I’ve kept the blinds closed to my own backyard.
Much like quitting drinking and becoming financially responsible, I keep telling myself that I’ll travel around Australia when I’m older. When nine hours on a plane becomes more torturous than it already is, that’s when I’ll look inwards to find joy, as opposed to searching for it abroad.
But much like quitting drinking and becoming financially responsible, part of me knows that I’m straight-up lying to myself about it. It leaves me wondering how I can fall so head over heels in love with places like Thailand and Japan and yet seem incapable of developing any sort of relationship with my own country.
To those from Melbourne, I’m sorry, it’s not you, it’s me. We’re like colleagues who got each other’s names wrong and now too much time has passed for us to ever correct each other. It’s better to live on pretending that I’m Pete, not Paul, and you’re a place that I’m absolutely, definitely, maybe going to see one day.
Paul Marshall is a Sydney-based travel writer who left his heart on the Banana Pancake Trail. With more than 10 years’ experience in the film, television, and video game industries, he now writes about his former life as a digital nomad and is always plotting his next escape. Whether it’s cycling across Korea or living in a Japanese fishing village, he loves a little-known destination and an offbeat adventure.Connect via email.
