Australia Journal
June 21~August 12, 1979
My fascination with Australia began at such a young age that I have no dependable grip on its first cause. It was almost certainly a periodical, with likely suspects being magazine or newspaper coverage of the wildlife, or history of WWII in the Pacific, that has figured so prominently in all my life. It was supercharged by Nevil Shute’s novel, On the Beach, and the film that took its name and narrative.
Life, hijacked by bad habits accrued opportunistically, proceeded in the manner described in previous posts including details of earliest memories. It might have made an interesting psychological case study for any student not easily bored. If the narrative could be made as interesting in the writing about it, as it was in its real-time discovery, perhaps it would be of some use. One of its more interesting aspects to me, is that I have been an organic atheist from earliest memory, yet it resembles nothing so much as the evangelical’s imagination of an individual’s “rebirth” without one’s life being interrupted by death. Despite my own doubts, they did not have the effect of hamstringing others’ to whom, so inclined, being “born again” was a possibility so real as to be impossible to doubt it?
Much worthy of notice is skipped over, of the time that passed between “what it was like, what happened, and what it’s like now”, that begins here.
The “Birthday” was theTuesday on July 8, 1975. It was to be just for me, bestowed in a meeting of a group of twenty or so people, all of them strangers to me. They called it “your sobriety date.” It happened in the basement of a church, in Boise’s North End.
“Optimistic fuckers,” I thought, listening as one after another of them mentioned it, citing the number of days, weeks, or months that had passed since each’s own celebrated date. I reckoned the number of one’s “birthdays” was a close match with the number of mornings they had awakened in a tide pool of hangover, and the first coherent words choked forth, “Ill never drink again.”
That was then. Today I write only to introduce a personal journal written about a period that began, as a result, four years later. Today, as was promised to me on that other day, and having postponed each day’s first drink of the day, for one day at a time since, I can share impressions that began with my arrival in the Terminal of Sydney International Airport, on June 21, 1979. The paywall, my first such, acknowledges my gratitude to paid subscribers to The Familographer. Family members helped me to get there; I have survived to write of it today, fifty years later, thanks to that support. I have transcribed it verbatim, well or badly written as may be, during a time when nothing could have convinced me that American voters would elect Ronald Reagan President. In the months after I returned at the end of a 6-month sojourn, it became clear to me that if I was to prosper in such a world as was coming, I would need to return to university.
I had gone to Australia expecting not to return, having overstayed my visa and intending to remain, waiting for the “amnesty” for “desirables” that was not uncommon at the time. I changed my mind in the course of my stay, seeing that it made more sense to leave as required, and to return as a legal immigrant. That never happened.
Sydney, NSW, Australia
June 21, 1979
Arrived from San Francisco, Sydney Airport, 6:35 A M following 14 hrs in flight, broken by a 1 hour stop in Honolulu, where I spent the time in a stretch and stroll with my seatmate, Bill Day, from Sydney. He was returning from the US where he had been on business. He builds water treatment plants in Australia and the near-Pacific.
