Copland Theatre, Economics and Commerce Building
University of Melbourne

Friday 18 July 6pm – 7pm

Tony Wheeler

Finding Time to Travel: Exploring the Past,
Present and Future of Travel Writing

In the final lecture of the Borders & Crossings conference on travel writing and tourism studies, Tony Wheeler, co-founder of Lonely Planet Publications and prolific travel writer and editor, will offer three different perspectives on the inextricably linked concepts of travel and time.

What insights into the travel practices of a lost era can we glean from history books and out-of-date guidebooks? History books are inevitably also travel books. What happened and where? What was the world like back then? Reverse the equation and travel books and particularly travel guides are also history texts. Part of the fascination of old guidebooks is the insight they give to an earlier era, we don’t expect to be put up at our local consulate anymore, we don’t worry about hotels having accommodation for our servants and concerns about stabling for the horse have changed into worries about secure car parking. The Pyramids and Notre Dame might still be there, but lots of other attractions will have disappeared or been supplanted by newer not-to-be-misseds.

Does the actual time of travel define its relative and intrinsic value? Has there been or will there be a better time to travel than others? Was the 1930s the best time to travel, an era which produced books like Patrick Leigh Fermor’s “A Time of Gifts”, Robert Byron’s “The Road to Oxiana” or Peter Fleming’s “News From Tartary”? Is walking the best way to travel, moving at the pace God intended for us? In our era, when the Bishop of London proclaims that ‘flying is a sin,’ perhaps time and speed need to be reversed and slow travel will become good travel.

What is the future of travel writing? Much of science fiction is just more travel writing. Space travel and space tourism are key elements of the genre, Captain Kirk, Spock, Scotty and the rest of the crew of the Starship Enterprise were on nothing less than a Star Trek. From H G Wells onward we’ve been using time machines to go back to the future, contemplating how our visits to the past will have affected things when we get back there. Even when we’re staying right here on our familiar planet a great deal of science fiction’s peek at the near future is just a visit to somewhere vaguely unfamiliar. In film, Blade Runner’s dystopian Los Angeles is simply rainy day London filled with street stalls from Bangkok’s Patpong Road. In print, William Gibson’s cyberworld features Bencoolen Street backpacker joints in Singapore mixed with Shibuya bar buildings in Tokyo.

RSVP is necessary for this event
Please send email message with the number of places required to: wheeler@mftw.com.au