An Abstract

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I was 25 when I left Australia in 1976, a young newspaper and radio journalist on my first-ever international flight. I was alone. I had no return ticket, no itinerary, and I knew not a single person in Southeast Asia.

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What I did have was self-confidence and an overriding self-belief that one day I would become a foreign correspondent. Among the passengers on my inaugural flight I stood out – long-haired and bearded – and instead of a suitcase, I carried a backpack which I placed in the airplane’s overhead luggage rack. It contained a manual typewriter, a cassette recorder, typewriter ribbons, cassette tapes, batteries, pens, a shortwave radio, a transistor, two dictionaries, a big map of Southeast Asia, and very few clothes. I deliberately did not pack swimming trunks or a beach towel; I was a travelling journalist in search of stories, not a tourist in search of a suntan.

 

I may have looked like just another backpacker on the ‘hippy’ trail to Europe, but the contents of my backpack – had anyone looked inside – defied the stereotypical hippy. And another thing: my destination was Southeast Asia, not Europe. Compounding my non-conformity was the fact that I never drank, never smoked, avoided tourist ‘hot spots’, and eschewed a travel companion. I was an atypical backpacker.

 

Since I was 10 years’ old, my dream was to become a foreign correspondent. I graduated with a diploma in Journalism, spent four years as a newspaper reporter and three years as a radio producer, but a foreign correspondent posting remained out of reach. In the 1970s, only veteran journalists – mostly men – were assigned to an overseas office as a pre-retirement reward for years of service.

 

I was too young and too impatient to wait for something I might never get, and possibly in a country not of my choosing. So, I resigned and flew to Kuala Lumpur on the cheapest flight available, with the intention to make Southeast Asia my journalistic ‘testing ground’ before I reached the Philippines, my chosen destination.

 

The Philippines was awash with stories: a dictator (President Ferdinand E. Marcos); a communist revolt; an Islamic insurrection; the two largest American military bases outside the USA; endemic corruption; and rampant human right abuses. It was the only majority Christian country in Asia, and English was widely spoken. For a news-hungry budding foreign correspondent, the Philippines was perfect. 

 

Never, in the years following, did I regret my decision to choose the Philippines to be my journey’s destination. Unlike in other countries where a foreign correspondent wakes up and asks: is there a story today? In the Philippines, the question a foreign correspondent asks on waking is: what story will I cover today? 

 

But it took me 18 months – on the most circuitous route – to get to the Philippines where I stayed 10 years, worked for 10 radio stations (including the BBC) and three newspapers (including the London Times), and watched President Ferdinand E. Marcos overthrown in a People Power revolution in 1986.

 

Why did it take me 18 months to reach the Philippines? I could have flown from Melbourne to Manila in 12 hours. Instead, I took one-and-a-half-years to get there because I wanted to see the ‘in-between’ parts. As I explained in a letter to my parents:

 

“I could have boarded a plane in Melbourne and disembarked in Manila in 12 hours. But if I had done that – flown from ‘A’ to ‘B’ – everything beneath would have gone unseen. Why travel from ‘A’ to ‘B’ in the air when you have the entire alphabet to choose from on the ground? And why hurry?”

 

Travelling alone, I took truck-like buses, dilapidated trains, rust-bucket cargo ships, even canoes on an exploration of Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Burma, Borneo and finally, the Philippines. Along the way, I suffered malaria, dysentery, kidney stones, and gout. 

 

This island-hopping, mind-expanding trip through the region, was my ‘journalistic baptism’. I was an impetuous, impulsive, and curious one-day-at-a-time traveller. I did not have a travel plan. Instead, I had a map which marked where I had been, not where I was going. There was no rush. Plenty to do. Lots to see. Much to experience.

 

Where I went was often an instinctive choice; a fellow traveller’s recommendation; a hunch; the pull of the unknown; or a coin-toss – north, south, east, or west.

 

For many days, on many occasions, I rode and slept on the deck of unseaworthy inter-island ships; explored jungle settlements by river canoes; endured interminable dusty bus journeys; and suffered ‘no-star’ rat-infested hotels. 

 

“Some hotels were good. Some were acceptable. Some were bad. Seriously bad. A badness that emerged at night when I turned off the light – scurrying cockroaches, lurking spiders, scampering mice, and buzzing mosquitoes.”

 

Occasionally, I stayed in brothels where a few rooms were set aside for travellers. Every night, I handwashed my underpants, T-shirt, and socks in the basin in my room and hung them to dry on a length of string (I always carried six clothes pegs). Often, in the crudest hotels, the toilet was nothing more than a hole in the floor. Within months of setting out, I dumped my sleeping bag, typewriter cover, and numerous clothes because they were too bulky and too heavy for my backpack.

 

With my typewriter and tape recorder, I could hone my journalism along the way. And that’s what I did. I travelled and I wrote. I set out to prove to myself and to the news bosses that I had the journalistic acuity to transition from journalist to foreign correspondent.

 

I must have looked like a ‘wannabe’ Hemingway. I went where few tourists ventured. I hitched a ride on a motorcycle to the Thai-Cambodia border where one week earlier Khmer Rouge soldiers, in a cross-border raid killed 30 civilians; on the Thai-Malay border, I witnessed my first killing when soldiers ordered a suspected communist rebel off the bus and shot him in a scuffle. In Burma, I was one of only 11,000 tourists given a week-long visa to the repressive, travel-restricted, military controlled country. And in Borneo I travelled upriver for more than a month without seeing another white person.

 

I went in search of ‘off-the-beaten-track’ places, often dangerous and isolated places. But some tourist ‘hot spots’, like Bali’s Kuta Beach, I could not avoid.

 

“The beach itself is grey and third rate. Spruikers selling ice-cream. Pimps selling hash, and girls selling themselves at bargain rates… For the Hindus of Bali it must be so offensive. These tourists couldn’t care less. They disregard customs, manners, and decent behaviour. If you can avoid the Indonesians in a rough circle quietly watching and pointing at the naked tourist couple making love on the beach, and at the same time avoid tripping over other couples sunbathing naked, you can make it back to your loseman in time to eat a rather dreadful pseudo-Western meal.”

 

In Borneo – where it rains an average 234 days each year – a four-day canoe journey up the wild Rajang River began with eight passengers and ended with me, alone, with the three-man crew. I went looking for elusive ex-headhunters and found them isolated in the upper reaches of the river, four days from the nearest town. 

 

My arrival caused consternation among many of the youngest children because I was the first white man they had ever seen. The youngest children, both boys and girls, were naked. The older girls wore dresses of thatched leaves and grasses, and the boys wore loincloths of animal skins and feathers. My hairy arms were stroked, my clothes poked and fingered, and my glasses shared among the garrulous children, bewitched by the blurry world they saw. My watch puzzled them, intrigued them, and my boots were studied with awe, and envy, I suspect. Six severed heads ‘guarded’ the longhouse in which I stayed. 

 

The communal veranda is the centre of Iban life. It is where they gather to eat, play, laze, and relax in much sought-after jungle vine hammocks. At night, after a meal of gluggy rice and some sort of meat, I retrieved my radio from the backpack. They were wonderstruck. In awe, both adults and children tried to shake the voices out of my radio.

 

In Borneo, the further upriver I travelled, the greater the isolation. 

 

“I haven’t seen another Westerner for possibly a month or more… Sometimes, I get the strangest looks from people who can’t believe a Westerner would travel like this. It’s assumed every Westerner has money. Frequently, my fellow passengers look at me with pity or in disbelief that I would travel this way.”

 

On another occasion, I hitched a ride on an Indonesian cargo ship that used a fire hose to blast the toilet clean every day. For four days, I slept on deck in a hammock and ate what the crew ate – rice and half a boiled egg – every meal, every day. 

 

For several days I travelled from one small Indonesian island to another on a dilapidated, overcrowded passenger ferry. During the day, I shared the top deck with scores of others and at night rough seas forced us below deck. The space was too low (less than 1.5 m) to stand erect or to lie comfortably and so crowded that to make space food was wrapped in scarves (like a food hamper) and babies were wrapped in shawls (like a hammock) and both food and babies were hung from ceiling hooks on the boat’s roof. All night they swung back and forth with the waves. 

 

On one cargo ship, I travelled with dozens of Indonesian families crammed onto the open deck where they sat, slept, cooked food, and queued to use the single toilet until it overflowed. Then, the men pissed over the side and women emptied the contents of small buckets and cans into the ocean.

 

Once, I stowed away on an Indonesia ship. I had to remain below deck until the vessel cleared the harbour. Then, I could ‘buy’ a bunk from a sailor willing to give up his bed and pay a hefty fee to eat the exact meals given to the rest of the crew.

 

Life rafts were rare. Most ships had none. In 18 months, I never saw a life vest, and not once did I witness anything that resembled an onboard safety drill.

 

Worse were the passenger vessels that slipped between islands and transported people, goods, and often livestock upriver. Rarely was a head count taken of the passengers who came onboard. Never was I asked my name and neither was anyone else. It’s little wonder that the first thing I looked for on boarding a coastal trader was an empty wooden box, and anything that floated, like a wooden lid or a foam box.

 

Rangoon, the so-called ‘hermit capital’ of Burma, lived up to its name when the pilot of the Thai Airways flight announced moments before we landed to turn our watches back 50 years. Customs and Immigration officials sat behind tables inside a giant aircraft hangar and two rifle-carrying soldiers insisted we stand behind a painted line and only approach customs agents, one at a time.

 

Most passengers were aware of Burma’s ‘special’ entry requirements – a bottle of Johnny Walker gold-label whiskey and a carton of 555 cigarettes – and they were the only things taken by the Customs agents, who placed them out of sight beneath the table before we were ushered to the Immigration agents sitting at the next table where our passports were stamped with a seven-day visa.

 

Outside the sparse, almost furniture-fee airport terminal, a small fleet of taxis, most of them 20 or 30 years-old, waited for passengers. Along with two other travellers, I chose what looked to be a 40-year-old diesel Rolls Royce. It was at the front of the taxi queue, at the crest of a slight hill, and we were told it required a push start downhill before we could jump onboard. What we were not told was that once started, the taxi couldn’t stop, so we had to run alongside, open the two backdoors, and jump inside the moving vehicle. We did, and we landed in a heap on the back seat.

 

Later, on the city’s outskirts, the taxi slowed to the speed of a bullock. That’s right! Burma’s most important and busiest road had been reduced to a ‘beast of burden’ plod because a bullock was towing a broken-down car with three children in the back seat. The father was in the driver’s seat and there was no glass in the windshield. Instead of using the steering wheel, the inventive father held two pieces of thick rope – one in each hand – which were attached to the yoke (the wooden collar that rests on the neck of the bullock). They acted like reins and with a slight pull left, a slight pull right, the farmer was able to guide the animal as it plodding along in the centre of the road. Behind stretched a line of vehicles as far as I could see.

 

I got dysentery in Burma, in a guesthouse in Mandalay. After numerous toilet visits, each worse than the last, I was found at night crawling on my elbows (like a soldier beneath barbed wire) down a corridor towards the bathroom where the toilet paper was newspaper scraps impaled on a piece of wire. 

 

The day before, in the toilet of the pre-World War Two train to Mandalay, the urinal was a light-filled funnel down which you could see the rail tracks flashing by; and the spot to defecate was a hole in the toilet carriage floor with a small metal hatch. To go to the toilet required a wobbly squat and a good aim. Instead of toilet paper, there was a bucket of water filled from the sink above.

 

Often, in the most remote rural areas of Southeast Asia, I realised I had become the object of people’s curiosity, just as much as I was the inquisitive traveller observing them. For some children, I was the tourist attraction – a white-skinned, bearded, rarely seen foreigner – and they would walk down the aisle and stare until they were called back to their seats.

 

Buses were Asia’s work horses. They were made to do the work of trucks. The most important thing was the engine in front, not the passengers in the back. Many times, I travelled in buses with open windows (no glass) and with benches (no seats) that were smothered in dust on the inside, covered in mud on the outside. Buses in the boondocks of Southeast Asia regularly blew tyres, overheated, broke down, and stuck to no schedule. Timetables were a laughable work of fiction. One bus ride in Sumatra took two days to travel 250 kms because of nine road bogs and two flat tyres.

 

On many of Southeast Asia’s most remote roads, deep potholes, dislodged boulders, eroded gullies, and corrugated surfaces can take hours to negotiate. My fellow passengers have included spear-carrying, half-naked natives; men with guns; hitchhiking soldiers; habit-wearing nuns; Buddhists in saffron robes; an entire school band; and pigs, chickens, roosters, snakes, guinea pigs, dogs, and cats, some in baskets on the bus roof. On one bus, a middle-aged bare-chested woman sat next to me with a puppy suckling her breast. Another time I was obliged to hold a farmer’s fighting cock.

 

These were the days before mobile phones, the Internet, and laptop computers. Letters to and from Australia could take two weeks or more. If I planned ahead and knew where I would be in a few weeks or a month, my parents addressed letters to the town’s post office via Post Restante where they would stay until I collected them.

 

Aerogrammes were the lazy person’s letter; a single thin sheet of fragile paper (with sticky edges) that could be folded into the shape and size of an envelope. They were so thin that the writing inside could be seen on the outside, and the minimum writing space prevented long descriptive letters home, unless your scrawl was tiny, like mine. The cost of an aerogramme covered the cost of the postage.    

 

A phone call home was rare and expensive, and prone to drop out. In many towns and in the rural areas a phone call could be made at the post office, but only if you booked in advance with a post office employee who then rang the telephone exchange operator in a distant city. Sometimes, the call came through in five or 10 minutes, or an hour. Very often, I was told no lines were available. When your call did come through, your allocated number was called, and you were directed to a glass encased phone booth with a stool and a wall mounted dial phone. The number of phone booths in each post office depended on the size of the town. In any case, it really didn’t matter. Poor lines meant shouted conversations and most calls lasted only a few minutes before they dropped out and noisy static filled the silence. Rarely did I end a phone call with a ‘goodbye’. Most times, my calls ended in mid-sentence.

 

Southeast Asia was my journalistic testing-ground, and I followed a strict on-the-road regimen. Regularly, at night, in no-star hotels, I typed newspaper and magazine features and posted them to Hong Kong (The Far Eastern Economic Review), London (The Times), and Melbourne (The Australian). Often during the day, on interminable bus journeys and sleep-inducing slow boat trips, I wrote scores of letters to my parents back in Australia. One letter – handwritten over a few days – was 16 pages long.

 

When, eventually, I arrived in the Philippines, I was ready. My journalistic baptism was over. The days of endless travel were behind me. Ahead were 10 of the most fulfilling, remarkable, often dangerous years of my life. My proudest boast?  ‘I did it on my own’. I fulfilled my vow; I became a self-made foreign correspondent.

 

‘Meandering to Manila’ (November 2025)

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