The essential experience of travel is finding new truths, new humour, new meaning, and new and unexpected ways of thinking and being. Travel writer Eric Hansen has done so for over thirty years and there was an instant meeting of the minds when I read this passage in his book "The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer":
"After an absence of twenty years, I'm not quite certain why I decided to go back to Thursday Island. Long after I had left the place, it continued to call to me. Many experiences from this part of my life are far better left forgotten. My mind was filled with twenty years' worth of imaginary opportunities lost and gained. How profoundly different my life would have been if I had decided to stay. Some people say you can never go home or return to a place once loved, or recapture a friendship left behind. Time, life, circumstances and fate all have their way of changing who we are and altering beyond all recognition memories or feelings until they finally seem like part of a dream or an illusion. But I knew I had to go back to Thursday Island and I am glad that I didn't wait any longer than I did."
My sentiments precisely. Even his reasons for leaving Thursday Island twenty years earlier somehow mesh with mine, although I had not previously analysed mine as precisely as he had his. He writes,
"Then one day, I suddenly left Thursday Island. It was beginning to feel like home and I knew that if I stayed much longer, I might not leave. I couldn't imagine my time on the island getting any better, and so I convinced myself that it would be a good idea to leave before the bottom fell out of the experience. It was as if I was afraid the circus would leave town or that the magic would dry up and disappear. For most of my life I have felt like a human magnet for the sorts of people and experiences that I encountered on the islands of the Torres Strait. For years, I was convinced that it was perpetual motion that opened me up and made me vulnerable and receptive to odd and unusual encounters. For years, this compulsion to keep moving kept me on the road."
Fearing that the magic would dry up and disappear has also been the motivation behind my fifty-odd job and location changes, since when I've had more than thirty years to reflect on the imaginary opportunities lost and gained. Long after I had left Thursday Island - and how different my life would have been if I had decided to stay! -, the place continued to call to me, and so I did return in April 2005 - click here.
