My son is in Australia right now, spending a year working and travelling around the country, having decided, at the ripe age of 20, that he wants to explore the world, writes Simon Burch.
I can relate to this, because almost 26 years ago to the day, I was also in the same area of Australia as he is – he’s in the Whitsundays, off the cost of Queensland – having travelled down from further up the coast where I made my (very hard-earned) money picking peppers and cueys – or cucumbers, to you and me.
Like Thomas, I was on a year out (accompanied by my partner), having given everything up to go around Australia and then, for four months, travelling north overland from South Africa to Kenya.
However, unlike Thomas, my ability to recall the details of my Down Under there will be probably better than his will be in a quarter of a century’s time, all thanks to a diary I kept from the first day I set off to the day I returned to the UK.
Containing many thousands of words written in tiny handwriting, the diary charts my thoughts and adventures trip from onboard a flight to a stopover in Kuala Lumpur in January 1999 to my last entry, which was written at a table at Nairobi Airport 366 days later.
If only I knew back in 1999 that what I was doing was very 2025. Because keeping a diary – or, in new-speak, journaling – is hot right now.
This is thanks to TikTok and books like The Artist’s Way and The Shadow Work Journal, while male influencers in the so-called hustle-bro sphere are, apparently, eulogising about the self-improvement that comes with keeping a journal.
Keeping a diary is just one type of journaling and it is recognised as a good way to help maintain good mental health through an experience akin to therapy.
There wasn’t any of this understanding back when I did my diary. I’d done diaries when I was younger and realised that I was about to go away on an amazing adventure that I didn’t want to ever forget, so decided that writing my daily experiences down would be the best way to ensure those precious memories were locked in forever.
I haven’t read my diary since, but Thomas being Down Under has inspired me to pull it out of a drawer and return to it in order to relive the past glories of backpacker life.
And it wasn’t long before I realised that the best thing about keeping my diary was, in fact, the writing everything down bit, rather than the story recall bit.
Because while some of the stuff was a joy to write, and I have no doubt that sharing my inner-most thoughts did help me to process some of the challenges that inevitably came my way, reading it back now, I realise that my diary is far from a page-turner.
In fact, it’s really rather boring.
There were certainly high points. Swimming with a manta ray in Western Australia (Coral Bay, May 31) was certainly an experience, and it’s not every day that an elephant wanders into your campsite (Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, November 20) but such events were, it turns out, very few and far between.
Take last 26 years ago last Tuesday, August 19, when we were picking peppers at a farm outside a town called Ayr. The day started at 6.30am when we woke up in our tent. It had been cold overnight and we’d had to borrow a blanket.
An hour later, we arrived in our car at the farm to find out that some of the (Aussie) workers who had also been employed there had been sacked, including one who, we’d previously noticed, smoked a lot and had a really bad mullet.
Our work group – two Brits, one Dutch and one Canadian – climbed onto a Ute (utility vehicle in Aussie speak) and were taken out into the fields to where a machine with a conveyor belt sticking out of the side of it was waiting.
Then we spent the rest of the day – minus breaks, called smokoes – bent double plucking green peppers off bushes and placing them onto the conveyor belt, which trundled them along into a waiting wooden container.
I say the rest of the day, but that’s not correct. For the last hour or so we did some weeding.
Then it was back in the Ute and then back to the campsite, although the car we were travelling in ran out of petrol, leaving us temporarily stranded among a load of sugarcane plantations.
In the evening all watched TV on a coin-operated TV in the communal kitchen until it ran out of credit (yes, really) so we had to go to bed.
It was cold in the tent – again – and we had to squash two mosquitoes which were buzzing around our heads before turning off the light.
Outside of my diary, I have absolutely no recollection of any of this. And, flicking through the pages there are loads of places I simply can’t remember and encounters with people I have long since forgotten existed.
I’m sure when I was writing all of this down – often writing by torchlight – I would have been disappointed to think that, far into the future, finding out what I did in forensic detail – I also often described what I had for tea – in 1999 wasn’t quite as thrilling as I’d imagined it would be.
But I would have been heartened by my takeaway thought, which is that my 27-year-old brain and memory were obviously doing their job, which is to operate like a sieve, holding onto just the important stuff for future reference and decision-making and letting everything fall by the wayside.
Memories work by repetition. In order to make them stick, the subject matter has to be so impactful that our mind can’t help returning to them and replaying them.
Anything that is normal, or humdrum, or run-of-the-mill we don’t revisit and so it disappears, as if it never happened.
So the vast majority of the things I did during my travel were dispensable memory-wise and it’s only because I kept a diary that they can be revisited at all.
And, naturally, there is lesson in there for marketing your business (this is LinkedIn, after all), which is to understand that everyone is filtering stuff they come across every day and only retaining a fraction of what they see and hear.
Anything in your messaging that’s ordinary, humdrum or everyday won’t make the grade. It will come, pass through and be lost.
Do something unique or unexpected, or make a meaningful human connection – because we’re a social species – and you will be memorable.
Be ordinary and, like everything I did on August 19, 1999, you will be forgotten. Unless, of course, someone has included you in their journal.
