Impressions from Australia, one of the world’s most hostile countries for the nicotine business.
By George Gay
It is my belief that luggage is evolving at a faster rate than the travelers who use it. At least this was the main observation I made while people-watching at the end of May as I waited to complete the formalities necessary before I could board my flights from Britain to Australia via Singapore. Luggage, seemingly to suit every conceivable travel need, was being carried, dragged, rolled and even ridden by travelers, most of whom it was difficult to imagine fulfilling any need. Frankly, these travelers looked devoid of agency as they moved robotically, heads lowered, slavishly submitting to the instructions being delivered by the cell phones they wrongly believed were acting in their service.
There was a time when it was said that people came weighed down with baggage of one sort or another, but now, it seems, luggage comes lumbered with human baggage. But for how much longer I wonder? Surely it would be more humane to cut out the middleman and woman and let the luggage, suitably AI enchanced, go traveling on its own, relaying its tourist or business experiences back to its owners safely ensconced at home. Given an AI uplift, luggage could certainly negotiate better than humans the automated bag-drop formalities at London airport and the immigration computers in Sydney. After all, it would be interacting with its own kind in a way that humans no longer do.
Why do people travel to other countries? Is it, as I have sometimes heard, “to broaden the mind?” Perhaps this was once true, but it is looking increasingly threadbare as a reason or excuse. Nowadays, with high-speed travel the norm, flying is more likely to cause jetlag, damaging the brain and draining the mind of memory, and, in any case, all the information you need to know about far-away places is available to you while sitting at the kitchen table with a computer and a cup of coffee.
But perhaps, as I have also heard, people travel “to get away from it all?” Well, I’ve got news for the people who think that way. Globalization and modern communications have conspired to make it impossible to get away from it all, except for the weather, if that is what you mean by “it all.” These days, people are incapable of getting away and enjoying new vistas because they are trapped within the horizons set by their phones or limited by their mental baggage.
Once in Australia, I did try to get away from it all by reading various newspapers, but, after a while, I found myself buying each day the same paper, the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), whose world view seemed to be aligned with the newspaper I read in the U.K., The Guardian. It was comforting, too, that the letter writers to the SMH seemed to share the same, generally caring attitudes exhibited daily in the pages of The Guardian.
And soon I realized that not only was I reading a paper with similar views but also that the news itself was little different to what I had thought I had left behind. There were reports of housing shortages, debates about immigration and concerns about energy provision and the climate crisis and about a cost-of-living crisis that meant less money was being donated to charities. Violence against women was in the news as was a lack of care facilities for the elderly, waiting times for medical treatment, a lack of some prescription drugs, increasing cases of whooping cough, a rising need for food banks, infrastructure cost overruns and bird flu. I had left a relatively rich country where child poverty levels were scandalously high and arrived in another relatively rich country to be greeted by an advertisement for The Smith Family’s Winter Appeal in which it was stated that one in six Australian children lived with poverty.
But it wasn’t all the same. I couldn’t help noticing, for instance, that whereas magpies in the U.K. mostly issue harsh, scolding cries, in Australia, they are more melodious. Perhaps the incidence of passive smoking among magpies is higher in the U.K., a more crowded country than Australia.
