My father's family at home, "Llanfair" (short for
Llanfairfechan), Melbourne, 1931
" ... your letters are reports from the destinations of my own dreams."
... Sven Hedin to Heinrich Harrer.
"Once you get home, nobody will be remotely interested in what you did or what you saw. Why should they be? All they'll want to know is whether or not you 'had a good time', and your notion of a 'good time' is unlikely to be theirs. The best kind of traveller is a thief on the prowl, looking for illuminating moments. Travelling, unlike tourism, is just living more intensely, freed for a short time from the constraints of being whoever it is we're accustomed to thinking we are. It's being on the prowl, beholden to nobody, for the beautiful self we'd forgotten was locked up inside us."
... Robert Dessaix in "The Age" newspaper, 18.ix.04.
So why write all this stuff? Well, partly just for me, some of it for the occasional person who is interested in some bits and pieces. But also, some of it : in China there are wang ba, internet shops, all over the place, and so it seems likely there will also be one tucked away in a back-street in Heaven (though I expect without Chinese computer games), and who knows Who may pay it a visit?
I live in Bulleen, a suburb on the east side of Melbourne (south-east Australia) about 16 kilometres from the city centre. For many years I have held parallel and in some ways complementary interests in Tibet and China.
The interest in Tibet was rather undeveloped until the July 1955 issue of the National Geographic Magazine arrived with its long article by Heinrich Harrer about life in Lhasa; later that same year I acquired my very first book about Tibet - Clarke's "The Marching Wind". The next year I read (compulsorily, at school) Harrer's celebrated "Seven Years in Tibet". Since then a romantic schoolboy kind of interest has matured and, I hope, become better informed and more truthful, helped in recent years by eleven visits to Tibetan territory.
The interest in China goes back further, probably to the last years of the Second World War and the rather crabby care of a Chinese amah. It was nourished by such morsels as the magazine "China Reconstructs" arriving from Peking every month in the late 50's and beyond, full of information about the successive versions of obligatory political correctness. It has thrived on a dozen visits to China, none yet to the east coast, or to Beijing or Shanghai. It is, of course, a love-hate relationship.
In 2001 I was in Tibet and China for five weeks with my companion Peta, Who is now with the Holy Angels.
What follows is a list of links to Web pages I have written, and a link to one by son Ben.
All of the above sites are maintained for the Australia Tibet Council Ltd. Sites below are private sites.
If accounts of later journeys are placed on the web, their addresses will be www.alphalink.com.au/~dawa/china**.htm, where "**" is the last two digits of the year.
