The golden years of travel
Discrete pieces might seem inconsequential: an isolated letter, a random travel brochure, a stash of photographs. Discovering archival bits and pieces over time also might seem inconsequential, but making connections between these items can reveal untold stories waiting for just the right moment. My aunty was going through her old papers last year and gave me a letter written to her in London by my father sixty years ago.
The nine-page letter was the first my father, Terry, wrote from Vancouver BC after leaving Australia.[i] In it, he commented, ‘Dear Mother won’t be very happy with me, seeing as I’ve written only 1 post card since arriving 18 days ago’.
When I visited my dad in my childhood home one night, I found him sitting in front of the television with a box of papers that he was tearing up and dropping into another box. Out of curiosity, I looked into the box of papers. With eyes widening and a rising voice to match, I cried, “What are you doing?”
“Getting rid of this rubbish” he replied, “nobody wants these old travel papers.”
I may have yelled, “Are you crazy? I do!”
“I’ll need these papers to write about your overseas travel.”
How could my very special interest in all things old not register with him? I immediately confiscated this precious loot, salvaging the quartered hotel receipts, and bundling up the travel papers for safe keeping.
***
Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes was the main history text in my Bachelor of Arts degree. I studied it in great detail because I’ve always remembered a chapter, ‘The Golden Years’ as coinciding with my parent’s lives. The Golden Years were considered by economists as an exceptional period of prosperity and advancement particularly for people in Western countries in terms of GDP, food production, manufacturing, auto industries, life expectancy, disposable income and tourism. ‘One of the reasons why the Golden Age was golden was that the price of a barrel of Saudi oil averaged less than $2 through the entire period from 1950-1973.’[ii] It made sense, after working from the age of 15 years old as an apprentice optical mechanic, my dad left for Canada, aged 25. Travelling in 1966 was affordable, the letter notes, ‘incidentally everyone on board seemed to be either a nurse or teacher.’ His overseas travels was a pinnacle life event for him, and a story on high rotation for me as a kid.
A conversation with my paternal grandmother Dot, as I drove her home from a holiday in Inverloch, revealed her opinion that there was no need to travel overseas. It was an idea that was foreign to me (after all those paternal travel stories), but one that was perhaps aligned with the views in this article published in the New Yorker in 2023, The Case against Travel. ‘Travel gets branded as an achievement: see interesting places, have interesting experiences, become interesting people … What is mysterious is why we imbue it with a vast significance, an aura of virtue. If a vacation is merely the pursuit of unchanging change, an embrace of nothing, why insist on its meaning?’ It wasn’t that my grandmother hadn’t been overseas herself; my grandparents visited my aunty who was living in New Zealand in the mid-1970s, but there was certain pragmatism that I was too young and emotionally immature to really understand.
I remember my parents telling me about a grandparental intervention in the 1980s when my eldest cousin had, in their opinion, been overseas for too long. I believe a letter was dispatched from Dot and Jack with some wording to the effect of ‘It’s time for you to come home…’
There were no conversations suggesting my grandfather, Jack, shared Dot’s views. He facilitated further travels for me by writing to my aunt’s sister-in-law, Linda, in the Lakes District, with whom he corresponded, to tell her I would be in the UK in 1998, and she invited me to visit. His crowning travel memory was a working holiday in outback Queensland in 1929, that I’ve written about here and here, which prompted another aunt and uncle to attempt a visit, and my own pilgrimage with my father in 2017.
Hobsbawm noted tourism as a phenomenon charting a swift rise following the Second World War. ‘Before the war never had more than 150,000 North Americans travelled to Central America and the Caribbean in any year, but between 1950 and 1970 their numbers grew from three hundred thousand to seven millions [sic].’[iii] This is consistent with my family’s movements, although there are exceptions, which I’ll explore in future blog posts.
***
In his letter to his sister, ‘Maun’, who is now known as Moon, my father wrote, ‘You know, I’ve been gone from Australia for nine weeks and it really feels years and years. So far I haven’t felt homesick maybe that will come later.’
After Moon had gifted the letter to me, she remarked on the candour and detail of the letter. I loved reading my father’s conversational thoughts on paper, and I recognised for the first time a gift for storytelling that I had taken for granted and demanded all my life, without ever considering him a storyteller. In the letter, my father details who was present for his departure, how he felt, ship life, and arriving in Canada.
My father left Melbourne on 18 May 1966 on the P & O Liner, ‘Iberia” with a bevy of family and friends* on the dock waving goodbye. He wrote:
‘When the Iberia pulled out from the dock at Port Melbourne I lent against the rail where I had many thoughts racing through my mind as Dad, Mum, Des, Marion, Colin, Faye, Norma & Peter (Marion’s sister and husband) and Mick Jones began to fade into the dark and dimly lit distance, I had a queer feeling that I was just sailing away once more, that I’d only been there for a visit in fact that I’d been travelling all my life, and had never really settled down all my life. God! the things one thinks about at such a time it’s an eerie feeling, like someone running a piece of chalk down a blackboard screech, screech, it goes, giving you a chilling sensation along one’s spine. It’s very difficult to remember and say much more because it was well after midnight and I was cold standing there.’
To place the letter into a visual context, I looked through my father’s photographs, something I loved doing as a kid. Searching for a studio photograph of my father competing in games on the ship (‘winning’ notes the self-caption), I find he has a beard in the photograph. There’s another passport size photo in the stash with the caption ‘Amsterdam, six days growth’. I put two and two together, adjusting the timelines in my mind, noting the cardboard frame of the photo has SS Oriana printed on it, so it is not a photo of the traveller at the start of his journey, but on the return home. A lamentation in his letter to Moon (Maun) comes back to me, ‘I was bitterly disappointed when I had the 5 films or 210 photos developed not one came out, after all the excitement of taking the bloody things.’
L-R: Judy Fordham, Unknown, Terry Meagher, Mardi Powell, Stan Joughin in Vancouver BC, July 1966.
There are three photos discernible as the earliest photos of the trip in the collection based on the people in the photo and a clean-shaven Terry; another aspect of great interest to me as a kid – my father without a beard! Telling my Dad about this essay, he recalls that the ship’s cabin housed five or six beds. One of the cabin mates, Stan Joughin, a Canadian from Vancouver BC, was ‘a helluva a nice guy’. The dining room allocated seating to passengers, and so Stan, Terry, and two Australian women from Sydney, Mardi Powell and Judy Fordham, sat at the same table every night as they travelled for six weeks from Australia to Canada before disembarking in Vancouver BC.
“The life on board was a strange life, no doubt you experienced it too where every morning I slept in till 12 noon mostly, a couple of times till 2.30pm, after getting back my senses I would arise, dress then go and have lunch, the food being top class according to other passengers who have travelled on different ships. The afternoon would be spent either sunbaking if the weather permitted or just read a book or play scrabble, draughts or something like that. Dinner was at 7PM 1st sitting after that I’d go and shave, have a shower, get dressed and either go to the Pictures, Dance, games night, Quiz session or whatever else which may have been put on.’
SS Iberia games, unknown couple in foreground with Mardi Powell and Terry Meagher in background (left) 1966
Terry’s letter mentions how he ended up boarding with Mrs Joughin, Stan’s mother, in Kerrisdale for three weeks on his arrival in Vancouver BC. ‘It was tremendous of Mrs Joughin to have me since I was originally going to stay for 3 days but which has materialised to almost 3 weeks.’ Stan and Mardi ended up marrying, and Mardi immigrated to Vancouver. The ship’s confined quarters, the intimacy of the ship games (as evident in the photograph above) the nightly dinner gatherings over six weeks explains the camaraderie and connection during the trip extending to post trip gatherings in Vancouver BC and continued hospitality. ‘Since being in BC Stan has driven me all over Vancouver so I could take photos, alas to no avail… also Phil invited us over several times for barbeques and things like that so have been fairly well occupied.’
L-R Elaine Woodward, Dick Woodward, Stan Joughin, Mardi Powell, Terry Meagher and Judy Fordham at King of Clubs Cabaret, Vancouver BC, 8 July 1966.
The prosperity that Hobsbawm describes in the Golden Years of the 1950s – 1970s not only shaped the formative years of my father’s life but changed the trajectory of life for future generations. Terry would spend two years in Canada before travelling to Europe for a spell prior to returning home to Australia. I daresay writing about Terry’s overseas travels will be a recurring family history theme as I uncover new bits and pieces and find connections that give new insights into the Golden Years of my parent’s youth.
*The people bidding Terry farewell on the Port Melbourne dock were: his parents Dot and Jack Meagher, his brother Des Meagher, a former girlfriend Marion Middleton, Norma and Peter (Marion’s sister and husband), a work colleague and friend, Mick Jones and his cousin, Colin Donovan with his wife Faye.
Endnotes
[i] Letter from Terry Meagher to Maureen Meagher, 18 July 1966. Meagher Family Archive.
[ii] Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991, Abacus, London, 1994, p.262.
[iii] Ibid, p.264.
