1975 – Off We Go

When I was thirty years old, I decided a move overseas would be exciting, an adventure. It was more than that. A colleague had advised me moving up the academic ranks was accelerated if you had spent a couple of years at a recognised overseas university, (although four years later I abandoned academe, but that’s another story). After a few years in Edinburgh, it was an ideal time to move overseas for a few years, a time for renewal, both personal and professional. My search first focussed on Canada, and I found the dream opportunity. McGill University was to set up a new group in their medical school to work on introducing a course on the behavioural sciences into their curriculum. This had been the subject of much of the work I had been doing at the Edinburgh Medical School and for a couple of European agencies. I applied, and was accepted, and we began packing and getting ready to move. Everything went well until I got a letter, just after selling our house: the provincial budget had been cut and with it my job.

I think my response is usually described as ‘panic’. I rushed into Edinburgh for the latest issue of the Times Higher Education Supplement. As usual it had around 160 jobs (the exact number that week was 164). Wasting no time, I fired off applications everywhere, quite indiscriminately. Some failed instantly: I did not get appointed to a research centre on brain surgery. However, I did get a call from Dunedin University, in New Zealand’s South Island. The head of the department of psychology was in Manchester. Would I like to go for an interview for a senior lectureship? I would, and I did! I was offered the job, and breathed again. Our goods were already in store, so all we had to do was change the destination, and re-plan our itinerary.

Then there was another call. This time I was being invited to fly out for a job interview in Australia, at the Reader (Associate Professor) level. Sure. I arrived in Adelaide on a Saturday morning. It wasn’t a good start. I was invited to a football match, not knowing my host meant Australian Rules Football, not soccer. I spent two hours on a cold, wet day, with about 50 other people, watching a totally incomprehensible game. Off to my hotel, the Hilton no less, only to discover a local motel had the rights to the Hilton name. It wasn’t the five-star luxury I had imagined. Just to complete the experiences of the day, a minor earthquake woke me a 4 am.

However, the interview on the Monday seemed successful; after all, it seemed obvious they must have wanted me or they wouldn’t have flown me out. I was offered the job and was appointed Reader in Educational Research at Flinders University of South Australia. When we arrived some months later, I discovered I had been their second preference. The first choice before the interviews was an existing member of staff: unsuccessful, he remained in the unit. Fortunately, he turned out to be very supportive, as well as a helpful guide to the ways of South Australia. He told me my excellent interview swung the choice – all because I believed I had it anyway!

Back in Edinburgh, I had to let the removals people there was a slight change of plans. I also had to tell Dunedin I wasn’t going there after all. I had a lot of leave owing, and so we booked a series of flights. Then I realised our passports were in a filing cabinet which might already be in a container on the way to Adelaide. I called and we were in luck, as the goods were still in store. I raced over to retrieve the passports, and noticed the stickers said “Sheldrake – Sydney”. Asking what was going on, the supervisor looked at me patiently. “When we brought this stuff into store, you were going to Canada. Then you changed your destination to some place in New Zealand. Then we got another call to say they were to go to Adelaide. We decided to hedge our bets. Sydney is half-way between Dunedin and Adelaide. If we sent your stuff there, it would be close, and the details could be sorted out once you arrived – wherever that might be”!

Panics and confusions over, we were ready to travel. I had accumulated some leave, and we decided to take the ‘slow boat’ to Australia, stopping off at various places. Each member of the family could choose a place they’d like to visit. I can’t remember who chose what, but we ended up with Amsterdam, Paris, Rome, Geneva, Cairo, Beirut, Malaysia, Bangkok and Bali.

It all went well to begin with. It was a rather funny start. Parents came to the airport to see us off as we left for Australia, with plenty of tears and hugs. An hour later we were getting out of an aeroplane in Amsterdam! The first couple of weeks were uneventful, just doing tourist things in Amsterdam, then Paris and then Rome. To be honest, I can’t remember much. In Paris, I remember my eldest daughter tripping upstairs as we climbed up to the first level of the Eiffel Tower (that tells you we were travelling with little money!). I remember looking at the Coliseum, and thinking how dilapidated it was. Limited recall betrays the fact that my time was taken up with organising ourselves to get to see things, as I had been some of these cities before.

My recollections change quite sharply on arriving in Egypt. I had a PhD student in Edinburgh, who had taken over making all the arrangements for our trip to Cairo. We knew we had arrived in a different world when the plane landed at the airport. All the passengers disembarked, and most of them simply walked across the tarmac and out of the airport without going through immigration. We were better behaved, of course. Once through, there was my student waiting, and he took us to his car. A man opened my door, and put out his hand: “baksheesh”. Whoa!!

Mohammed drove us to the Golden Hotel. I began to wonder just what we had let ourselves in for as he drove the wrong way down a one-way street to deposit us at the hotel. It was cheap, and then when we got in, we discovered it was way beyond cheap, it was horrible! I looked it up recently, and it’s still operating. If you visit the website, it is advertised as an economic and apparently clean place. However, one trip advisor review caught my attention:
“Extremely dirty, (dust everywhere no signs that it was ever wiped out), noisy, smelly, no amenities whatsoever (except a small fridge, a 19” TV and leaky toilet) … no bathroom privacy. Staff will deceive you regarding taxi prices, distances. … Bedsheets are just glorified rugs, the balcony door does not close so you have 24/7 noise and pollution … only good thing about location is the museum”
It doesn’t sound like all that much has changed. Perhaps because of the squalor, perhaps just because it was a different environment, the rest of the family became very sick.

However, we did summon up enough energy to see the pyramids and the Museum. In those days Tutankhamun’s mask was in a wooden cabinet, unlocked: I could have taken it out to examine it more closely. This city was one daughter’s choice, and, as she had requested, we went down to Giza, saw the pyramids and had camel rides. As an aside, in her first year in school in South Australia, the teacher asked about travel. “I’ve been to Egypt. I saw the pyramids and rode on a camel!” “Please don’t tell fibs.” Furious, she came home, collected her Egypt photographs, and marched up the teacher the next day! The teacher did apologise, but my daughter never forgot.

In Cairo, not feeling the best, we suddenly faced a second challenge. Civil war had broken out in Lebanon and we had to change our travel plans. After some discussion with the airline (we had been travelling with Alitalia for this part of the trip, which was linked with Qantas at the time), we decided to go to Baghdad. I went to the Embassy of Iraq, to be told a visa would take two weeks. Two weeks? The man at the desk nodded sadly, and waited. Slow, but I got there: of course, baksheesh. Two Egyptian pounds and an hour later, the visas were in our passports!

We flew on to Baghdad, and a shambolic arrival. After immigration, we entered the arrivals area and saw a mountain of cases within a square of tables, and three men collecting cases and bringing them to customers. Cases had to be opened, and were enthusiastically searched – for alcohol, pornographic tapes or magazines, or whatever else was banned. We waited, went through the appalling search process (had I forgotten about baksheesh already?), and went over to the small booth dealing with accommodation. There was nothing available?!! We had chosen to visit Baghdad during an international dentistry convention in the city. I took a taxi up to the city and went to see Alitalia, but they couldn’t get us out until two days later. We spent two days at the airport. The airline gave us same meal, chicken, salad and a bread roll, for every meal.

By the time we were to depart, we were organised. No seat allocation, so the three children pushed their way to the front of the queue, and when the door was opened rushed over to the plane, up the stairs, and bagged two sets of three seats. We came along behind, an airline staff member tried to grab by carry-on bag (no way, it had our money and passports) and battling past we got on board. In our seats, we watched the unfolding chaos in some amazement. One lady had brought on a cardboard box with what sounded like two chickens inside. Another had a hip bath, yes, a hip bath, and since it was too big to go under the seat in front of her, or in the overhead luggage containers, she put it in the gangway. Children climbed over seats, falling into other passengers’ laps. A woman sat next to me, in the one vacant seat in the set of six the children had grabbed. As I looked around, I saw it was one of the flight attendants. She smiled and explained there was no point trying to do anything, so she sat with us all the way to Bahrain.

After a couple of days of recovery in a lovely hotel in Bahrain, we were on standby to get on a Qantas flight. Two days after our arrival, we went back to the airport, but there were no seats available. We returned to the hotel. The next night we were back at the airport. My partner lost it completely at this stage, grabbed hold of the Qantas Services officer (I mean literally grabbed hold of him, hands locked onto his jacket collar) and demanded we were put on a flight. He was as scared as I would have been, and we travelled First Class to India, and on to Kuala Lumpur. I loved it. Back then there was a cocktail lounge for First Class on the upper deck of a 747: gin and tonics and first class travel. It was great. Everyone else slept the whole time!!

When we arrived in Malaysia, we were met at the airport by a man with a placard, and a lovely Volvo. We got in the car, and were driven some 200 miles to a rubber plantation. The plantation was in northern Malaysia, close to Telok Anson (the village’s name has now reverted to the earlier name of Telok Intan). Our host, John, one of my dad’s students from many years earlier, was wonderful. The plantation had a clubhouse, where drinks were served after 4 pm, a swimming pool (where snakes were to be found swimming on some days), a river close by (with alligators), and one of the first oil palm plantations (oil palms soon took over from rubber plantations, our host was in the vanguard). More to the children’s’ delight, we were assigned maids. One daughter caught on quickly, and would delight in dropping clothing, towels, whatever, wherever she went, and then watched the maid rush along and pick everything up!

The local Chinese millionaire heard we were in town, and invited us to dinner. It was nearly a catastrophe. First, we entered the restaurant, and walked past the tables, into the back, through the kitchen, and upstairs to a small private dining room. Seeing the kitchen was not a good start, as it was … well, let’s say less hygienic than we might have hoped. When we entered the room, I saw there were two drinks waitresses, and we were each given a tumbler. The choices for a drink were limited; whisky or 7-up? All the family went for the soft drink, so I agreed to have whisky. Second mistake, not only did I dislike whisky (both the drink and the aroma, having once drunk too much whisky in Edinburgh), but every time I took a sip, the glass was refilled.

The first dish appeared, a wonderfully coloured creation, looking like a mosaic fish. “What’s that?” demanded a child. “Seaweed.” “Oh, yuk.” Not a good response. Neither the children nor my partner wanted to eat seaweed, a pity as it was delicious. The next platter appeared, laid out like an alligator. “What’s that?” Our Chinese host smiled. “Chinese Ice Cream.” Now everyone ate. The last challenge came from a daughter who kept asking for fried rice. Dish number eight was a vast mound of fried rice, but she was too full. “Just as well”, John told me afterwards. “If you eat the rice at the end, it means there wasn’t enough to satisfy you!”.

After a week relaxing, we spent a few days in Kuala Lumpur, and then, fully recovered from our time in the Middle East, wandered on and had enjoyable holidays in Thailand and Bali. Enjoyable can be translated as ‘very hot’, but the children could either go in a swimming pool or swim in safe beach areas, which they did all day long; in other words, enjoyable for them. I just got hot! Finally, we had to stop in Perth to visit some distant family, on our way from Bali to Adelaide. On that flight, everyone was asleep, but I was invited to spend the trip in the cockpit – those were the days!! Arriving in Perth, we had our first contact with the world of hot cloudless summer days, and houses with air conditioning. Our travels were almost over but now I felt sick.

When we arrived in Adelaide, our first ‘home’ was in a flats on campus, intended for staff in the Medical School. I broke out in a fever, covered in nasty red spots. We asked a neighbour, a doctor, to check me out. It was a funny meeting. He stood on one side of the room, I stood on the other: I told him we had been to such exotic places as Cairo, Bagdad and the backwoods of Malaysia, and he wondered if I caught something esoteric and dangerous. It was chicken pox. Once reassured, he prescribed some drugs and I took many showers to relieve the itching. I didn’t start work at the university until three months after my arrival. It was a bad case, and I wasn’t able to leave our flat for two months, and then only to go down a few steps for the newspaper! Our possessions arrived while I was getting better, including my work books, in some 90 boxes that were put directly into my university office. I didn’t know it at the time, but their arrival gave me gave me an excellent reputation – the boxes were whisky cartons!!

This year I am moving back to Australia. Will this be the last international move? I think so. The move from the UK to Australia had been an exciting adventure. Moving from the Australia to the US was less of an adventure, but still exciting. Adventure and excitement seem less likely a third time, and the thought of settling and staying in one place is enticing. Who knows? One day, something might happen, an unexpected opportunity come on the horizon, and, tempted by excitement, once more it will be: ‘Off We Go!!’