Masai Warriors and Goosebump Trails

They say those who know do and those who don’t teach. But I can’t see why you can’t do both.

I love travelling, I love travel writing, I love journalism but I also love to teach. It’s fun to impart what little knowledge you might have come across to other people. And it’s even more fun to see what they come up with. And with this in mind I have started teaching travel writing.


In the past few years, I’ve been to around 20 international destinations and scores in Australia and New Zealand.. I’ve interviewed everybody from Masai warriors to Republican voters in the US to Irish genealogists to Albanian professors to Indonesian villagers. And I’ve written hundreds of travel stories.


But I didn’t start out as a travel writer. I did a pretty traditional journalism cadetship on a newspaper and worked in the Press Gallery in Canberra before heading to the Kimberley in Western Australia and then the Northern Territory to cover the burgeoning land rights movements there.


It wasn’t really until I worked in Central America in the mid 80s that I started writing travel stories. It was a way of getting stories published that you couldn’t get into the world news or features pages. One I remember was about the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua and what an evocative destination that was, even with a war going on there at the time.


We went over to cover the autonomy movement and elections. We sailed up the coast on a cargo ship and climbed into canoes which crashed over waves before landing on the beach. Everybody was green with seasickness but that didn't stop one girl carrying a birthday cake for her family the whole way. On the beach we were met by long-haired, wild-looking soldiers. I thought I’d arrived for the filming of Apocalypse Now.


The female Nicaraguan journalist and I slept head to toe in a mosquito-netted hammock, down with the soldiers. We thought we were safer there. It seems strange now reading about Nicaragua as the newest tourist destination. 


When I was there they used to blow up the ferry to Bluefields on the Atlantic Coast every second Friday.


Times change and so do politics and people. What was a war zone regularly becomes a tourist destination and vice versa.


That’s what makes it so fascinating to write about.


Come to one of my courses held in my Sydney home where you can also enjoy beautiful Balinese food cooked by my husband, Budi Arsana, and get some travel writing tips.


I also teach regional and family history writing. Nearly every story is enriched by historical background, I believe. And some of my favourites have been about tracing my family history in Scotland and Ireland, what’s known as the “goosebump trail”.


Email me on plater@optusnet.com.au for course dates, times and prices.

Lionel and Elvis

Sadly, great Australian boxer Lionel Rose died this week.

At the age of 19 Rose became the first Aboriginal person to win a world title – when he defeated Masahiko “Fighting” Harada in Tokyo in 1968 to win the world bantamweight belt.

Rose grew up in a bark shed at Jackson’s Track, a poor settlement near the Gippsland town of Drouin in Victoria but became a champion.

Rose represented a positive figure for Australian indigenous people. He was a part of my childhood, in a way as he was the first famous Aboriginal person I'd heard of as a teenager.

As a Victorian friend said to me, "he was a superb sportsman and someone that I looked up to at the time, and still do. Plus, he was very cute".

I was intrigued to read in his obituary by Gerry Carman that Rose gathered a glittering array of admirers around Australia and overseas and his biggest American fan was Elvis Presley. Rose and his trainer Jack Rennie apparently were the only outsiders allowed on to the set of a Presley film (Roustabout) and spent three hours with the king of rock’n’roll, who insisted on a brief “spar” with him.

“Elvis never forgot his raisin’” is one of the many tributes to Elvis Presley on a story wall at the shotgun shack he was born in at Tupelo, Mississippi, now a museum, which I visited in 2006. It was thus named because a shotgun bullet could pass from the front to the back.

The tribute was written by Annie Presley, a cousin by marriage and a dear friend of Elvis’s mother, Gladys.

Another tribute tells of Elvis sneaking away to the local black Baptist church to listen to gospel music.

The shack is not that different to back in 1934 when Elvis’s dad Vernon borrowed $180 for materials to build it with Elvis’s grandfather and uncle on land he sharecropped.

In 1948, Vernon moved the family to Memphis, about 160km north, to look for work. What they couldn’t load in their 1939 Plymouth, they left behind. But it was Graceland, the home he moved into after he became a star, when he was 22, that most people associate with Elvis.

On the way to the recent Byron Bay Bluesfest I listened in the car to Paul Simon’s Graceland:

"The Mississippi Delta was shining
Like a National guitar
I am following the river
Down the highway
Through the cradle of the civil war

I'm going to Graceland
Graceland
In Memphis Tennessee..."

With the civil war always as the backdrop, the U S of A is the land that created rock’n’roll – and before that gospel, jazz, soul, rhythm and blues, bluegrass and country. Elvis and later the Beatles and the Rolling Stones unashamedly turned black music into white music for a wider audience.

Rose, on the other hand, recorded country/pop music singles such as I Thank You.

I wonder if during those three hours together Elvis and Rose jammed or just talked about coming from the wrong side of the tracks – something they shared although from different countries and backgrounds.

They were both stars.