Big Reads

Paperbackpackers

By Matthew Lane

24 May 2008

They’re cashedup layabouts, bashed-up by public opinion and washed-up in Bondi. Now, as Barry Divola tells, the modern backpacker is caught in print.

The toughest part of writing his exposé of backpacker culture was matching backpackers drink for drink for 30 days and 30 long nights, says Barry Divola.

“I was trying to keep up with the drinking … and I like eight hours’ sleep a night and I wasn’t getting anywhere near that – I just fell apart at the end, you know?” Divola says of his research for The Secret Life of Backpackers.

“The biggest thing for me now looking back is, ‘how the hell did I do it?’ I kind of look back and think a lot of it was pretty hellish,” says Divola, who is somewhat older than the average party animal found on the backpackers’ trail from Bondi Beach to Cairns.

Before Divola began his backpacking mission, his Oz travels had never taken him north of Brisbane. To research this book, Divola hit the route trodden by thousands of sunstruck Poms every year. Divola spent the month eating like a backpacker, not-sleeping like a backpacker, and – eventually – smelling like a backpacker, as he told Festival News.

Although Divola had hardly travelled in Australia, he did backpack in Europe as a young man in the 1980s and early ’90s. He admits that this new Australian experience left him longing for the good old days, when backpackers did it rough and it wasn’t so safe. “I think that backpacking infrastructures have changed completely from, say, 20 years ago, even 10 years ago, because now it’s really geared towards people who have money,” he says.

According to statistics from Tourism Australia, backpackers are major contributors to the tourist economy. International backpackers stay longer than non-backpackers and spend more than twice what the average tourist does. In 2006, they spent an average of $5200 per person.

In the same year, over a million visitors chose backpacker accommodation, spending 15 million nights in hostels. That’s a lot of sweaty, sandy bunk-beds. Backpacking researcher and academic Brad West agrees that backpacking has become more mainstream and accessible.

“There’s a greater awareness of the economic contribution and the profits that can be made out of backpacking,” he says. “As the industry has grown exponentially, there’s been a development in backpacking hostels from being independently run to being a more professional business,” says West, who edited and contributed to Down the Road, a book on backpacking and independent travel.

In his book, Divola reminisces about the past, when backpacking was about adventure and making your own way. But that’s not what it’s about for backpackers in Bondi. Harriet Slade has been living at the Surfside Hostel on Bondi Beach for four months now. She says the backpacking community on the east coast is very comfy and insular and it’s easy to get stuck.

“[I’m] just caught in Australia – not even Australia, just Bondi. I haven’t even seen anywhere else in Australia,” she says. But this doesn’t seem to bother Harriet or any of the other backpackers who are in the same situation. “A lot of people have said ‘go travelling, you’ll love it Harriet’. But I don’t want to just yet, I love being here and I don’t want to let any of it go just yet,” she says.

Similarly, Sam Barrett has been living at the Surfside for two months and says that backpacking is all about the people. “That’s why I’ve stayed here so long, it’s a great group of people here, and up the east coast you keep seeing the same group of people over and over again.”

So if backpacking on the east coast of Australia isn’t about danger, discovery and exploration, what’s it all about? West says that “within Australia, when they go to Sydney, when they go to Bondi Beach at particular times of the year they might be seeking the surf, sun and sex”. You don’t really have to be a scholar to figure that one out. Harriet was eager to brag about their party antics.

“All night long, if it’s not here it’s down the beach, if it’s not down the beach it’s at Hotel Bondi and then by five or six o’clock, everyone’s back here, doors open at six in the morning, you go outside and it just continues,” she says. “There’s always a beer in someone’s hand, always a cigarette in someone’s hand. It’s like Las Vegas, it never stops. The party continues all the time.”

Gina Stevens manages the Beach Road Hotel in Bondi and confirms Harriet’s claims. “Over the summer period, they’d bring in at least 60% [of our business] and that would be continuous, on weeknights as well.” Stevens recalls the highest of backpacker hi-jinks was when a group of Irish backpackers climbed into the large wooden flood boat that hangs from the hotel’s ceiling, almost five metres above the floor.

“They’ve climbed up into the boat and sat in the boat and ordered their beers from the bar and actually gotten them passed up to them in the boat.” Divola says the few serious adventurers he met were not the rule but the exception. “There was a Norwegian guy who was riding a bike from Cairns to Melbourne … I wouldn’t ride a bike from Cairns to Melbourne, I couldn’t.”

Brad West says you can’t just lump all backpackers into the same binge-drinking basket. “There are different sorts of backpackers and we have to be careful of just labelling everyone who just stays at backpacking hostels as … all the same … they search for different things at different times in their travels.” Jonathon Cleave, a manager at the Surfside Hostel, sympathises.

“I get the impression that backpackers aren’t particularly liked by some of the locals and they’re seen as people who aren’t working, just drinking all the time and partying all the time.” Whether they’re exploring the unbeaten track and really trying to experience Australia, or just interested in the trip between the hostel and the closest bar, West says there is one desire that unifies the tribes: “interaction with other backpackers”.

“That social dimension to it is still a strong motivation.” Even after all his complaining, Divola admits that the people are still the best thing about seeing the world. “A lot of these people are lovely, they take you into their confidence, and they talk to you and they tell you about their lives – and that’s the beautiful thing about travelling.”