Counting down...

In three days time I have to present my most important program of the year on 3RRR, as part of the station's annual Radiothon. Then that night, at 7.30pm, I fly out of Melbourne on my first-ever trip to the UK and Europe. It surprises a lot of people that I haven't been to the UK before; they're even more surprised when I tell them that, apart from a two-week visit to New Zealand with my parents when I was 14, I've never really even been overseas - not unless Tasmania counts.

It seems almost madatory now for so many Australians in their early 20's to go backbacking for a year(well, middle-class and upper-class Australians, anyway), but I just never got around to doing it.

At a time when half my friends were jetting off to work in London for six months to a year, and from there heading off to wherever their fancy took them, I'd just quit my job and gone onto the dole in order to focus on the creative aspects of my life. Given that I was broke, and that it seemed much more important to me to find out more about myself and what I was capable of than visit the other side of the world, I stayed in Melbourne. This impression was intensified when several of my friends came home from their great adventure and proceeded to get married, get mortgages, and generally started acting like grown-ups. Definitely not an attractive option for me. If that's what travel does to you, I recall thinking as I packed myself another cone of homegrown hydro, I want nothing to do with it!

So, while friend after friend took off overseas I stayed in Northcote. It's a period of my life, from roughly 1991 - 1998, that I regard with enourmous fondness, despite my memories of some of it being a little hazy. I was smoking and ingesting a wide array of substances at the time...

It was a time when I stopped listening to only punk and goth bands and explored music more widely; although, even with my intensely gothic period already behind me,I still helped co-found a gothic club called Apocalypse (later to morph into Abyss) around that time.

I began performing my work at poetry readings, which led to me supporting US bands like Bikini Kill and Propaghandi, as well as Jello Biafaas a spoken word artist. I did my radio training at 3RRR as part of Centrelink's atempt to get me off the dole by making me more employable. My creative output for role-playing game publishers Chaosium and White Wolf was significant (and surprising given that I was almost permanently stoned in those days!), while by 1995-96 I was discovering the gay punk movement known as queercore, which soon led me into publishing my first zine The Burning Times.

Looking back, this confused, colourful and bloody enjoyable period of my life ended in 1998 with the start of a major new relationship with a schoolteacher named Mark Smith. Late that year we moved in together, and then in 1999 we moved to Mullumbimby, in Northern New South Wales, Cue a bout of severe depression, drug-induced psychosis, an explosive relationship breakup which resulted in the two of us still not speaking to each other, and a return to Melbourne in 2000.

A whole new phase of my life started that year. I wonder where it's going to lead next?

It's odd, you know. This post was supposted to be about my flying over to Glasgow for Bec and Bob's wedding, which takes place this coming Sunday 28th August. I was going to write about how I've been totally underprepared and disorganised (I only applied for my passport eight days before I was due to leave Melbourne) and about how much I'm looking forward to seeing Bec and Bob and then having a whirlwind trip through the UK, Portugal, Spain, France and Germany (with a couple of days in Amsterdam squeezed in somewhere along the way). I didn't expect it to turn into a major reminiscence...

For those of you who have read this far, I intend to try and update this blog regularly while I'm overseas: it's going to temporarily turn into my travel diary while I'm overseas instead of a repository for my arts journalism.

So, until the 23rd of September, goodbye Melbourne, and hello Northern Hemisphere!