7 July

More reflections on travel. Burke and Wills. Neither of course survived their expedition, but what does that say? That travel as we know it is mostly not exploration. Untravelled places are often dangerous, unpredictable. Place has agency. We travel so easily and with such little challenge, because somebody conquered the spaces we travel though, for us. We may think that’s not true for many places we visit, say a country in Europe like France. We never conquered France. But like any country that allows tourism, France allows it only to the extent it doesn’t actually challenge their lives too much. We create special places for tourists, to shield us from them and protect our own lives. As we do for embassies, to allow foreign countries to own territory, inside our own. It’s a precisely controlled space.