We’re a promiscuous culture. Not sexually. We’re promiscuous with place. This is a common sight in the…

We’re a promiscuous culture. Not sexually. We’re promiscuous with place. This is a common sight in the ‘outback’. If we’re not flying overseas to promiscuously consume the places there, we’re doing the ‘big lap’ of our own country. What does a promiscuity of place mean? /1 https://t.co/iwqDqomkgk

It means we have no conception of what place is. We confuse it with space. With maps. We collect spaces like some collect stamps. ‘I’ve been everywhere, man’. Talk to the grey nomads and other travellers, and this accumulation of places is a passion. But we never unpack it. /2

Few seem to ask, why does visiting lots of places matter? Why are we doing this? Does seeing lots of the country bring us somehow closer to it? I think it’s quite clearly our old imperial DNA, the great imperial voyages were all about accumulating places. /3

And the continuity of that culture is still seen today. The places we travel as tourists to see become ours, we acquire them, as tourist destinations. Their local ‘economies’ become utterly dependent on us, as tourists. That tourism then destroys the place. /4

As we’re seeing now in places like Byron. I Tweeted that I’ve just spent some time in what we (also bizarrely I think) call ‘remote Australia’, or ‘the outback’. Wilcannia was interesting for me. They had terrible problems with Covid there. /5 https://t.co/EkFHcrhjV5

The NSW LNP Government, then Australia’s free market zealots, of course refused calls to limit tourism to the town to control Covid infection there. Nothing can get in the way of ‘the economy’. Aboriginal men in Wilcannia have a life expectancy of 37. /6 https://t.co/GbbSw0wAak

This is the destructive paradox at the heart of travel, of our promiscuity of place. Because we’re not grounded as a culture, still stuck in old imperial models of acquisition and exploitation, right down to the modern forms like property development, we can’t fathom this. /7

Criticise travel and an Australian (and most other Western cultures) will stare at you blankly, like you’re unhinged. Travel broadens the mind! No it doesn’t, it gives you scenic backdrops for selfies of closed minds. We’re still colonising, and we don’t see it. /end