With the exception of one great-grandfather, my brothers and I are the first in our family to have travelled the world for purposes other than migration. We've all lived overseas at times, and both of my brothers' partners come from other places. Even my parents have taken some inspiration from us and started doing their own non-migration-style travel.
It's a weird privilege when you look at it in those terms — something that seems culturally normal is actually a historical anomaly. It's now less expensive to travel outside Australia that to holiday within it. Flying is the cheapest it's been, and the cheapest it's ever likely to be. And the Australian dollar is strong.
So what does that mean for the places we are now able to travel to en masse? It means something, especially because those who live in the places we travel to are often people who can't travel themselves, people who can't escape the monotony of home life even if they wanted to.
Sometimes when I see the inequity of my traveling, when I register my complicity in a system that is contingent on global inequalities, I am reminded of Jamaica Kincaid's 1988 book A Small Place. It's a fictional memoir about how Antigua's colonial past is lived out through contemporary tourism. In it, the tourist's perspective of a beautiful, smiling Antigua is met with the scathing voice of the formerly colonised, who explains the ramifications of every interaction the tourist has, and deduces the inherent exploitation of the tourist-local relationship.
So I was in Bali recently being a fat, exploitative tourist and it didn't feel all that good. I was there to see some of a writers festival, which I did, and which was incredible. But I felt slightly unpleasant being there, slightly wrong, because all of the restaurants we ate at were basically for tourists and expats — people with money.
To the credit of the festival organisers, events were packed with international and Indonesian audiences alike, but back in the tourist town, the only Balinese in sight were those serving us. Without natural resources, Bali's main industry is tourism, and so in some ways, the economy depends on people like me eating at restaurants like that.
Too many people who happen to live in the tourist regions (which are ever expanding — 700 hectares of land are cleared each year to build tourist infrastructure) are forced into some kind of tourist labour, even if they're not interested in it, or good at it. So while you can get a cheap massage almost anywhere, it's less likely that a trained practitioner will massage you than an inexperienced young person who will make it up as they go. Which is not to critique the standards of massage in Bali, but rather the perhaps exploitative expectations of tourists.
One person told me the story of going out to a gallery in a rural area and seeing the same man harvesting rice with a buffalo that they'd seen a few months earlier. When they asked the gallery owner if it was harvest time again, he was told that the man in the rice patty was not actually harvesting rice, he was just employed to look like he was. A spectacle for the tourists. Which I'm pretty sure is the most alienated labour possible.
Where the tourist attraction to Bali has always been its beautiful natural environment and friendly, spiritual culture, both of these attractions are suffering under the impact of mass tourism. While some argue that any employment for locals is good employment, the poverty rates in Bali have in fact increased in recent decades, as has the disparity between rich and poor.
Bali now has the second highest percentage of disadvantage in Indonesia, after Jakarta. In seaside areas, coral reefs have been destroyed, and in rural areas, water is often redirected from rice patties towards guest houses. Deforestation has impacted the local environment, bringing on drought. Drought inflates prices.
Kincaid writes that the 'natives', the local residents of a tourist destination, are likely to hate the tourists, even when they are smiling, for the simple inequity of the transaction. She writes, 'Every native would like to find a way out ... But some natives — most natives in the world — cannot go anywhere. They are too poor ... They are too poor to escape the reality of their lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the place they live, which is the very place you, the tourist, want to go.'
What, then, to do with the privilege of travel? Guilt is not necessarily a useful political gesture. And it's not as though people are going to stop travelling overseas any time soon. So maybe we should just find somewhere else to mess up.
Ellena Savage has written about literature, feminism, and political culture for publications including Overland, Australian Book Review, Right Now, The Lifted Brow, and Farrago, which she co-edited in 2010. She tweets as @RarrSavage
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