Sunday Blog 196 – 3rd August 2025
On the 3rd of August 1979, I was fourteen years old, and I’d never left Australia. I was about to head off for sixteen glorious weeks in Europe with my parents and my (plentiful) siblings.
I flicked through the photo album from that time today, marinading in the memories. Dad was up on the roof doing last minute repairs, I was saying farewell to indifferent cats. Not pictured: I remember I’d worn myself to a shred worrying if I had enough room in my suitcase for the required amount of sanitary pads for the duration of the holiday. I was too chicken-shit to try tampons, and it hadn’t occurred to me that there would in fact be sanitary ware available in one of the largest cities in the western world, aka London.
Meanwhile, Mum was looking at her garden one last time, hoping it would survive four months without her. She was an inveterate Anglophile and at 53 years of age, she was finally realising her ambition to get to the U.K. Also not pictured, she was awash with traveller’s remorse. “What am I doing? Am I really going to go through with this?” she said, more than once.
Despite her jitters, we left on schedule on the night of 3 August, with a huge group to farewell us at the airport. We flew through Bombay, where we weren’t allowed to disembark, before finally landing in Heathrow. Mum took a picture of the British Airways aircraft that had been her torturer throughout the long, sleepless flight.
The top left image is me looking out over the wasteland of London in the morning of 4th August 1979, jet lagged and slightly horrified. But when I first saw Westminster House and Big Ben in real life, I felt like I’d left my body. We used to have a pop-up picture book with both Westminster House and Big Ben in it. I loved to open up the pages and see this improbable wonder of architecture which is everywhere, everywhere in Europe.
The bottom left picture of me on the train in Scotland also jumped out at me as I flicked through the 1979 album. A glimpse of my still-child self, looking out the window.
As I plan yet another Europe trip–leaving later this month, I remember the 3rd of August 1979 as the date my world view was enlarged beyond the tight confines of Perth. So grateful that this first 1979 trip was not the last.