Ben Groundwater - The Cultural Day Trader

I’m sure that I have met Ben in the dark corner of a hostel bar. Well not actually Ben but his type. He, sweating through his third beer of the evening, discretely burping is desperate to download his truly excellent opinions of Vienna or Seoul or Marrakesh onto whichever backpacker is unlucky enough to pick the wrong man to sit across.

“Nah mate Budapest is shit. It’s 20XX and hardly anyone there speaks English. It’s like ‘if you want my money you’re going to have to learn to communicate.’” the chuckle of disbelief that such a place could even exist.

For a long time tourist writing has been due a reckoning. Fortunately, it is simply too light - too insubstantial to rest anywhere for long - more akin to copy than writing.

One moment please, to contract tourist writing with travel writing: travel writing is that of Paul Theroux or Bruce Chatwin. In it, the writer stands exposed, open and vulnerable in the country they are travelling through. There is risk but the risk is not adrenalin fuelled - it’s not say riding a motorbike from Berlin to Iran (as I did in my late twenties). Instead, there is humility and a genuine attempt to connect those with whom they meet, an earnest attempt to dare themselves to cross the cultural DMZ. The purpose of such travel is to step outside and commune with those within another culture. Such writing resists aggregation or extrapolation as it relies heavily on the specific. The old lady in China that Theroux meets in Xi'an remembers the city before the neon and before it was levelled to throw up towering blocks of apartments. She is but one of many. Others Theroux meets embrace the change.

By contrast, tourist writing is promotional - whether self or of the country/region itself. It is about products, hotels and train lines, the experiences are replicable for the right price. Tourist writers write about themselves first and the people they encounter, often an undifferentiated mass from which steps forth the occasional guide (often stupid or weird) or tout trying to rip them off. You can tell easily because the foreignness belongs to the locals not to them. They are the influencers of yesteryear. The largest thing they pack is their ego, followed by a lack of nuance.

Nobody this country has produced exemplifies this second approach more than Ben Groundwater. As he has written in his piece for Traveller Magazine - a promotional brochure posing as journalism Australia and international travel: Why I’ll be heading overseas for a holiday as soon as possible In it Ben displays a heroic sense of entitlement and tone deafness to the moment. In the midst of a pandemic Ben can think only of how the closed borders affected his ability to travel. He’s actually put out by it all.

“Right now I’m kind of over Australia.” he explains, fairly oblivious that borders could be closed for any reason than to inconvenience him personally.

“This whole country feels so fractured right now, and fractious. Friends argue on social media. Families are split by arbitrary border lines. Premiers beat their chests and lay blame on all the other states. Media fans the flames. Readers lap it up.” Stop arguing! You’re upsetting Ben! If you don’t calm down he’ll go overseas for another six months. He will - he’s done it before.

This snippet, staunchly apolitical, lacks the courage or insight to diagnose the problem let alone propose any solution except packing his bags and leaving. Instead, blissfully unaware that a global calamity might have implications beyond impacting his travel plans, it mourns the fact that Australia is kind of a bit, like, messed up right now. And given this platform what is Ben’s contribution to the discussion:

“I miss the confusion and the thrill of foreign lands. I miss the wide-eyed enjoyment of being far from home. I miss the sound of other languages, the smell of other cuisines, the look of a place that’s not my own.”

In other words Ben is bored. People are dying while their relatives are unable to see them and Ben is bored. Yes Ben we’re all bored. In Melbourne we underwent a titanic lockdown and I dare say that people had problems that were larger than not being able to go to the UK “to see family, to catch up with friends”. Such a position is the logical extension of a man that has become so spoiled and entitled that an international pandemic barely registers on his radar beyond his inability to go on holiday.

Ben has the mentality of a cultural day trader. He returns to Australia and enjoys the privilege of a fully funded health system then travels to another country to juice their culture for content without producing anything of real value, any depth, any insight.