Life Without Regrets?

The book Travelling Light, Stories from the world we explored in the 70s, began as a blog.

Our daughter, Lee, thought her mother’s travel photographs were worth looking at so she combined them with extracts from newspaper articles I had written when we were on the road. The blog can still be found if you have Instagram, it is called travelling_light_book and it is identified by a large purple dot.

Then, collectively, we decided to expand the newspaper articles, illustrate the text with Lisa’s photographs and the book was conceived; the rest, as they say, is history.

When we arrived in New Zealand in the winter of 1979, Lisa was pregnant with our first child. We didn’t have much money but we did have friends who we had met along the way. They took us to the small settlement of Akaroa, on Banks Peninsula, and when Lisa saw the cottage hospital on a hill above the town she said emphatically “I will have the baby here”.

We found a first floor flat in a nineteenth century building known as the “Giant’s House” and went out to look for work. I found a job as a builder’s labourer and Lisa worked for the local council, grubbing gorse on the hillsides above the harbour. Our rent was $25, our combined income was $300, and our life in New Zealand was about to begin.

At first we were treated a little warily by the locals because we still had a hippy look about us. We wore beads, some of our clothes were embroidered and when, in the spring of that year, we were spotted digging the garden with no clothes on at all, our reputations were sealed. Our son, Julian, was born in the new year and when it became apparent to everybody we were here to stay, we were accepted, despite our quixotic origins.

During that first summer I can remember sitting astride the ridge of a building I was helping to roof and being transfixed by the scene before me. I rested my hammer across my leather apron and looked out over bush-covered hills as wood pigeons swooped and bellbirds harmonised. Blindingly white clouds, set in a deep blue sky, paraded behind the rocky outcrops on the rim of the crater and I realised in a flash life had changed radically.

After ten years of travelling around the world and indulging ourselves at every opportunity, we suddenly had responsibilities and commitments. The task of making the transition from freedom to relative restraint was made easier by the acceptance of the tight-knit community of Akaroa. This was the era before mass tourism, the local economy ran on farming and fishing, people “went to town” by bus once in a blue moon and everybody knew what everybody else was up to straight away.

In retrospect those first years were tough and we survived in a very rudimentary way. With some help from our parents, we secured a Housing Commission Loan on an 1870’s farm house standing on ten, north-facing, acres. The roof leaked, there was no bathroom, no insulation, a rutted driveway and a long drop, but to us it was a palace. We had seen what poverty was on our travels and we had seen what people do to survive, so we set about homesteading in the time-honoured fashion. We made a garden, kept chickens, got some sheep and milked a cow, cut down trees for firewood, shot the possums who ate the walnuts and slowly we prospered.

Sometimes it seemed as if we had squandered the years which we had spent on the road. Everybody else had started work and families much earlier than us, they had deeper roots in society and it felt we had somehow been missing in action for a long time, but as the years have rolled by, there has come about a greater appreciation of those “lost” years.

Travelling Light describes many of the things we learned and experienced as we moved about the world, but that world has gone forever and travel will never be the same again.

The decade of the 70’s was the last before the digital revolution altered everything including, amongst other things, the way we think, communicate and travel. In the 70’s airlines were still in an embryonic state, we wrote letters to our friends and family (long distance calls were a nightmare), the world’s population was half of what it is now and the carbon dioxide level stood at 325 parts per million.

The freedom we knew then doesn’t exist any more. Every journey is now planned in advance, booked and paid for. When you lift your eyes from the keyboard, abandon the virtual world, and set off into the real world you are checked, certified, searched and processed like a beast in the field. You even know the exact time and date when you are returning home, because that too is to be determined,

To claim “a life well lived is a life without regrets” sounds a bit like a cliche, but these days to have travelled freely in the 70’s seems to epitomise the last of a more innocent era. We grasped the opportunity to travel when the chance existed, and for young people today the same option no longer exists.

As long as there are no regrets attached to the life well lived, who cares if it’s a cliche?

Travelling Light: Stories from the world we explored in the 70s by Steve Lowndes, photography by Lisa Potts, Published by Quentin Wilson Publishing, RRP $49.99