Crocodile Dundee and hopping kangaroos, the Outback as the Southern Hemisphere’s answer to the Old West: such are the clichés that pop to mind for most Americans about Australia. Dave Watson knows differently. The Madison writer lived there as the new millennium began, pursuing love, commerce and higher education. He recounts his experiences in Walkabout Undone: A Memoir.
“I discovered a side to Australia I hadn’t seen or heard about from a foreigner’s perspective,” he says. “That mostly has to do with everyone I know who’s been there does the usual two-week or month-long tour and then returns home. Very few, without a personal connection, go back to Australia.” Touring a place by bus, waiting in its airports and working hotel conference rooms—you see surfaces. “I spent two years in Asia and still did not see much of China, Mongolia or Russia,” he continues. Living as opposed even to staying somewhere brings other truths to light.
In recent years, some memoirists have been “exposed” for fictionalizing their lives, and however lightly they photoshopped the details, they have drawn umbrage for faking it. “It’s as literal as I recalled, so I’d say it’s a literal account,” Watson says, “and then there is that brain theory where your brain is constantly lying to us, where you don’t remember things exactly as they happened. The one technique through the writing process I had to employ was keeping in mind that not everything that happens to you is interesting.”
Would he try to convince other college-age people, as he was at the time, out of following his example (and his heart) overseas? “I’d talk with them about it but not out of it,” he insists. “My friend Jim in the book said I would’ve gone through life thinking, ‘What if?’ over and over again. Like I say in the book, traveling also teaches you where you shouldn’t go.”
Stay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.
Dave Watson will discuss Walkabout Undone on Friday, April 6 at Voyageur Book Shop, 2212 S. Kinnickinnic Ave.
Shop this title on Amazon:
