The death of distance

My classmates' eyes pop out at mention of my christmas flight home. "22 hours - I'd go crazy after 10." So much for my efforts to pursuade them that Australia is not the ends of the earth. My only competitor is a Swede flying to his Nicaraguan sweetheart via New York and Miami - 20 hours.

As I write I'm listening to ABC radio online having just checked The Age and The Australian - there is a hot wind blowing in Melbourne town. The separation between physical distance and emotional distance is closing fast. At one level there's a certain sadness that we'll never again experience the separation from home of travellers a century ago - the satisfaction of the trek and the discovery of a new world. I love Frank Moorehouse's book 'Grand Days' and the way it captures the transformation of an Australian country girl in 1930s Geneva. She dreams of dry paddocks at home while leading a glamorously feather-boa'ed life, linked to her roots by dust-tinged letters from home conveying months old news. But those days are gone, and my romanticism probably misplaced.

Instant is the word of our age: know anything, anywhere, immediately and feel aggrieved if something stands in the way. As I discovered in a rural Tanzanian hotel room, you can know that an election has been called in Australia before 99.9% of Australians discover (CNN). But I think its a false intimacy - one keeps abreast of the news and views, but misses the non-digital textures of home (the smell of hot gum leaves springs to mind). The company of family and friends can never be truly digitised. How would you capture the kaleidascope of conversations, asides, manerisms, smells, knowing looks and kicks under the table. I just hope the web's artifice of closeness doesn't become a substitute for the real thing. An 80% solution to justify perpetual globe trotting holds plenty of temptation.