Europe @ 2.4 km/h

Wakefield Press

Europe @ 2.4 km/h

Ken Haley is one of Australia’s most widely travelled authors. He became a paraplegic in 1991, but so far as Ken is concerned the only difference that has made is that he now observes the world from a seated position. A journalist by profession, he has had stints on the foreign desk of
The Times
,
Sunday Times
and
Observer
in London, the
Gulf Daily News
in Bahrain and the
South China Morning Post
in Hong Kong. He has also worked at the
Age
, Melbourne, and as a newspaper sub-editor in Athens, Hong Kong and Johannesburg. Until recently he was the editor of the
Dimboola Banner
.

Wakefield Press
1 The Parade West
Kent Town
South Australia 5067
www.wakefieldpress.com.au

First published 2011
This edition published 2011

Copyright © Ken Haley, 2011

All rights reserved. This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced without written permission. Enquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

Cover design by Stacey Zass, Page 12
Edited by Julia Beaven, Wakefield Press

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

EUROPILOGUE

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Nous voulons voyager sans vapeur et sans voile!
Faites, pour égayer l’ennui de nos prisons,
Passer sur nos esprits, tendus comme une toile,
Vos souvenirs avec leurs cadres d’horizons.

We long to travel not by steam or sail,
For here in prison every day’s the same.
Oh, paint across the canvas of our soul
Your memoirs, with horizons as their frame.

Charles Baudelaire,

Les Fleurs du Mal,

Part III, Verse 2

LE VOYAGE

What am I doing here in Europe? You might well ask; I ask myself. Surely there can be nothing new under the European sun, you say, nowhere on the face of the globe will you find real estate more tramped over, fought over, written about. Even the ancients called it ‘the known world’.

At school, ‘European’ was often bracketed with ‘explorer’. The first pictures we received of these mavericks from the other end of the world portrayed them as heading out to the lands of ‘lesser breeds’, discovering societies that didn’t have enough sense to know they were lost. Well, the Europeans’ world might be ‘known’ to them but, 400 years later, we in their Antipodes have our own ‘known world’. So, I tell myself, perhaps it’s time to return the compliment and go exploring the Old World anew.

The European explorers set off in search of spice and riches. If my only spice turns out to be the piquancy of human behaviour, my only riches the joy of the journey itself and of witnessing the cultures I roam among, so be it. We live in different times, or so we like to believe. I come in peace, O Father of Continents, and have no desire to conquer you. Let others treat you as a glittering bauble, your attractions all obvious, all external. For me, Europe is a magic box. I yearn to know what’s inside, and to find out I will try to grasp it at both ends, north and south, to turn it round, shake it a little.

Four years since my last European landfall, I am picking up where I left off — Tallinn, Estonia — and tomorrow will ring in the grandeur of St Petersburg. After traipsing across that vastness of ‘European Russia’ which goes by the name of Karelia, I will light out for the northernmost reaches of the only continent we call the Continent before pursuing a host of detours that land me, finally, on the road to Portugal.

It’s fair to say I’m on a quest. But as I hurtle 39,000 feet over the Urals, in an arc that will touch down at Frankfurt, the object of that quest appears as insubstantial as the clouds outside my window.

A week before leaving Australia I was having a drink with two colleagues during a mid-shift break and found myself hard pressed to say what was so special, uniquely European, about Europe. When I suggested that Europe stood for the idea that humans were destined to subdue or govern the natural world rather than coexist passively with it, one of my colleagues scoffed, ‘You could say the same about Australia or America’. Conceding his point — perhaps too readily, given that Australia and America are ‘European’ societies, too — I found myself back at square one. Not to worry, I would have plenty of time to ponder the question further: seven-and a-half months of it.

In a direct line, the northern point of this landmass lies about 5000 km from its southern tip. But this will be a journey of tangents, not short cuts. By visiting its northern, southern and western extremities, I aim almost literally to comprehend the whole, to encompass what lies between the extremities, to open the lid on this magic box of Europe. How much room can there be inside for secrets? Next to my homeland, Australia, it is the smallest as well as the oldest-named of all those pieces of the terrestrial jigsaw we call continents. Surely, when the shaking has stopped, I will know what enticed me here: the culture, the scenery, the ‘European spirit’ (if such a thing exists), the people themselves. Or all of the above and then some.

In Hong Kong, a couple of days before my flight to Europe, I read in the
South China Morning Post
an article about Sierra Leonean ex-child soldiers being educated in a Spanish college, prompting the thought that one thing Europe must stand for is the belief its values are universal. Sometimes this presumption has been put to questionable use, as in the exploitative aspect of colonialism; and sometimes to benign use, as reflected in the inclusiveness and generosity of spirit exhibited in that Spanish initiative.

Yet, when six months later I reach the European town closest of all to Africa, I will find this shaft of illumination blotted out by a much darker, indeed shameful, facet of the Continental character.

To complicate my attempts to get to grips with Europe — which is, after all, where we Westerners hail from — I reminded myself that the clarity provided by maps was always going to be too vague to be universally acceptable. As I’d noted years ago, if you use Europe as a geographical label one glance at an atlas will suffice to establish that almost all of Turkey (97 per cent, in case you were wondering) is in Asia and, whatever the Cypriots think, their island is wholly non-European. (Eight months later, in
The Economist’s
annual review of the world,
¹
I read with astonishment that the new €1 coin entering the union’s currency in 2008 shows Cyprus due south of Italy, many kilometres west of its true location.)

To be fair, some people have argued that Europe is not a continent at all — and technically they are right. It is a trio of peninsulas at the pointy end of Eurasia (now that’s a
real
continent) as much as a set of values, a cultural legacy or an economic club.

If it’s any of these three, the question immediately arises: can anyone join? No one can rightly dispute the contribution that Jewish culture has made over many centuries to European ideals, most obviously in the religious sphere. And maybe it is because so many of Israel’s settlers came from Europe that, to take what might on the surface seem a trivial example, the Israeli national football team takes part in the European competition.

Truly, the closer I get to Europe — and, with the Urals a receding memory, my plane is now over Warsaw, beginning its descent — the further I seem to be from understanding the mysterious contents of this ‘known world’ spread out beneath my feet. The magic box conceals its treasures well. As I am soon to discover, the meaning of Europe has bamboozled sharper intellects than mine. For all I know, most Europeans share my bafflement. Perhaps, it occurs to me, there is no such entity, in the sense Margaret Thatcher had in mind when she said there was no society. Or could it be that they are making it up as they go along?

Nor is the difficulty of pinning Europe down anything new. One of my favourite lines in 20th-century literature is uttered by a Damon Runyon character seated at a table in a Lower East Side diner when a mobster parks himself opposite and quietly informs him that ‘the Boss’ back in Chicago has a little job to be dispatched on the other side of the Atlantic, over in Europe. Our nervous hero, as Runyon records, not wishing to appear reluctant but equally anxious to play for time, replies, ‘And which Europe would that be?’