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This article is part of an opinion summer opinion series where writers share the story of a year that changed their lives.
See all 7 stories.I was 18 years old, hungover, and highly impressionable when my mate Dean dragged me into the travel agent (remember them?) one Saturday morning and cajoled me into joining him on what the American writer David Foster Wallace once referred to as A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.
An ocean cruise.
Dean, a couple of years older than me and the closest thing I had to a brother, had just come back from one such bacchanal, aboard the P&O ship Oriana. And in the downstairs bar of Caesar’s Palace in Ipswich, Queensland one Friday night, my mate Richard and I downed Bundy and Cokes and sat enthralled as Dean regaled us with tales as fabulous to our girl-crazy, booze-soaked ears as anything from The 1001 Arabian Nights.
The P&O ocean liner SS Canberra, colloquially known as the Great White Whale. The ship operated from 1961 to 1997, and was briefly requisitioned by the UK government in 1982 to transport troops to the Falkland Islands. Credit: Internet
“It was incredible,” he told us. “The drinks were cheap, the food was free, and the ship was full of beautiful women.”
I can’t really recall anything else he said after that, because it was enough.
That night, Richard and I crashed at Dean’s parents’ house; the next morning, the three of us went into town and booked our passage, as we old sea dogs like to say, on the 14-day Christmas-New Year cruise aboard the Oriana’s sister ship, the SS Canberra, sailing out of Sydney in December 1983.
Thing is, by the time the voyage actually rolled around almost a year later, I wondered what the hell I’d been thinking.
Passengers on a P&O cruise ship in 1977.Credit: P & O
My life was changing, or so I hoped; after two years working a mindless job in the Queensland Public Service, I was ready to go to university, to study literature, in the hope I might one day learn how to write (there’s still time…) This cruise felt like an expensive distraction – I could have eked out that $1245 fare for months at uni. The long-birthed (-berthed?) trip was a relic of a life I was desperate to leave behind.
Dean’s life had changed, too. He had a steady girlfriend now, they were talking about marriage, he was determined to keep himself nice. Only Richard seemed genuinely excited about the cruise.
The three of us shared a small cabin somewhere below the waterline (roughly at the depth of the Mariana Trench, I suspect). The fourth person in this broom cupboard with bunks was a stranger; bizarrely, he was also called Karl (only the second I had ever met).
Life was changing and my expensive berth on a cruise was booked in. I wondered what the hell I’d been thinking.Credit:
He was so tall his head scraped the roof of the cabin, and so skinny he could practically enter it without opening the door. To avoid confusion, we gave him a nickname, in honour of Duran Duran, then one of the biggest pop bands on the planet: He was henceforth to be known as Giraffe Giraffe. Yes, we were arseholes.
Giraffe Giraffe was actually more of a startled deer. A country boy, he had arrived with $300 in his pocket. It might have been enough, just, to fuel a boozy two weeks, since all meals were included in the fare. But an hour after boarding he went to the duty-free shop and bought a camera for $270. Sure, he might have used it to capture Girls On Film … if only he’d set some money aside for the film itself.
So, for two weeks, G-G wandered aimlessly, occasionally convincing fellow passengers to buy him a 73 cent can of beer (once outside Australian waters, no excise was payable on alcohol), while the three of us aimlessly and endlessly drank and ate and swam. There was a ballroom dancing class in there somewhere, a fancy dress competition, and some quoits. But mostly it was just a case of whiling away the daytime hours in a blur of drinking before a change of clothes (daytime surf shirt off; nighttime surf shirt on) and then heading to one of the nightclubs for more drinking, dancing and general buffoonery.
Passengers on a P&O cruise in 1972 play some deck cricket... with care not to hit the porpoises at square leg.
Against all odds, I met a great woman, Ingrid, whose mother had bought her a ticket as a 21st birthday present. It was a package tour, though, Mum included, so any shenanigans were strictly reserved for my cabin. While my roommates were fast asleep, or so we convinced ourselves.
Richard – a good-looking guy but chronically shy – had embarked on the cruise hoping to finally break his drought with the opposite sex. And he seemed on track one day when he retired to our chambre mid-afternoon with a lovely young woman, only to blow it all by covering up his embarrassment with an ill-timed line from Fawlty Towers.
Citing Basil (John Cleese) in hospital after he’s been knocked silly by a moose antler to the head, Richard responded to his new friend’s amorous advances with a haughty “don’t touch me … I don’t know where you’ve been”. She duly obliged, practically bolting out of there. Clearly, she was no connoisseur of 1970s British comedy.
Dean, meanwhile, moped his way through the whole trip like a man led to a banquet and told he could eat anything he wanted, but it would prove fatal. He just wanted to get home to his girl.
The pointlessness of it all was inescapable. And one night in Suva, it all came crashing down on us.
Passengers play deck quoits aboard a cruise ship in 1981.Credit:
There we were, in an empty nightclub, having one more round of drinks, just like we’d been doing for days already, and would do for more days to come, and we were over it. The party ship had run aground, the pleasure cruise was all out of fun.
The name of the nightclub: Caesar’s Palace, of course, just like Ipswitch bar where we had hatched the plan.
We came, we saw, we conked out. Now, please, can we all just go home?
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