garoos and fascinating scenery, of remote roads stretching to the dusty horizon. But more than anything, he brought back an unsurpassable story – the fact that he’d been there, on the other side of the world. Even if he had only gone, touched down in Sydney and returned in a matter of hours, it would have seemed the height of adventure and exoticism to us. And on top of that, he gave us a present, a boomerang. We headed out into the countryside with that piece of painted wood which summarises tens of thousands of years of history and survival of the original inhabitants of Australia. We used to get together on a wide expanse of Castilian land near my family’s home close to Segovia. The horizon was distant. We were slightly concerned that we wouldn’t be able to control the flight of the boomerang: I don’t remember what year it was, and imagination mixes with memory, but it’s entirely possible we’d already seen Mad Max 2, with that scene in which one of the desert vandals tries to grab hold of a flying steel boomerang, which chops off all the fingers of his hand. In any event, we were careful. We threw the boomerang with all our might, trying not to lose sight of it during its circular flight. Needless to say, it never came back. Our understanding of the millennia-old techniques necessary to handle that small and incredibly complex hunting and self-defence tool was fairly limited, and that piece of wood was lost forever in the fields of Segovia. In the summer of 2010, while I was working for the daily newspaper, El País, as editor-in-chief of the supplement Babelia, the Cervantes Institute in Sydney invited me to give a series of talks in several Australian cities about the future of Europe and about cultural journalism – vague topics at the best of times. The first thing that occurred to me was the story of Uncle Alejandro and that lost boomerang. The allure of a trip to the other side of the world – technically, for us Spaniards, not Australia but New Zealand, which I also visited in the second stage of that journey – is hard to match. But that gigantic island continent is fascinating not just because it is so far away – too many hours of flying time to measure and recall – but because of stories like the one of uncle Alejandro. In Spain in the 70s, even in a French school, my friend Miki was an exception in the classroom, a rarity with a strange surname and some exotic rites, such as Slava, the celebration in honour of a family’s patron saint enjoyed by each Serbian family – although back then, Miki was a Yugoslav, from a country which would cease to exist a few years later. We didn’t know what a Serbian was.
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