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Have wheelchair. Will travel. Many of Ken Haley’s travel exploits came dangerously close to killing him…he told Kymberly Martin about some of them. What attracts you to these danger zones – is there a war correspondent lurking there somewhere? Not particularly. I’ve interrogated myself on this point over the years and concluded that if I wanted to be a war correspondent, I am the type of person who would have volunteered for a specific theatre. No, my practice of choosing an entire region to visit, rather than just one or two countries, means that at the outset of my travel planning all countries in that region are on the table. Only on closer inspection do I exclude any, and the main reason for choosing not to go somewhere is that it’s either in a war or undergoing civil strife that looks likely to degenerate into war.
Trepid traveller: Hoisted aboard a pitching craft by the sturdy hands of fishermen standing at the end of a ramshackle pier, the author makes his way across Samana Bay, in the north of the Dominican Republic.
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cathartic ‘event’ in Ken Haley’s life was triggered during the invasion of Kuwait, while he was working as a sub-editor in Bahrain. With everyone braced for the impending military attack by the triumphant forces of Saddam Hussein, tensions rose to such a pitch Haley suffered a panic attack. After several months of extreme disorientation, insomnia and night terrors, the classic ‘nervous breakdown’, he tried to take his life by pushing himself off a fourthstorey window ledge in East Melbourne in March 1991, fracturing his spine… What did you do before becoming a journalist? I enrolled at Toorak Teachers’ College,
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February/March 2022
where in my third and final year I became student president and, around the same time, felt a loss of commitment to the notion of a career in the classroom. Journalism had been my first love, so I became a vagrant for a few months, hitch-hiking to Adelaide, getting a gig as a piano player in a city pub, and enrolling in an Arts degree at Flinders University, where I lasted five days, until one of the 193 cadet-journalism job applications I initiated in an unheralded assault on newspapers the length and breadth of the country bore fruit. (Two editors said yes – one in Scottsdale, Tasmania the other in Camperdown, Victoria. I chose the one in my home state.)
I am not attracted by chaos but want to visit as many countries as I can, but I do take the long view that putting myself too clearly in harm’s way (ie: bullets), is likely to end up defeating my objective! Had I made it to Central America last year, I was planning to avoid the most dangerous parts of Mexico, skirt around Honduras and El Salvador and put Nicaragua in the ‘decide later’ category depending on whether it stabilised or became too unsafe. Often ‘off the beaten track’ doesn’t include just those countries with a poor reputation, in the Caribbean, for example, Haiti, but those that are not ‘hostile territory’ for Westerners, just less publicised, (e.g. Grenada and the Dominican Republic). Do ever choose a destination where you can relax in tranquil luxury? I don’t have the money, or much inclination, to holiday in idle luxury. Occasionally, on a journey where several nights have been spent at a spartan youth hostel, I have ‘lucked into’ luxury as I once did in a 15thcentury chateau in central France, where the dining room was hung with Gobelin tapestries. But that is the exception as the chateau was. It was