The Day We Went Missing

Trigger warning: Readers may disagree with the opinions expressed below and may also believe me to be deplorable (remember Hilary Clinton’s “deplorables” moment?), morally bankrupt, selfish, egotistical, and generally a thoroughly reprehensible person.

It had to happen, or maybe it didn’t; maybe if Australians were not so obsessed with safety, rules, regulations, general wonkism, no-one would have blinked an eye, but this is Australia in 2023 and the pioneering instinct to push boundaries has well and truly shrunk to a daring exploit being defined as visiting a grocery store while not wearing a mask.

Our car, parked at Clairview boat ramp to await our return after a two week sea kayak trip was reported to the police and we were tracked down to a remote island and our neighbours, back home on the south coast of NSW interviewed about our whereabouts. All this because we did what we always do: we parked our car at the planned terminus of our two week sea kayaking trip and paddled happily off-shore in search of the real world.

Once, and I cannot remember when that time was, we did report to the local police that we were leaving a car parked. My recollection is hazy but I think it was a small town somewhere in Northern Queensland and we were leaving the car on the street so we left some information with the local police service. Otherwise, we don’t randomly walk up to strangers, even strangers that live close to where we are leaving the car to say “Hey, that car there will be sitting unattended for two weeks, have at it.” That seems like a bad idea. But perhaps, after our recent experience, I will change my mind. Certainly in future, we will report our parked car to police. At least if police are alerted by hypervigilant members of the public they have no requirement to waste their time chasing down people who are on holiday! Lesson learned.

The irony, of course, is that we always lodge a trip plan with at least one, and generally multiple “responsible” people with instructions on what to do should we not return on time. We all carry PLB’s, radios, and mobile telephones and our trip plans are assiduously constructed to mitigate risk. No-one survives 40 years of outdoor adventuring without doing these things.

When we got back home, I went over to chat with my neighbour, elderly, delightful, Italian in that stereotypical Italian way (that is NOT racism). “I pray to God,” she repeated several times while waving her arms in the air, “I pray to God, that you are alive.” I apologized profusely, as profusely as Doug apologized to the police when we got back in range of mobile service and were able to pick up our messages.

The real moral of the story however, may be the level of survellance inflicted on the general public. Did we actually agree to this, or has the culture of safetyism simply enabled the expansion of surveillance under the guise of “keeping us safe” – a truly cringe worthy approprism? Like online tracking, most people seem supremely unconcerned about being monitored by various automatic cameras with recognition technology, somehow believing that the Zuckerberg’s and Xi Jinping’s of the world have beneficent instead of malevolent intentions. One would think the pandemic years would have disabused folks of these notions, but, I guess if you tend towards extreme paternalism such surveillance may be comforting.