Lonely Planet

Lonely Planet – an elegy
Dani Valent
July 21, 2013

The news about Lonely Planet cutting its editorial operations in Melbourne hit me hard. Not because I work there, not even because I know people there, not anymore. But I worked at the Melbourne-based travel publisher from 1994 and more or less built a life around the company till my last travel writing job for them in 2003. Lonely Planet was fun and exciting. It trusted me with amazing travel and work opportunities, and it was while working for the company that I could first say the words I’d always wanted to: ‘I’m a writer.’

I didn’t start there writing. I was plodding through an interminable Arts degree when a friend of a friend mentioned they needed help processing invoices at her work. I started as a casual at Lonely Planet’s head office, then in Hawthorn. It was pre-9/11, before the digital revolution. Independent travel was booming, guidebooks were considered essential, and Lonely Planet was loved and trusted best of all. There were lots of bookshops and they all bought lots of Lonely Planet books. There was always a big pile of invoices to process. I clocked up hours, made firm friends fast. The angsty poetry I’d been poring over at uni seemed slightly less important. Instead, I ate up the letters that poured in from readers around the world, dispatches from travellers who were attached to the Lonely Planet story: this backpackers hostel never has hot water, that border is now open if you get this permit, those banana pancakes are off the boil. There was a fleet of employees to sift and pass on those nuggets. I felt part of an amazing international community and my home town was its hub.

We worked hard and produced great travel guides but it was loose and lively in the office. We could pretty much do what we liked. A colleague brought her baby in and kept him under her desk. Dogs came and went. People complained about music choices but never about how loud it was. There were lots of romances, drunk pashes and intense talks in the carpark. All the girls went to cry in Andy’s office at least once. We’d stop for elevenses to eat crumpets and do the nine-letter-word. We got email and realised how great it was for flirting. I took to wearing a nurse’s uniform to work, I’m not sure why. I remember debating a new invoice system, sitting on the floor like primary school kids, in co-owner Jim Hart’s office. Every Friday afternoon there were slabs of beer and we popped stubbies at our desks while we did our footy tips, then drifted into the warehouse for knock-off drinks, maybe cricket or a kick of the footy in the car park, and we tried not to ping a ball into Tony Wheeler’s Ferrari. (The founders, the big bosses, Tony and Maureen Wheeler came and went, walking around their empire seeming as happy and baffled as any of us. And Tony usually rode a bike to work.) Work parties were big and wild. There was an office band and I remember a gang of us shoving into the disabled toilets at the Forum with a manager and a bag of pot.

Trucks kept rumbling in, delivering books from ships and later ferrying them away to bookshops. LP – as we all called it – grew like crazy. There were about 60 people when I started and every Monday it seemed there were 10 new faces. Lonely Planet swallowed up its commercial park on Burwood Road and later built a campus in Footscray, employing more than 300 Melbourne staff at its peak. For me the constant growth meant proxy promotions. Suddenly I was conducting job interviews and performance reviews, taking it seriously but feeling weird, role-playing my way into adulthood, like we all do, I suppose.

The internet has the most to do with LP’s decline but the company was never sluggish about the web. It’s just hard to make money out of online content. Not long after I got there, the web team set up and I thought it sounded like fun so I hassled until they let me join them. I wrangled online content at the company’s California office for six months, lived in the Lonely Planet apartment in San Francisco and felt lucky every single minute. We trooped to Silicon Valley to do deals and I remember thinking that the Yahoo! office had more beanbags than we did. I elbowed my way into travel writing and did heaps of jobs in random places: Bulgaria, the Virgin Islands, Mississippi, India, Turkey, Corsica. I would go anywhere they asked and the adventures made me brave and grateful.

Lonely Planet incubated novelists, publishers, journalists, editors, marketers, television producers and more. I can’t think where a Melbourne person would go today to learn and write and grow up on the job and be paid pretty well for it, like I was. I live on the internet now like we all do, and I love the freedom and breadth of it. But I’ll pay for content because readers’ money built and sustained my proving ground and gave me a life as a writer.