by TAD FRIEND

On the evening after the rainiest summer day in Melbourne’s history, Tony Wheeler’s dinner guests, who were British, wanted to discuss the weather. Wheeler gradually redirected the conversation to the Falkland Islands.

He had recently written a new Lonely Planet guide to the Falklands, and also one to East Timor, exactly the sort of backpacker destinations that he and his wife, Maureen, had in mind when they established Lonely Planet, in 1973, as the scruffy but valiant enemy of the cruise ship and the droning tour guide. The Wheelers’ guests, who were touring Australia, were Roger Twiney, a flatmate of Tony’s in England in the early seventies, and Roger’s wife, Susanne.

As both couples sat in the Wheelers’ living room, watching the sun set across the Yarra River, Tony spoke of the Falklands’ king and rockhopper penguins; of tracing Ernest Shackleton’s footsteps on South Georgia Island; and of the peculiarities of the local “squidocracy,” those grown rich from fishing the cephalopod mollusk.

“But isn’t it cold, windy, inhospitable?” Roger asked.

“No, no!” Tony said. “It’s just like Yorkshire.”

“I’m from Yorkshire,” Susanne said, with a don’t-tell-me-about-Yorkshire tone.

Have Tony Wheeler’s guidebooks travelled too far?, continued