Unpackaged Tours

Unpackaged Tours is a collection of linked travel stories drawn from diaries kept by author Suzanne Falkiner while travelling overland from Sydney to Paris in the early 1970s, and later through South America and beyond. Part memoir and part travel narrative, it captures a vanished world before smartphones, budget airlines, and the internet transformed the experience of travel.

In the 1960s and ’70s, thousands of young Australians set out on the legendary Overland Trail through Asia and the Middle East to Europe. These journeys passed through countries that were then open, affordable, and largely untouched by tourism, including Afghanistan, Iran, Burma, and Bali before mass travel arrived. Along the way come stories of student life in Paris, expatriate circles in Rome and the South of France, and travels along the Gringo Trail from the Amazon to Tierra del Fuego.

Blending diary extracts, observation, and reflection, Unpackaged Tours evokes an era when travel meant uncertainty, freedom, and discovery. These stories are both a personal record and a portrait of a generation drawn to the wider world at a moment when many of these places were on the brink of profound change.

‘...a valuable, rare piece of reportage from a significant time — when no one knew what was coming.'

Nicholas Jose

‘A spare, acute autobiography by a restless Australian…Suzanne Falkiner … manages recalcitrant material with precision and grace.'

THE NEW YORKER