WHEN Patrick O'Neil and his friends were approached by two young men on a street in Jamaica, they almost laughed at the pathetic gangster outfits they were wearing: baggy jeans, bandannas and an excess of gold jewellery. Then the would-be assailants produced a gun, and nobody found it funny. Fortunately, a passer-by convinced the pair of thugs not to kill their captives, so the startled group proceeded with their plan to see a movie.
"The usher led us to our seats - and there they were," says O'Neil. "One minute, they were holding a gun in our faces and the next minute, they were squishing their legs to the side so we could get to our seats."
Yes, O'Neil and his mates chose to watch the film with these gun-wielding homeboys instead of fleeing to safety. "We were in serious shock," he explains, before sheepishly admitting, "And we were a bit stoned, too."
O'Neil recounts that story and many other travel misadventures in his book Sideways: Travels with Kafka, Hunter S. & Kerouac. In Rio, he was arrested for marijuana possession, but managed to bribe his way out of trouble. In Amsterdam, thugs chased him through the red-light district. In the Mexican desert, murderous cowboys almost killed him - or was that just a figment of his peyote-fired imagination?
"I'm 99 per cent sure that it happened," he says, stubbing out his cigarette, lighting another and ordering a third coffee. "I honestly thought I was going to be killed."
By this point, you'd be forgiven for dismissing the 30-year-old's book as Yet Another Zany Travel Memoir. Except that it's actually quite good - mainly because he knows how to take the mickey out of himself.
Sure, setting out to travel the world "in the vein of" three great authors does not seem very modest, but O'Neil is the first to admit that. "Kafka was the pin-up boy for suffering artists," he says in his deep, made-for-radio voice. "And at the age of 21, that's how I wanted to be perceived."
In 2000 he quit his job at the Herald Sun and flew to London, where he found himself in a garishly-decorated penthouse owned by a pop star (his friend was house-sitting for the singer, whom O'Neil declines to name). It was luxurious, and he found it hard to wallow in existential angst while sitting on a zebra-patterned couch. So he fled to Amsterdam.
As he made his way around Europe, however, it dawned on him: self-inflicted torment is not all it's cracked up to be. "I realised that there's nothing wrong with having fun," he chuckles.
He also accepted that his journey was not going to be as unique as he had intended. "Everyone likes to dismiss other people as tourists but think of themselves as intrepid travellers. Then you go to a hostel and see everyone flicking through Lonely Planet, trying to find that hidden borough that no one else knows about.
"And when you go there the next day, you see the same 40 people who were reading Lonely Planet the night before."
He returned to the Herald Sun before embarking on his Hunter S.-inspired tour in 2003 and his Kerouac trip in 2006.
Needless to say, each journey involved plenty of drugs, wild parties and sexual adventures - not the sort of thing you want your mother to read about. Still, O'Neil asked his mum, Anne O'Donovan - an editor, publisher and The Age Good Food Guide creator - to read his manuscript. Mostly, she confined herself to grammatical changes, but couldn't resist putting an exclamation mark next to a passage about a one-night stand.
"I met a woman in a bar in New York and then, suddenly, we're in my bedroom," O'Neil says. "I think it was a bit of a shock to her that it could happen so rapidly."
Although most of the action occurs overseas, his returns to Melbourne yield the greatest insights. It was here, for instance, that he realised the contentment that comes from living an "ordinary" life.
"If you just drift and drift, it's not satisfying," he says. "All work and no play is not fun, but all play and no work leaves you with an empty feeling."
His far-left political outlook - already challenged by his time abroad - was further tested by his attempts to give greenies a fair go in his newspaper. "I got screwed (by some environmental groups). The left seems to think they can twist the facts if it's for a good cause. The right are much smarter. They know that most journalists are lefties, so they're more cautious with their claims."
O'Neil is already planning another overseas jaunt, but for now, he just wants to bask in his new-found stability.
"You can't spend all your time running around the desert having crazy experiences," he says.
"I love doing that, but if you want to get things done in your life, you have to stay in the one place and focus."
THIS is a triptych of journeys as O'Neil seeks the travel experiences of his literary heroes - Franz Kafka, Hunter S. Thompson and Jack Kerouac. His search for Kafka takes him to London, Paris, Amsterdam and then the Sahara Desert. In Hunter S. Thompson mode, O'Neil brushes against acid freaks and Russian 4WDs in the Brazilian jungle; gangsters, pistols and pirates in Jamaica; and a whole lot of madness in Mexico. Along the way he learnt a little, loved a lot and didn't really find out much more about Thompson than he could by reading his books or his journalism.
From there it was the Jack Kerouac path, from Rio's Ipanema Beach through the Bolivian mountains and into Colombia before a winter of discontent in New York. The impetus for all these journeys was O'Neil's tongue-in-cheek desire to be a famous writer - and write he did.
There are some laugh-out-loud moments in this book and it's Australian to its core - dry humour injected into even the most dangerous situation - but it makes great copy despite often being truly terrifying.
It's an interesting and enjoyable read but not a book I'd give to any young man with itchy feet - he may not have the same kind of dumb luck as O'Neil.
Review | Thursday, 05 March 2009
Sideways: Travels With Kafka, Hunter S. And Kerouac: Patrick O'Neil
Review by Sally Keighery, Program Coordinator of CAE Book Groups
This evocatively written, action-packed memoir is a love letter to the intoxicating strangeness of travel. Inspired by his literary heroes, O’Neil eschews pre-booked itineraries for loose plans based on fulfilling dreams and testing out life philosophies on the other side of the world.
He’s just turned 21 and up for almost anything, from tripping at trance festivals in the Sahara to partaking in boiled pet bunny in Bolivia. Curious, affable and intelligent, he’s often prepared to leap before looking in order to experience the adventures he craves. It’s a canny tactic but the amount of hot water he gets into would have most backpackers reaching for the cold tap!
O’Neil is careful not to judge those of us who stay put, content to steer clear of peyote and gangstas – it’s just not for him, at least, not all the time. After a few years on the move he realises what he needs: ‘the road to reflect on home and home to reflect on the road’. One suspects he’ll be on a plane again before long and Sideways will inspire more than a few readers to do the same.
Whether we are with the author at the administratively aggravating Hungarian-Slovakian border post without a visa, being massaged for free in Marrakech, or partying high in Alto Paraiso, Brazil, there are laughable situations, poignant moments, physical danger and the possibility of deep friendships. However, this book is neither solely travelogue nor episodic philosophy, but a ruse that employs travel and modern philosophy to enable entry into the author’s searching mind. The ruse is colourful and enjoyably packaged. There is much pleasure to share on this journey, during which the author’s untidy circumstances are tempered by his acute observances on the subtleties and nuances of the human condition. Although written in a breezy style, this book belies its serious undercurrent. It operates on a number of levels, the most important being what the author may have purposely omitted from the dialogue. We are often brought painfully close to the author through his swift clarity and distilled descriptions, but there is a literary reticence masquerading as bonhomie which we are not permitted to go beyond. O’Neil’s next offering is greatly anticipated.
Barbara Cullen was CEO of the ABA and now manages small business policy for the Victorian Government
Patrick O'Neil is officially published after a massive notetaking adventure around the world following his fave author's Kafka, Hunter S Thompson and Jack Kerouac, he called by Robbie Marieke and the Doctor
for a chat.
The Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange spoke to Patrick O'Neil about his travel memoir.
Patrick O'Neil had many overseas adventures in his 20s. He danced to trance music in Morocco and reggae in Jamaica, took peyote in Mexico and was stuck on a bus for 36 hours in Bolivia with no food and water. On these journeys he invoked his literary muses to guide him. They showed him how not to travel the 'straight and narrow' path; instead, how to take a route 'sideways'. He writes about his journeys with these guides in his book Sideways: Travels with Kafka, Hunter S. and Kerouac.
Footage from the book launch at Readings in Carlton and the after party at Hope St warehouse. Shot and edited by Darcy Gladwin
Review | Saturday, April 18 2009
Sideways review in The Age
Review by Bruce Elder
My initial response to the book, with the subhead "Travels with Kafka, Hunter S. & Kerouac" was scepticism. Even the title smacked of
pretentiousness. Then I recalled that back in 1968, which I first travelled to Europe, I was guilty of exactly the same self-conscious literary tomfoolery.
I spent weeks in Dublin retracing every moment of Leopold Bloom's odyssey through the city and then - I am almost too embarrassed to
admit - I headed to Sligo, where I paid homage at Yeats's grave under "bare Ben Bulben's head" and, to the bemusement of a few cows, stood
on a narrow lane beside a lake and recited, to a small tree and bush-covered island, Yeats's The Lake Isle Of Innisfree. How dare I accuse a fellow literary
wanderer of pretentiousness? In fact, Patrick O'Neil, a Melbourne writer, demonstrates in this entertaining and well-written book that following a writer - even one as abstract and philosophical as Franz Kafka - can give a journey layers of meaning that would never be provided by mere tourist-style gawping.
O'Neil uses the writers as starting points so that, for example, in the Kafka section he somehow finds himself writing about an electronic trance party in Morocco.
The book is divided into three sections, each a kind of free association based on a different writer. O'Neil is travelling to make sense of his world. He keeps returning to Australia only to discover that a humdrum daily existence is so abhorrent he has to escape. His first journey is to Europe, Turkey and North Africa. The second finds
O'Neil in the Brazilian jungle.
He then moves to Jamaica, where he gets stoned on local ganja, and Mexico, where he tries his luck with peyote.
In the final "Jack K." section O'Neil wanders through Brazil, Bolivia and Colombia and somehow ends up in New York. The result is a rambling, exuberant and always entertaining journey, the likes of which hasn't been written about since the mad 1960s.
Patrick O'Neil is loose and always has been. So it's not hard to imagine that, when the chain-smoking arts student from Melbourne was unleashed on the world with little more than a fedora and a fanciful ambition to become a writer, some strange and wonderful things happened; baleful encounters in Amsterdam alleys, acid trips in the Sahara desert, stand-offs with Jamaican gangsters.
But, just as one of the book's major influences, Dr Thompson, ruminated, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." Inherently weird, O'Neil expertly delves into the trials, freedoms and tribulations posed to a twenty-something scaling the world with no plans. Sideways has a wonderful voice. Every one of O'Neil's lucid descriptions makes you feel like jumping the next plane to Mexico and knocking on the door of peyote-induced psychosis.
My guess is that one day O'Neil is going to get so far out, he may never come back. In the interim, get a copy of Sideways, saunter down to the Black Cat, and ask him to sign your copy in exchange for a pot of lager.
WHEN Patrick O'Neil and his friends were approached by two young men on a street in Jamaica, they almost laughed at the pathetic gangster outfits they were wearing: baggy jeans, bandannas and an excess of gold jewellery. Then the would-be assailants produced a gun, and nobody found it funny. Fortunately, a passer-by convinced the pair of thugs not to kill their captives, so the startled group proceeded with their plan to see a movie.
THIS is a triptych of journeys as O'Neil seeks the travel experiences of his literary heroes - Franz Kafka, Hunter S. Thompson and Jack Kerouac. His search for Kafka takes him to London, Paris, Amsterdam and then the Sahara Desert. In Hunter S. Thompson mode, O'Neil brushes against acid freaks and Russian 4WDs in the Brazilian jungle; gangsters, pistols and pirates in Jamaica; and a whole lot of madness in Mexico. Along the way he learnt a little, loved a lot and didn't really find out much more about Thompson than he could by reading his books or his journalism. 
This evocatively written, action-packed memoir is a love letter to the intoxicating strangeness of travel. Inspired by his literary heroes, O’Neil eschews pre-booked itineraries for loose plans based on fulfilling dreams and testing out life philosophies on the other side of the world. 