He Said She Said: Maureen & Tony Wheeler

By Peter Myers

Travel publishing phenomenon Lonely Planet caters to just about every segment of travel imaginable, shaping itineraries for everyone from independent travellers to families. l + t met up with the company’s founders, Maureen & Tony Wheeler, to discuss their collective autobiography.

Having long wished to chart their course from the early-70s, when, as a broke pair of young newly wedded travellers who’d made it to Sydney from London overland with just 27 Australian cents between them, Tony and Maureen Wheeler detail how their handmade pamphlet-style first-edition of Across Asia on the Cheap came out just at the right time, at the beginning of a new era of independent travel, becoming over the subsequent three decades a global publishing sensation beloved by millions.

Tony, and, more reluctantly, Maureen, began working on their frank and witty collective autobiography, The Lonely Planet Story, about 10 years ago after regularly being asked why they hadn’t written a book about their experiences. As to who will read it, Maureen cites their recent jaunt promoting the (translated) book in China: “Chinese readers just couldn’t comprehend the fact that we had just taken off, left careers and family, to travel and work in the way we had.” Tony adds that, “When you’ve written something, you always think it’s really good, but you have no idea how people are going to take it. Which was a reason for publishing it outside Lonely Planet; objective editors could say to us, ‘This bit is rubbish, cut out the next 10 pages.’ They ended up cutting out 100 pages.”

LP’s guides first colonised the Asia Pacific, then the Americas. When they’d run out of countries to cover, Europe was set upon from 1993. As a practical combination of annuallyupdated country and regional guides, LP had an upper hand over experienced Europe-focused publishers. Many readers will begin this book believing that being a LP writer would be their dream job. Most will finish it with the opposite idea. Some of the funniest episodes focus on writer led disasters, born of sickness or huge egos. Politics rears its ugly head frequently with hilarious conclusions: deadlines not being reached thanks to arguments over India’s everelusive borders, and Russia’s ever-decreasing landmass; the Vietnamese government pirating the book, then banning all copies except their own counterfeits; the Burmese Action Group in London boycotting LP because they print guideson Burma, despite the belief of the Burmese that the more travellers who visit, the better off their country will be. But LP weathered the storms, as well as the downturn in travelling post-9/11, SARS, Bali bombings, Iraq war and Madrid & London bombings.

The book’s coverage of the technical paradigm shifts that LP has negotiated over the last 30 years reveals that they were extremely early adapters in the computer age. It is hard for us, with our desktop publishing software, to imagine the laborious processes of gluing down each section of text, resetting equipment each time one needed to change font or style, and correcting mistakes with a scalpel!

Another more sombre aspect of the autobiography that will be familiar to many involved in start-up firms is the messiness that can ensue when a company starts small, with friends, then grows exponentially into a serious corporation. Big money can kill big friendships.

A question many people ask the Wheelers – me included– is how they feel about ‘laying the tracks’ through the world,which mass tourism and big business inevitably followed.The couple find it laughable that their “little guidebook publishing company… expanded the airport, bought the aircraft, increased the flight frequencies, sold the package tours, built the hotels and restaurants… and convinced all thevisitors to go there.” Tony also finds it “patronising for those of us in the developed world to think people should maintain a simpler life to please us.” He does, however, share this publication’s real concern about the amount of energy travel burns up. In a typical year of travel, Tony will use more fuel on airlines than all the cars in a Grand Prix. Says Maureen: “When you can cross Europe for a few dollars in these new cheap flights, it’s another example of us going just one step too far.”

On the flipside, Tony writes, “travel is… the biggest business in the world – more people depend on travel and tourism for their employment than any other business… It is through travel that we meet and understand other people, and at this time, when there is so much anger and misunderstanding in the world, travel is more important than it has ever been.”

As to the future, expect more variations on the guide theme from LP, whose photo-led coffee table books like One Planet and The Cities Book are compilations that no one else could match, thanks to the sheer scale of their oft-quirky content, maps and images… oh, and Tony is planning a one-off account of travel in ‘Axis of Evil’ countries and other ‘Bad Lands’ – the latter being the upcoming book’s title.

The Lonely Planet Story by Tony and Maureen Wheeler is published by Periplus at USD 16.95.