By the time Tony co-founded Lonely Planet Publications in 1973, he already had the travel bug. And ever since, travel and discovery have been at the heart of his life and career.
I’ve recorded several podcasts, interviews, conversations recently.
At London Business School Maureen and I recorded Journeys, a conversation with Rajesh Chandy the Professor of Entrepreneurship in the Developing World at the Wheeler Institute. People seemed to enjoy it, someone suggested that we ‘looked like two teenagers our to start an exciting adventure,’ not business like at all.
With Tyrel Cameron Eskelson I talked on his Interlocutor podcast about my travel life, starting in Pakistan when I was a small child right up to travel in recent weeks and for the rest of 2025.
They’re the two islands half way across Bass Strait, between the island state of Tasmania to the south and mainland Australia to the north. Although island residents tend to call Tasmania ‘the mainland.’ And despite living in Melbourne for many years and making many t...
Yesterday I posted about wacky Chinese buildings, today it’s a wacky Melbourne book. Jane Rawson’s novel A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists combines a dystopian Melbourne in 2030, crippled by climate change, industrial meltdown and societal collapse, with a li...
Yesterday I posted about Melbourne’s (temporary) MPavilion. After I wrote that piece I went to a session at the pavilion about Chinese filmmaker Yang Fudong. There’s a current exhibition on his works at ACMI – the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. The Yang Fu...
▲ Melbourne’s Southbank Arts Precinct has a new temporary structure in the Queen Victoria Gardens, the MPavilion. Sponsored by Naomi Milgrom this year’s Sean Godsell designed temporary building will be followed by another new design each year for four years. You can r...
If you’ve been waiting for the new and much acclaimed Narendra Modi government in India to do something you’ll notice outside of India here it is – electronic visas. No more endless hassling at the visa issuing offices, you can now (like the USA or Turkey for me recen...
I’m regularly amazed at how many people I know who have spent time in Afghanistan, have connections with Afghanistan or even visit the country. Alexandra and Leigh Copeland have been dealing with Afghan carpets ever since they spent time in the country in the e...
I posted earlier in the month about how there seems to be some new ‘tech challenge’ almost every day. OK, here are 5 more of them: • Once you’ve subscribed to a magazine it’s a race to see how soon they can suggest you resubscribe. Of course when they make thei...
◄ Seems like everywhere I go these days has recently signed up to a bicycle rental scheme. I’ve posted about my encounters with them in London, Paris, Melbourne, New York, San Francisco and now Brisbane. Back in September I was in Brisbane for the Brisbane Writers Fe...
Hilary Mantel wrote a number of books before her big breakthrough with Wolf Hall. Followed up by her second Booker Prize winner Bring Up the Bodies. I saw the two books, as plays, in London earlier this year. On the same day, matinee and evening performance so it was ...
▲ Maureen and I arrived in Australia – on the beach at Exmouth on the North-West Cape of Western Australia – on 7 December 1972. In a few weeks time that will be 42 years ago. ▲ Exactly five days earlier Gough Whitlam had been elected Prime Minister with the electi...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013