The Bug continues its series of extracts from travel editor Don Gordon-Brown's latest award-winning book, Any Chance of an Upgrade Under the Circumstances?, due out soon.

When one's roots come home to roost

When one goes in search of one's roots, some level of embarrassment is highly likely along the way.
But right at the beginning? For here I am, freshly arrived at Brisbane International Airport and in full root-search mode, and I'm red faced already. It hardly seems fair.
I'm stuck in Customs and apparently there's something terribly wrong with my passport. Not only that, it seems there's nothing I can do about it.
A devoted Anglophile all my life, I'm shocked that I didn't see the mistake before. But it's a big one and it threatens to spoil such a long-awaited, longer overdue trip of a lifetime as, in my 50th year on this shrinking planet, I head to Europe for the first time in my life.
The trip is important, you see, for I was born of English and Scottish stock, raised on The Secret Five and The Famous Seven, not necessarily in that order, later on the exploits of Captain Bigglesworth, he sneered, in spite of the luger pointed menacingly at his belly.
The son of a scrawny, hairless, white-bodied Pom who only ever told me one joke, about an Englishman called Ponsenby who was having an affair with an elephant but that there was nothing unusual about Ponsenby because it was a female elephant.
That joke. Always told even more badly than as written here, thrown in at various times in a child's adolescence to try to bridge the yawning gap between father and pimply son, always spectacularly unsuccessful.
So here I am; about to visit that part of the world where Ponsenby spent his childhood. Headed for the place that almost seems as much my birthright as his.
Perhaps in an English pub somewhere, I'll rub shoulders with one of Ponsenby's issue. Ponsenby would be long dead by now, if he's taken my father's lead, but perhaps a grandson the age of my oldest might be sitting in a quaint little pub somewhere in the midlands, sipping on a warm and fruity pint, otherwise totally anonymously if not for the rather attractive Indian she-elephant by his side, sipping her sherry.
Three decades too late to really go after my roots, I'm off to find them anyway.
Try to work out why, as a toddler, I spoke in a broad Scottish brogue, always, according to my mother, talking about having left "mah hat in the hoose".
Mum thought this was a miracle, seeing I didn't even own a hat back then.
She loved to retell this story as much as I loved to hear it. She brought it up almost as often as Dad's Punsenby joke though always much-better received.
She always said the accent, almost too thick to slice into understandable pieces, was unfathomable in more ways than one, as we were just about the first family on the new estate at the top of Hamilton Road in post-war Chermside and had no real neighbours, let alone anyone who spoke like that.
They're long gone now, my oldies, so I can't ask them certain questions about my roots.
So I'm off myself to try to work out why dad's Punsenby joke misfired so badly so often; victim of either his bad joke-telling or my prudish Methodistism, if that's the word for it. To discover the well from which these Wesleyan ways sprung so strongly to make any conversation with my dad on any issue of the flesh immediately waterlogged and bogged down beyond all hope. And, of course, to find out why I spoke that fluent Scottish for a year or two of anklebitinghood.
To talk to the people who have lived their lives the way my forbears lived, before travelling halfway around the world to a god- forsaken place like Australia to die of snake bite or Large White consumption.
Bump into Ponsenby maybe. Shock myself, perhaps, by talking fluent Gaelic with some Scottish boofredhead in a bar. Sniff out my roots, be proud of my origins, yet bung on the Aussie accent as much as possible. Be the typical larrikin; the friendly antipodean joker.
And then the bubble bursts - even before liftoff - as we go through Customs.
I hand the customs chappies my brand-new passport and they appear to smirk as they flip through the pages.
And there it is: on the page opposite my photo are these words that are obviously causing the problem. Why hadn't I seen them before?
They read: The Governor General of the Commonwealth of Australia, being the representative in Australia of Her Majesty the Queen Elizabeth the Second, requests all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance and to afford him or her every assistance and protection of which he or she may stand in need.

Now I don't want to let my travel yarns in this book sink into a personal attack on anyone.
But quite frankly, how any proud Australian at this stage in our nation's development would not want to see that wording in our passport struck out immediately is beyond me.
Here we are, one of the most independent, egalitarian, irreverent countries on earth and we can only travel abroad if the made-over matriarchial midget of a dysfunctional gin-soaked, racist, English family of pompous big-eared gits bids us so to do.
Decent Australians should find that situation totally insulting, yet here's that wretched dwarf of a Prime Minister of ours, that spittle-lipped Preamble Man of and for the 50s, that suburban conveyancer who has risen far beyond his abilities, that bastion of conservative thought, arguing that it's best that we keep Australia as it is, with the Queen of England and very rarely Australia as our head of state, graciously allowing her representative man-servant in Australia to let us travel overseas with her best wishes.
Now I rarely know where that insignificant little prick Howard is coming from, but where he came from is probably much the same place as me. Or, for that matter, I.
You only have to look at the monikers to guess both our shared heritagesdrips with Anglo-Saxon stiff upper lippity.
But where we've come from and where we are now are two entirely different states of minds, and it boils my butt to think that modern, multicultural Australia has a leader who doesn't understand that it's time to move on.
I am ashamed to have a Prime Minister bound to Her Majesty's frock, afraid to let go. Beholden to a woman who will always put her own country before ours.
I am embarrassed to think that if the up-coming referendum goes down, the child Australia might be left at home alone, with the parents moving out before we do.
I'm particularly red-faced that Howard sees nothing wrong with the maternal, condescending message contained in the current Australian passport.
Naturally enough, I don't want the pages of this excellent travel book, soon to be available at all respectable bookstores, to be spoilt by unnecessary personal attacks, so that's the last I'll be saying on this matter.
Except perhaps for this.
Little Johnny Howard, locked in the past that he finds so comforting, should be taken out and run over by a very heavy steamroller, along with others of his ilk, including that pompous, brown-nosing, toffy-faced punce Tony Abbott and that wretched crooked-mouthed crone from Breast-fed Babies for a Constitutional Monarchy. You know who I mean.
They should be steamrolled (I've got in mind one of those massive, road-building models) repeatedly, folded in from the sides over and over and over and over again, steamrolled some more and folded inwards repeatedly until they are spread a thousand metres long, a hand-span wide and as paper thin as possible. Well, perhaps not too paper thin.
They should then be bleached, perforated, rolled tightly and inserted into the dunny roll holders in the toilets of all proud, dinky-di Australians who want a republic of one type or another.
They should then be used to wipe the arses of true-blue Aussies – people who want to see this nation standing on its own two feet as a proud and separate republic in the new millennium – because, frankly, that's all they're good for.
But because I don't see the point in running personal attacks in a travel book of this type, that's the last I'll be saying on this matter.