Geoff Crowther remembered

Vale Geoff Crowther

Geoff Crowther, intrepid traveller and adventurer, pioneering guidebook writer, much-loved eccentric and Northern Rivers favourite, died earlier this year at the age of seventy-seven. Here Tony Wheeler, co-founder of Lonely Planet, pays tribute to an icon of travel who undoubtedly succeeded in making the planet a little less lonely.

He sold millions of books, he played a key role in overthrowing an African dictator, he was banned in another African country, maps he drew were shown alongside a Tolkien map of Middle Earth in a display at the British Library, and he was from just outside Byron Bay. However, his death in April 2021 went virtually unnoticed in Australia, apart from an obituary in the Byron Shire Echo. Unnoticed in Australia perhaps, but elsewhere in the world Geoff Crowther’s departure prompted lengthy reports in every Times you can mention: The Times of London, The Financial Times, even The New York Times all noted the key role Geoff, from his rainforest retreat at Burringbar, played for travellers all over the world, in that pre-pandemic golden era of independent travel. I turned up in Australia – fresh off Asia’s hippie trail – in 1972 and with my wife Maureen created Lonely Planet the following year. Lonely Planet quickly needed more writers and Geoff was clearly our man. In London, he was the travel expert behind the BIT Guides, the main funding source for the very 1960s ‘underground information centre’, BIT. Pete Townshend and Paul McCartney may have helped

to keep BIT afloat, but it was the travel guides which were the key backing. Then the 1960s ended, BIT was grinding to a halt and I suggested to Geoff that he turn his work on Africa into the first Lonely Planet Africa. Forty-four years later, that Africa guidebook is still the only publication in the world to cover every country on the continent. What about South America, I suggested, and Geoff headed off to Central and then South America and emerged with a second classic guidebook, South America on a Shoestring. Instead of heading back to chilly England to write up his extensive research, Geoff relocated to Australia, taking up residence in an old banana shed on what had become a commune just outside Burringbar. With that book on the shelves, Geoff’s next destination was India where he played a key role in the book I still look upon as Lonely Planet’s proudest creation. For months, Geoff shuttled back and forth between northern New South Wales and my place in Melbourne, putting together a guidebook that was both a critical and popular success: it won a guidebook of the year award in London and sold like those proverbial hotcakes. In fact, it sold so well that Geoff was soon employing every craftsperson on the commune to put together a beautiful home with a soaring roof inspired by the Batak houses of North Sumatra in Indonesia. Of course, mains power was still far away, so Geoff’s computers, printers and communications equipment were powered by arrays of solar cells, decades before solar power became an everyday (and cheap) commodity. In between housebuilding and book-writing Geoff also continued to travel, particularly in Africa, where his comments on Malawi’s ‘President for Life’, Hastings Banda, earned him and his Africa guide a ban from the country. African travellers sometimes went to extraordinary lengths to smuggle their copy of Africa on a Shoestring into Malawi. I was once shown a copy of a hardback schoolbook, a British-colonial-era history of Rhodesia – the country which today has become Zambia and Zimbabwe. Flipping the cover open and turning over a few pages revealed that the school text mysteriously metamorphosed into Geoff’s Africa guide.

In 1991, Reuters correspondent Aidan Hartley was the only journalist with the rebels on their way to overthrowing the despotic Ethiopian dictator Mengistu. As they approached Addis Ababa the rebel commander told Hartley he had not been in the capital for many years and most of his men had never been there. Despite their captured Soviet tanks, he was afraid they would get lost in the city’s streets. In his book The Zanzibar Chest Hartley recounted that all he could provide was the Addis Ababa map from his copy of Africa on a Shoestring, but that proved perfectly adequate. Printed off from a commandeered photocopier, the guidebook map was used as the tanks rolled into the city. Lonely Planet guides were often good at finding the best hotel or restaurant, the hottest bars, the right bus stations, but as far as I know this is the only occasion a guidebook was used to overthrow a government. And that mapping encounter with JRR Tolkien? In 2016 the British Library in London mounted a major exhibition, Maps and the 20th Century: Drawing the Line. In one display cabinet, a map of Middle Earth, which Tolkien used to plot the storyline of Lord of the Rings, was juxtaposed with Geoff’s maps and notes in his journal from researching the first edition of South America on a Shoestring. Despite endurance and a work ethic which left almost everybody in his wake, Geoff’s full-on approach to life sometimes went a little too far and it was probably too much indulgence in the amber fluid which led to a stupid household accident and a brain injury that resulted in a decade-long spell in a nursing home outside Byron Bay. It was a cruel end to a life lived at full throttle and in every corner of the earth, but there are still Crowther connections to Byron Bay. Hyung Poon, his Korean former wife whom he met while working on the Lonely Planet guide to the country, still lives in Byron Bay, although their son Ashley, clearly infected by his father’s travel bug, is currently living in Korea. In between everywhere else of course.