Sean and Davids Long Drive
Sean and David’s Long Drive tells the story of two friends who decide to travel around Australia in a Ford Falcon to escape their dull and boring lives in urban Australia. The story is told through diary entries written by Sean Condon, the author and proud ‘generation X-er’ which give details regarding Sean’s thoughts about where they are, who they’ve met and any experiences along the road worth noting. Sean’s idea of Australian tourism is constructed though his use of techniques such as setting, point of view, characterisation, language, selection of detail and the fragmentation of time which he uses to create a mixture of the ‘good the bad and the ugly’ of his experiences on the road. The details Sean gives in his travel log are predominately critical of people, places and encounters he experiences on his journey, which create an image of Australia which is in great contrast to that of tourism guides and the general perception of Australia. Sean doesn’t leave anything out of his journey, as stated by Kathy Bail of Rolling Stone: “You’ll be shown the crap and the weird stuff as well as the scenic wonders” although the majority of the text focuses on the negative or ‘crap.’ It is
When comparing Sean and David’s long drive to ordinary travel guides and brochures it becomes apparent that both focus on very different things about the locales they mention. For instance The Eyewitness Travel Guide to Australia describes Surfers Paradise as “Australia’s playground, a flashy strip of holiday apartments, luxury hotels, shopping malls, nightclubs, a casino and 42 kilometres of golden sandy beaches.” Sean and David’s Long Drive focuses on a slightly different side of Surfers Paradise in the quote “We passed dozens of prostitutes, drug dealers, bent cops and shady-looking real estate agents selling apartment buildings to passers by.” Through viewing the two quotes aforementioned, it is clear that while travel guides focus on features which promote an area and entice readers by only giving one side of the story, Sean and David’s Long Drive shows the slightly good, the bad and the ugly side of everything, which positions itself as an anti travel text because it doesn’t aim at promoting a place with unreasonable expectations, it gives reasons why or why not to travel there. Sean’s language through the text is very descriptive, sarcastic and distinctly Australian. His use of descriptive language creates a greater understanding of what Sean is seeing and experiencing, which is often not a lot. By going into great depths of detail over the most irrelevant of things such as signs he sees while driving show just how bored he is. Also, in one scene it appears that he has gone mad and is creating his own fantasy world to escape from the boredom of travelling: “A police car pulled us over and a cop demanded to know what we were babbling about. ‘Nothing officer,’ we replied. Then we shot him. (Only in the leg.)” Sean’s slightly foul mouth proves that this book isn’t really aiming to promote tourism, for a start the texts often coarse language would probably deter most readers. His choice in language changes from informal to formal depending on the mood and situations he has been. This has two effects, it shows that he is well educated and is a pretty smart guy when he wants to be (therefore a reliable narrator) and secondly it shows that he’s still ‘one of us’ an Australian with a bad sense of humour and overuse of swear words. Sean uses characterisation to create characters which the reader is encouraged to hate, feel sorry for or just view as plain weird. The inclusion of certain characters Sean and David meet on the road serves a purpose of stereotyping a town or city as being similar to one or two characters. This technique almost always works against the locale they are at; the characters are usually close to insanity or just really annoying. For instance, when Sean and David are
Some topics in this essay:
David’s Drive,
Sean David’s,
Sean Condon,
Surfers Paradise,
Uluru Kakadu,
Port Augusta,
David Adelaide,
Guide Australia,
Mission Beach,
Characters Sean,
sean david’s,
david’s drive,
sean david’s drive,
diary entries,
hair wax,
selection detail,
leave port augusta,
guide australia,
sean feels,
surfers paradise,
anti-travel message,
mission beach,
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Approximate Word count = 1853
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)
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