Journey on a road less travelled

By Matt Neal. Warrnambool Standard 8th July 2006 - ©Copyright Warrnambool Standard  2006.  All rights reserved

Alan Leishman (with back to camera) playing saxophone with Tabasco Jazz


The journey of Alan Leishman from war-time working class England to his current peaceful existence in Dunkeld is a strange and circuitous one. He’s played jazz in English castles during the swinging sixties, received threatening phone calls from the Iranian parliament while working at a Tehran newspaper and cycled down Afghan mountains by moonlight. It’s safe to say there are few other people living in Dunkeld that have seen as much of the world as Alan. Born in 1941, Alan was raised in Surrey in bi-lingual household by his French mother and half-French father. When he was a youngster Alan watched as his dad decided to do the patriotic thing and signed up for the Navy, almost getting killed when a German U-boat sunk his destroyer off the coast of North Africa and left him treading water overnight. Alan recalls visiting his relatives the south of France after the war and playing in the ruins of houses bombed by the German army. While there, a 5 year-old Alan began painting landscapes of the southern French countryside under the tutelage of his artistic older brother. Back at school his knack for drawing improved and he was soon inundated with requests from his fellow classmates to draw pictures of submarines, fighter planes and warships. In the meantime he’d also developed a passion for music, graduating from harmonica to, as his Dad put it, “a proper instrument” — the clarinet. It seemed natural he would end up at an art school and at 15 he enrolled at the Farnham School of Art as a young student in the senior part of the school. It was there that his music took off too. “Once I got to art school I found a few guys who could really play and we got ourselves organised into a jazz band. “Our drummer was right into modern jazz. He called up one day and said ‘you’ve got to hear this Charlie Parker record’. So I cycled round to this guy’s place. Listening to Parker play was “a sort of Road to Damascus” awakening — “a light went off in my head — it was like when rock guys hear Hendrix for the first time”. Throughout the ‘60s, he played in a range of line ups and found himself viewing a side of English society he would have otherwise never seen, he said. “We played at a lot of posh places and private parties. I remember playing at one for this stunning blonde girl... it was her 18th birthday. She was this groovy chick she had cigarette in a cigarette holder and straw boater hat.” She was Patti Boyd, who went on to marry George Harrison. We played at a millionaires party on the west coast of Scotland that cost 10,000 pounds. We played in castles. We played in Lord Scudamore’s 15th century manor — he was a nice bloke,” he said. By 1966, Alan was enjoying a lively existence playing in jazz and soul ensembles at night and drawing storyboards for TX’ commercials by day. But then his life changed when he read the book Full Tilt -- Dervla Murphy’s tale of her bicycle journey from Ireland to India. Alan always had a passion for cycling. “I wanted to do what Dervla Murphy did but obviously she was much tougher than me. It was an incredible feat and she did it on a single speed bike, which meant she had to walk up a lot of mountains. I was going to try to get to Greece or Istanbul. I had a few training rides and off I went.” Aside from one train trip in France, Alan managed to cycle from England, through France to Italy, down the then Yugoslavian coast and across to Istanbul. Then, in 1968, Alan set out again from England, this time making it to Istanbul before heading to Tehran. He made the entire journey on his bicycle, having made a pact with himself never to get off and walk his three-speed bike, no matter how steep the hill. His sense of adventure led him to a group of tourists bound for Kabul in a landrover. He loved it, taking bike rides out to surrounding villages occasionally or enjoying local customs, including “hash the size your shoe heel for US$1”. I can’t be like Bill Clinton and say I didn’t inhale. (Kabul) was on the hippy trail on the way to India and Nepal. There as a lot of drug taking.’ Maybe it was the hash, but Alan and his new American buddy Shailer decided to ride their bikes 230km north-west across the mountains of Afghanistan to see the Buddhas of Bamiyan - two giant statues carved into a cliff face 1500 years ago, only be destroyed by the Taliban a few years ago. On the second day of their journey they saw few people and noticed every vehicle that passed them soon came back again. They took shelter under rocks when it got too hot. Their food supplies started to run dangerously low as they cycled on into their third day. “Late on the afternoon of the third day we saw the reason why those cars had been going back past us -- the road through the mountains had fallen into a river and what was left was impassable. There was just a tiny ledge of tarmac.” With not enough food to turn back and a town at the end of the road they had no choice but to press on. The pair grabbed their packs, and with their back to the mountain, stepped slowly along the 50-metre long ledge. ‘It was certainly a six metre drop -- enough to break your arm or leg or skull it was dangerous.’ Having carried their packs across, they walked back and got the bikes before negotiating the ledge for a third time. “I remember it well because it was my 27th birthday,’ he laughed. Hungry and tired, they reached the village later that day, pigging out on potato, okra, beans and bread and reached the statues soon after. ‘There were two of them, there in all their magnificence, carved into the face of the rock. The Taliban used them for target practice.’ Shailer and Alan parted company, with Shailer heading back to Kabul and Alan riding on to Mazar-e-Sharif, the third largest city and the closest place he could get more money. With only US$1 left to his name, Alan entered the bank in Mazar-e-Sharif to cash his travellers cheques, but the bank would not accept the English pound. “Your dollar is good, sterling is bad”, the clerk said in English before offering Alan a ridiculously low conversion rate for his last US dollar bill. “I started getting angry. I was realising I was in a serious position as it was too far to the next bank”. He was directed upstairs to a supervisor, who restated that the bank did not accept pounds. “I lost it with this guy and I yelled “this bank is shit and so are you””.

The bank’s manager, hearing the yelling came over from his desk and asked the supervisor to translate. Then the bank manager went back to his desk and pulled out a revolver — a full-blown .38 calibre Browning or something. He said “you go out”. I had to take my short-changed dollar and he followed me with the gun at my back down the stairs and out of the bank. I think I must be one of the few people to be taken out of a bank at gunpoint.

Alan took a bus as far as he could afford and found himself about 150 kilometres from Kabul.

The temperature was in the mid 30s by the time he headed off on his bike up the mountains and through the Kotal-e-Salang pass — a 3.3-kilometre king road tunnel almost 4000 metres above sea level. About four hours after leaving the tunnel, he reached a village teahouse. “The people at the teahouse were amazed to see this bloke on a bike coming out of the mountains at 10 o’clock at night”. Spending the last of his money on bread, Alan rode on the next day, eventually getting a lift with a US peace corps jeep about 30km from Kabul.

Alan and Shaller eventually rode onto Pakistan, where Alan got dysentery.

“I counted one day and I went to the toilet 21 times”, he said, adding he lost one stone. I was so weak I had to go back to Tehran. “If it happened over here I would have been in a hospital”.

After returning to health, Alan found a job at the Tehran Journal, one of the few English language newspapers in Iran. He worked as a sub-editor and cartoonist, occasionally taking calls from the Iranian interior ministry commanding certain events not to be reported on. “There had been an outbreak of cholera on the border with Afghanistan and one or two people on our side had died. The guy from the ministry said “you are not to print anything about this”.

He returned home to England on Christmas Eve 1970, picking up a job at a local paper where some of his Tehran buddies worked. A few years later he “got bit friendly” at a Christmas party with an Australian woman named Jan who worked at the paper. “You know how it is. It was one those romantic-comedy clichés”, he joked. Jan and Alan were married in 1978, with Alan meeting most of her family for the first time on an Australian holiday in the early ‘80s. The pair moved Down Under in 1987. Nowadays, Alan teaches a couple of days a week in Ararat and Hamilton, having also taught at Warrnambool College and Timboon P-12. He paints when he can and plays regular jazz gigs around the district, including about once a month at the Hotel Warrnambool’s fortnightly jazz nights. From his tiny studio in the backyard of his Dunkeld home, you can see the Grampians — one would have thought he’d seen enough mountains to last a lifetime.