Holidaying with a friend should always be fun. This is how it's done
This story is part of the May 18 edition of Sunday Life. See all 14 stories.
The opportunity to travel the world with my best mate Jack, experiencing different cultures and having all sorts of adventures and fun, is a dream come true. It's the kind of thing we used to talk about, and now we've pretty much been on the road together non-stop for 12 years. We've done the whole $10-a-day thing, shared meals, been totally broke – and somehow, we've managed not to drive each other crazy. Travelling with someone really shows you who they are; for us, it just works.
One of our absolute favourite things in the world, the reason we became The Inspired Unemployed, is making people laugh. It still blows our minds that this is actually our job: we get to go on adventures and have the time of our lives, and somehow that counts as work. Wild. It's definitely a 'pinch yourself' moment.
Travelling with your best mate is easy, and it's good having someone to share experiences with. We tackled some pretty wild challenges while filming our new travel show, The List, and doing that kind of stuff solo would've been way tougher. It definitely helps to have someone there to hype you up and laugh through it all with you. This is how we always make sure we're having fun.
Push your boundaries
Loading
We're big believers in getting out of your comfort zone and not following the herd or travelling to places that are trending. You'll never regret taking the leap and going somewhere you can immerse yourself in the unknown and get uncomfortable; you'll learn a lot about yourself.
Keep it chill
Travelling can have its downsides. I mean, it would be nice to not be riddled with food poisoning while trying to film a TV show. As for us, we barely argue, which is a miracle considering how much time we spend together, including our work. If we do get a bit snappy, it's usually just the jet lag talking, or the fact we haven't slept properly in days. Usually, if we give it a minute, we're quickly back to laughing at nothing.
Don't get 'hangry'
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
News.com.au
11 hours ago
- News.com.au
‘People think their way is right because they're offended': Inspired Unemployed respond to controversial routine
EXCLUSIVE: Even though they've spent the past two years writing the modern-day how-to manual on playing practical jokes in TV show The Inspired Unemployed (Impractical) Jokers, Jack Steele and Matt 'The Falcon' Ford say they are only just getting better at reading the room. 'Cancel culture now is ridiculous,' Steele says. 'It's pretty hard to do anything, because everyone has a voice and an opinion, and comedy is so subjective. 'People think their way is right, but that's just because they're offended.' Since appearing online in 2019, the pair known as The Inspired Unemployed have amassed more than 5 million followers on social media for their loveable larrikin videos and posts. In 2023, they added housemates Dom Littrich and Liam Moore to their troupe to front the Australian version of (Impractical) Jokers, a series in which the foursome's escalating prank battles result in hilarious, cringe-inducing encounters with the unsuspecting public. Although the show's blend of Punk'd and Candid Camera can be challenging, the team say they are serious about making sure their silliness lands right. 'You try to calculate [the risks] before you go in, even when you're in the ideas room,' Steele says. 'You're always trying to deep-dive it and think, 'OK, how will people react? Are we pushing it too far? Is the joke on us enough?' And if not, then we pull back.' Wearing uniforms to act as anything from sales assistants to yoga instructors, and shooting in the outer Sydney suburbs instead of in the CBD, staves off being recognised as famous comedians. 'Young ones tend to be more onto it,' Ford says of their attempts to fool people by blending in. 'Older ones are a bit easier to get.' And easier to anger. In April 2024, well-known media personalities Antoinette Lattouf, Clementine Ford and Yumi Stynes hosted a free Sydney event called Love Unboxed, billed as a conversation on relationships. In truth, it was a set-up for a season two gag, with the three women in on the ruse. Introduced as a special guest to offer a male counterpoint, Steele spouted whatever his three mates fed him via an earpiece, including comments such as 'I think chicks dig consent'. Although Steele was the butt of the joke, the stunt received intense backlash and was cut from the show. 'It was a punishment of mine, so I had no idea what I was going into,' Steele says. 'I just played it as it comes, and obviously it didn't play great.' Ultimately, Steele and Ford say their schtick has never been about denigrating women or humiliating people. 'We have an exactly 50/50 female and male following, which translates into the show,' Steele notes. 'I guess that's who we are. We all grew up with sisters, and we're not too male-dominated in our life.' By chance, their show's new season launches in line with Men's Health Week (June 9-15), which focuses on helping men and boys lead healthier, happier lives. The timing resonates with Steele. 'We always talk about our emotions and if we feel insecure or vulnerable, happy or down or whatever,' he reflects. 'We get a lot of messages, particularly from women, saying, 'You've helped my husband or boyfriend talk for the first time [about their feelings]', which is really nice to hear.' To that end, the pair won't let one headline-grabbing misstep dent their confidence. 'Every day, we're surprised people go along with some of the things we're doing,' Ford says, smiling. 'We're not qualified in anything [we pretend to do]. But if you just own it, people believe it.' Season 3 of The Inspired Unemployed (Impractical) Jokers premieres at 9.40pm on Monday on Network 10 and 10Play, with all episodes available to stream on Paramount+.
Sydney Morning Herald
19 hours ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
The last 800m to one of Australia's most historic spots is the toughest part of the trek
This story is part of the June 8 edition of Sunday Life. See all 14 stories. The final 30-odd kilometres of unsealed road to Cape York are perhaps its roughest. Starting from Bamaga, one of five Indigenous communities strung out across the Northern Peninsula Area, a single-lane track plagued with potholes and bulldust cuts through tangled rainforests inhabited by one of the last remaining cassowary populations in Queensland. The turn-back point for the less determined is at The Croc Tent, a roadside souvenir store stocking anything and everything related to the region, including crocodile snow domes and 'Snappers', a kind of male g-string that comes in one size only: XXL. Especially popular are garish, fishing-themed polo shirts that have been adopted as an unofficial uniform in this isolated part of the world. Following a tricky creek crossing further along the track, motorists travelling almost exclusively in four-wheel-drives must pass the decaying remains of the Cape York Wilderness Lodge, which closed for renovations in 2002 and never reopened. From there, the end of the road is in sight. Our final stop is a gravel clearing beside the sweeping sands of Frangipani Bay, just 800 metres from continental Australia's northernmost tip. It has taken our Outback Spirit tour group nine days to reach this point after starting our journey in Cairns, more than 1000 kilometres south. But from here, we must continue on foot. To make it this far, we'd travelled up the coast to Cooktown before turning inland across the Great Dividing Range. After departing the dripping wet Daintree rainforests, the remainder of our journey traversed savannah woodlands bordered by sandstone escarpments and crocodile-infested wetlands. While we were able to ride out the bumps and corrugations in the comfort of our rugged coach, thoughts were spared for those who preceded us. Loading The first European overland attempt to reach Cape York, an area inhabited by Indigenous people for tens of thousands of years, was led by Englishman Edmund Kennedy. Kennedy's 13-strong expedition party left Rockingham Bay in 1848, aiming to establish a route to the tip so that a port could be developed for trade with the East Indies. All but three of the group perished and the expedition failed. A further 17 years passed before two brothers, Frank and Alexander Jardine, made it all the way to the tip, opening a corridor for a telegraph line that would connect Laura, west of Cooktown, with Thursday Island, in the Torres Strait. After four years of toil and hardship, it was completed in 1887. In 1928, two New Zealanders followed the telegraph line to reach the cape in an Austin 7 car. It took them 38 days, with quicksand, forest fires and an average of 25 punctures a day slowing them down. At night, the two slept in the open on a bed of gum leaves, wrapped inside a mosquito net.
Sydney Morning Herald
19 hours ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘As an older woman, courage starts to wobble': How Marta Dusseldorp finds her strength
This story is part of the June 8 edition of Sunday Life. See all 14 stories. Walking through the rainforest in the remote west of her adopted Tasmanian home, actor Marta Dusseldorp finds beauty and brutality along the banks that are home to rare Huon pine. At one junction, the clear water of one river meets the yellow, soupy water of another, poisoned by copper mining tailings. 'It's just extraordinary, the confluence of man and nature,' says Sydney-born and raised Dusseldorp, 52, who, more than seven years ago, moved to the island state with actor-director husband Ben Winspear and their two daughters, Grace and Maggie. Dusseldorp has just completed shooting the second season of ABC TV comedy-drama Bay of Fires, which she co-created, co-produced and stars. Filming took place again in the well-preserved main street of the small Tasmanian town of Zeehan, known for silver mining. But this spot, where the King and Queen rivers meet, proved a more elusive location. 'I tried to film there, but it's really hard to get to, and the safety issues weren't going to quite work.' Surrounding mountains and valleys have nonetheless provided picturesque settings for the appealing Tassie-noir, to which Dusseldorp's picaresque character Anika fled with her two children after death threats were made against her in her former corporate life in Melbourne. Anika took on the alias Stella, and hid among a cohort of eccentric, protected witnesses: there is heroin being cooked, a religious cult that has arranged marriages, and an assassin waiting for the aliens to descend. The second season has capitalism and greed on its themes as the townsfolk pressure Stella for more payouts from her corporate scam, which has already netted them $3.4 million, and inflationary pressures have pushed the price of bread to $23 a loaf. New threats may yet force Stella into the drug trade with her old foe Frankie (Kerry Fox), presumed dead by all at the end of the first season. Like the twists in her show, life in the smallest Australian state has delivered what Dusseldorp did not predict: fertile, imaginative ground. While her husband was born in Wagga Wagga, he'd grown up in Hobart, and they both wanted their children to experience the Tasmanian lifestyle. But they did not know how long they would stay. The couple found a network of like-minded actors, writers and directors, and started their own production company, Archipelago. Tasmania is also home to mycelium, the underground network of fungi threads that shares water and nutrients between trees, and which Dusseldorp says is a metaphor for the artist-community connections she's found in the state. The culture here appears to stimulate both artistic growth and biodiversity. Living here, says Dusseldorp, 'stops the clutter and gives you focus. You can get a lot done in Tassie as connections are just one step away.' Today, Dusseldorp is wearing a fawn trench coat in the lobby of her Sydney hotel and drinking lemongrass tea with honey. Several years ago, life was more frenetic as she dominated television screens in three popular series: Janet King, A Place to Call Home and Jack Irish. As if the pressures of playing the lead in the first two shows were not enough, Dusseldorp would also carve out three months each year between TV seasons to do a theatre play, including War of the Roses, The Crucible, Scenes from a Marriage and A Doll's House, Part 2. Theatre became her 'weird' way of researching what the public was feeling, she reflects now, which helped her decide when she went back onto a TV set if she was playing her long-running screen characters 'too tough or not tough enough'. '[Audiences] come as these beasts, and they sit as one, like in a colosseum, and then turn on you,' she observes. 'If they don't like [the play] or whatever, you have to work out a way to re-engage them, unite them, and give them something to go home with; it's like being a conductor. You find out politically where people are at and what's funny, because it changes depending on the climate.' The Australian playwright Benedict Andrews said Dusseldorp is a 'very brave and captivating and muscular actress'. (She played the eponymous lead in his 2016 play Gloria.) 'Oh my god,' says Dusseldorp when I remind her of performing this role in Sydney's tiny 105-seat Stables Theatre. ' Gloria was a very particular beast. She was basically a cry from me about what it felt like to be in the spotlight. Benedict did a really great job of showing the internal shattering of Gloria as a mother and a partner, and what the costs are of [fame]. 'I didn't want to fully acknowledge [the costs of fame], and when I don't want to acknowledge something, I do a play about it, so I can be somebody else, live it out, and go, 'Got that out of my system!' I would often go home and fall in a heap, but it was done. Theatre is like severance: there it is, I did that, and I went through it, and now I'm OK.' Dusseldorp met Winspear in 2003 when they were working on separate Sydney Theatre Company productions. 'He was like a ship: solid, unique,' Dusseldorp told me in a 2013 interview. The attraction was such that she 'had to splash cold water on my face'. Since moving to Tasmania, Winspear has directed Dusseldorp in the plays The Bleeding Tree, The Maids and Women of Troy. What's her take on their relationship now? 'We still walk side by side, which I really love,' she says. 'And there's an intent to be the custodians of our daughters forever, and make sure we guide them as best we can. Our work together is sacred, so we try to make sure it's filled with honesty, mutual respect, care.' In 2013, when I visited the couple's home in Sydney's Edgecliff, Winspear was preparing the evening meal for Grace, then almost 6, and Maggie, 3. He said he was mindful of how acting and directing obligations can invert family life, so they resisted employing childcare. 'His love of his family is his north star,' says Dusseldorp now. 'It comes down to mutual respect in a long-term relationship, understanding that people have their own ways of doing things, and trying to learn from that.' Grace is now 18 and has left Tasmania to live in Sydney. A budding writer, she is studying English literature. 'She's written a TV series about the family, which I have not seen yet,' Dusseldorp laughs, 'and I have the right to vet, I've told her! Sometimes when we have a family situation, I see her jotting things down and I'm like, 'What is that?'.' Maggie, now 15, and like her sister was often on the set of her mother's shows. 'My kids feel very comfortable socially with adults because they've always been around them.' Dusseldorp is mindful that with privilege comes responsibility. She is producing a film with a domestic-violence theme that is yet to go into production. She is also on the board of the Sydney-based charity, the Dusseldorp Forum, formed in 1989 by her late paternal grandfather, Dick Dusseldorp, founder of construction giant Lend Lease. The forum aims to improve education, health and social outcomes for children and their families through community-led projects. After our interview, Dusseldorp is going to visit her sister Teya, who is the forum's executive director. Her younger twin brothers Tom and Joe are also on the board. Missing from this story of tight siblings is brother Yoris, lost to cancer in infancy when Dusseldorp was eight. 'When I lost my brother, I realised that life comes for everyone in very unexpected ways, and that the person opposite you may have had a particular experience that you need to listen to and care about.' I ask Dusseldorp if she has a book in her. She laughs. 'If I do, it's just for me,' she says. 'I think it might help to put some stuff in order so I can work out what makes me creative, that way I can avoid losing courage. And maybe that's why people do it.' She reflects now on the road ahead; she hopes for a third season of Bay of Fires, and that the roles she plays, as well as creates, continue to have meaning; she doesn't want to just work for the sake of it. 'As an older woman, courage starts to wobble,' she says. 'I want to keep my courage until the very end, and I'm finding that right now I'm having to remind myself of that. That's partly because you become slightly invisible [as an older woman], less relevant possibly, and post-menopause, you need to redefine yourself.' Loading She adds women are finding strength in banding together post-menopause to 'bash through' the suffering of being ignored in this next stage of life. I suggest that shows such as Bay of Fires have proved there is an audience for engaging stories focused on older women. 'I think so,' she agrees. 'The courage to turn up is now something for me, but I want to have something to say. You've got to have a reason to be there, otherwise, shush!' Bay of Fires season two premieres on June 15 on ABC TV and iView.
