Y2Kangaroo: A Year Down Under at the End of the Century

It was the end of the 20th century: a time when email was high-tech, cell phones were just becoming popular and waking up to the sound of backpacker sex in crowded youth hostels was par for the course if you were a young traveler.

Stephen Barnard arrived in Australia in 1999 with a working holiday visa and a bank account that would hover just above zero for the better part of a year. As he works his way up and down the east coast, he meets an unforgettable cast of characters in youth hostels, caravan parks, pubs, clubs and seedy back alleys before finally coming face-to-face with not only the dark side of the tourist trail, but also himself.

Often funny, sometimes morally ambiguous and occasionally disturbing, Y2Kangaroo is a firsthand account of what it was like to be young and backpacking Down Under at the end of the 1990s. Based on the author’s own diaries, it is also an intimate look at the tail-end of Generation X, offering a glimpse into a time and place before technology took over everything.