Britt Lapthorne case evokes parents' worst fears

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By Terry Sweetman

October 11, 2008 11:00pm

ISRAELI, Italian, Continental, Mexican, Indian, Chinese, Tibetan, boldly declared the sign outside the rundown eatery in the southern Indian temple town of Hampi.

I wouldn't have eaten there without a medivac helicopter on standby, but the kids were tucking in with abandon.

All around me I heard the unmistakable twang of Australian voices as kids bargained for trinkets and scarves and budget-friendly remembrances small enough to roll up in their backpacks.

I was bored with yet another graven temple but the kids were bubbling with the frank curiosity, the appetite, the vigour, and the fearlessness of youth.

The world belonged to them and I was but a greying bystander on the footpath to adulthood.

I've seen them – or their kind – all over the world and basked in the reflected confidence of their youth.

I've seen them pulling beers in English pubs, playing nanny to spoilt brats, dossing in French bus stops, doing the dirty work, following dodgy landladies down mysterious alleys in eastern Europe, frugally sharing pasta in Italy, trudging the slopes of Gallipoli before it became fashionable, wiping away tears at Hellfire Pass, looking the world in the eye, judging people on their behaviour rather than their race or religion, and laughing, laughing, laughing.

But, the laughter stopped yesterday when it was announced that it was indeed Melbourne girl Britt Lapthorne's body that had been pulled from the otherwise peerless sea off Dubrovnik, in Croatia.

So ended two wrenching weeks of fear and doubt for her parents – Dale and Elke – and her brother Darren.

Nobody but a parent who has experienced that mixture of pride, pleasure and ongoing dread that comes from a backpacking child could quite share the Lapthornes' worst fears as they cried out for answers and cried out for their daughter.

Fresh in my mind after more than a decade are the gnawing worries when more than a week went by without news from our backpacking daughter.

Still haunting me is the frantic helplessness wrought by distance as she rang in tears on Christmas Eve to report she was homeless after some domestic dust-up that had shattered her communal living arrangements.

Still lurking are the suspicions – confirmed in later years over late night drinks – of mad, bad, foolish things that were happening on the other side of the world.

However, nobody but parents who have entrusted their child to a strange world and had that trust so horribly betrayed could begin to understand the Lapthornes' grief.

That is a special grief shared by a few. It is a fraternity of sorrow to which belong the parents of those who died in a Swiss ravine some years back, of those who perished in the fire at the Childers backpacker hostel, to the families of all those who find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time or chance upon evil in their pursuit of experience.

Still, in the ledger of life, the backpacking thing leaves us all the richer for the leavening of experience that our finest and brightest bring back to our lives and our country.

Of all the resources with which this land is blessed, few are more precious than that restless tribe of the curious, resourceful, fearless, friendly and incurably happy to which belongs the ubiqutious young Australian backpacker.

These youngsters are our envoys to the world and the world's window into our country. They are our ambassadors of affability, our merchants of knowledge, and our best protection against the sort of blind insularity that has led the world to so much grief.

Most of us – hundreds of thousands of us each year – send our sons and daughters away as children and they return to us as adults.

But, for the Lapthornes, Britt will be forever a child, a child whose innocence was betrayed.