Friends for 20 years, the Melbourne bassist of Jet and Intrepid’s senior designer got the band back together on a family trip to China – children in tow.
Pat O’Neill first clocked Mark Wilson at some point at a house party in Melbourne’s southside. Memories are hazy exactly where this was but Pat recognised Mark as the bassist from Jet, whose single Are You Gonna Be My Girl had topped charts around the world only a few years earlier. It was 2005, a life stage Pat now refers to lovingly as their ‘early-20s ratbag era’.
Pat was staying with a high-school friend of Mark’s he’d met at Melbourne institution nightclub, Revolver Upstairs. Amid the music and drinking, the pair fell into conversation. Pat asked Mark about the tour he’d just returned from and without missing a beat, conversation shifted to Aussie Rules football. Turned out, they both supported the Geelong Cats, and silently the roots of a new friendship formed.
They had also, they discovered, both lost their dads (Pat’s in 2005 and Mark’s a few years earlier in 1998) and their friendship deepened with the shared sense of loss. In 2015, Pat was in Mark’s wedding party and in 2017, Mark returned the favour to be best man at Pat’s as they morphed out of their ratbag era into something quieter. Today, they’re husbands and dads.
What happens when ratbags go through life’s ups and downs together and then settle down? Naturally, roles change, relationships shift. But to survive, a friendship has to find new ways to thrive – something they discovered when an opportunity arose to go on an Intrepid family trip to China, with their kids (Louis, aged six and Goldie, seven) now part of the entourage.
New kinds of kicks
‘We’re both into food, both into music, we like wine and cooking, too…’ Mark tells me when I catch him for a chat, fresh off a Jet show in Chile to a crowd of 100,000.
He and Pat still live close to each other in Melbourne and each now has two kids. They make an effort to bring their families together as much as they can, but when the pair of dads found themselves with a school holiday in the calendar for their eldest kids, Pat, now a senior graphic designer with Intrepid, sparked the idea of hitting the road on a new kind of tour.
‘It was my son’s first year of school,’ says Pat, who’s worked for Intrepid for 13 years. ‘I thought over the school holidays, rather than try and find childcare for him, while my wife was working and my daughter was still going to kindergarten, I would pick an Intrepid trip. So, I floated the idea of China to Mark.’
‘Everyone goes to the same places with their children,’ says Mark, who has toured more than 40 countries as a musician – and many more under his own steam. ‘But I’d never been to China, so the idea of going with your kid to a place that none of us had been before was pretty appealing.’
And that’s how they found themselves, 20 years after they met in that house party, sitting in a Beijing restaurant, negotiating with a seven year old who didn’t want to eat anything but rice.
Read more: Intrepid’s new Premium Family trips
Dads on tour
‘It’s obviously a very different dynamic travelling with young children,’ Mark laughs about his daughter’s aversion to trying the food. ‘Goldie didn’t eat a lot. But then she doesn’t eat a lot at home either. She only ate the rice part of her dinner tonight, and that’s pretty much what she existed on the whole time there.’
Meanwhile, Pat had no worries on that front and was keen to get his son involved in the food scene across China. ‘Louis has always been a really good eater, so I enjoyed him wanting to try all the different foods,’ says Pat. ‘The only thing he didn’t eat was the roast goose in Hong Kong, because he thought it looked scary. Which was fair enough, because it was literally the whole goose head.’
But despite the initial cultural differences, the men embraced the shared experience of exploring a new place together, as they gradually assimilated their past and present lives. ‘When we had spare time we would explore, says Pat. ‘In Xi’an, we went out to look at the street food and even managed to find a couple of pubs, where the kids were happy and we could all watch daily life unfold in this cool city,’ revealing that even in a new place, old rituals stayed strong.
Read more: How to make your next family trip a hit
Bonding on the road in China
Gradually, the men found their footing. Mark and Pat found the adults were able to relax and enjoy themselves while the group’s combined kids – aged between six and 15 – revelled in their own independence. ‘There was a lot of distance covered on high-speed trains, and the kids would all be sitting together and playing with each other. They loved making new friends from different countries, including a German family whose youngest kid barely spoke any English before the trip but was conversational by the end.’
Witnessing your kids stumble into those kinds of connections in a new place is exhilarating, but this trip was unique in the way it dovetailed man-thrills with family-thrills.
In Yangshuo, there was a bike ride planned: ‘They didn’t have bikes small enough for the little kids, so we got these (very pink) motorbikes with sidecars. Pat and I rode around the rice paddies of the Yulong River with the kids in the sidecars, which was just amazing.’ From riding the world in tour vans to riding through China with kids in sidecars, the men had come a long way.
Seeing the world through their eyes
Mark says the opportunity to bond with his daughter was priceless: ‘Getting away as just a dad-and-daughter duo was really cool, because we’d just had a son, and the focus had been on him a lot. It was sweet watching her experience it all. She had no preconceived ideas, so you see the magic of travel through their eyes. I didn’t get to leave Australia until I started making albums!’.
Both men are keen to do it again with their youngest children when they are old enough, with Mark insisting he’s learnt from this experience that ‘travel is as important as school.’ But it wasn’t only educational for the kids, the pair say. The trip also gave them the chance to get to grips with their new identities as fathers, too, not just as rock ‘n’ roll buddies.
‘Mark and I have been through life’s highs and lows together, we have shared experiences,’ considers Pat about their long friendship.
Now back home in Melbourne, what stays with Mark and Pat isn’t any one stop on their adventure, but the feeling of moving through it together that resonates – two men adjusting to new rhythms; two dads watching their kids grow, out there in the world.
Pat and Mark travelled on Intrepid’s China Family Holiday. Intrepid’s family trips are designed for people travelling with a child aged between 5 (or 10 for some trips) and 17.
