“Six weeks, 17 countries, one pair of undies … okay, maybe two.”
It’s funny the things that can change your life, and that silly but effective advertising come-on for fast-drying underwear certainly set the direction for the most recent chapter in the adventurous lives of Noosa couple Lars Winberg and Jenny Cusick. Phil Jarratt reports.
In the early 2000s Lars and Jenny sold a business in Tasmania and moved part-time to Noosa to begin what Jenny called “a retirement plan” and Lars called “a new challenge”. In fact, it turned out to be both. They are still happily ensconced in the riverside townhouse they bought, and Lightweight Traveller, the store they established in Hastings Street in 2005, is still in the same Bay Village premises, still selling the lightweight, fast-drying, top-selling undies that made their business, along with just about everything else the savvy modern traveller might need.
Of course, all travel-related businesses are facing challenges in these uncertain times – Lightweight Traveller is down to fighting weight with just Noosa and Melbourne bricks and mortar stores and a good website – but right from the start, this energetic senior couple has never been afraid of a challenge.
Born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1935, the son of a policeman whose duties included guard duty at the royal palace, Lars’s earliest memories are of being allowed to gaze dreamily at the crown jewels, and of cycling to the communal gardens at the edge of the city to dig up potatoes for dinner. A keen skier, bushwalker and motocross enthusiast, he was only average at school, but doing his compulsory military service with the engineering corps ignited a lifelong fascination with engineering and construction, and after completing his service he studied at night for his engineering degree for five years while working by day to support a wife and young family.
After graduation Lars worked with a team of cutting-edge scientists doing research on nuclear magnetic resonance at Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Technology, but the years of working and studying around the clock had taken a toll on the marriage, and in 1968 he migrated alone to Australia.
Although the Australian government did not recognise his engineering degree, private companies had no such qualms and he was soon working for large companies like Honeywell. But his favourite job was with the little-known Canadian Aero Services, which flew light aircraft reconnaissance missions for mineral exploration companies such as Western Mining. Based in Sydney, he found he was spending most of his time on a boy’s own adventure around Kalgoorlie. He recalls: “We’d fly in teams of three – a pilot, a navigator and me in the back making sure all the equipment worked properly. Some of the pilots were a little bit crazy, but I just loved it.”
A second marriage came and went. Back in Sydney working as a national sales manager for a tech company, Lars accepted a dare from a friend to attend a Linnea Swedish folk dancing club. “The last thing I could ever have imagined doing,” he says, “but sometimes unexpected things happen.” There he met and danced with Newcastle-born high school teacher Jenny Cusick, who had recently returned from a year spent living in Sweden, and wanted to retain her command of the language. Soon she was commanding Lars as well. The two danced at the Sydney Opera House during the 1982 national folkloric festival and by year’s end they had set up home in Paddington.
Through his membership of the Cooma Ski Club, where he indulged his passion for skiing and orienteering, Lars had become friendly with the remarkable businessman, conservationist and adventurer Frank “Paddy” Pallin, whose chain of outdoors stores had become a phenomenon. Lars was asked to consider starting a franchised store, and was offered either Brisbane or Launceston. The couple explored Tasmania in a motorhome, fell in love with everything except the climate (Jenny likes it warm) and decided to leap into the unknown in Australia’s third-oldest city.
“In our lives together, Lars charges forward, and I just tidy up afterwards,” Jenny laughs, although you only have to know them for five minutes to realise that the yin and yang of this relationship goes a lot deeper than that.
Paddy Pallin Launceston was hard work but successful, and when the couple realised that tourists were renting mountain gear from them, then jumping on a Mountain Stage Lines bus, they bought the company and Lars started driving the customers up the treacherous Jacob’s Ladder switchback to the snow, loving every minute.
The pilots’ strike of 1989 made it a tough season, but every cloud has a silver lining, and when the wildly successful World Expeditions withdrew from its Tasmanian operations, Lars and Jenny bought the business, changed the name to Tasmanian Expeditions and folded the bus company into it. While Jenny ran the tour company and Lars the shop, he recalls days spent cycling the remote parts of the island dreaming up new tour options as the happiest of a long and eventful career.
Shortly after making the final of the 1992 Veteran World Cup of Orienteering in Tasmania – the only world cup to be held in Australia – Lars was skiing at Ben Lomond with their six-year-old daughter Eva when he was astonished to find that his left foot would not follow the command from his brain. Then he found that he had lost control while rock-hopping during an orienteering course. He was diagnosed with peripheral neuropathy. “It’s a very slowly deteriorating condition in which the nerves are gradually dying, giving him less control over his limbs,” Jenny explains.
Lars shrugs and smiles: “They don’t know why I got it and they don’t know how to fix it. When the nerves die the muscles die. But I have no pain.” But for the last six years he has had a fast-moving Luggie mobility scooter, a source of endless fascination to children who watch him hurtle along the riverfront.
After 13 years of guiding not just thousands of adventurous customers but also the business to travel awards and healthy turnover, Lars and Jenny were approached by World Expeditions who wanted to buy the business back. Long pause. Or they could start up in opposition. It was time for the next chapter.
Lars had noticed a seismic shift in how people travelled. The baby boomers were cashed up and wanted their adventures spiced with creature comforts. “These were the people who had reached an age where wouldn’t dream of walking into Paddy Pallins,” says Lars. “They weren’t interested in tents and sleeping bags. So we decided to create a shop for them.” Enter Lightweight Traveller.
Although they still have a Paddy Pallin Adventure Equipment store in Launceston (Lars retired as manager only a few years ago) and an LT store in Melbourne, Noosa is pretty much home for Lars and Jenny now. A lifelong environmentalist, at 85 Lars is still a passionate advocate of caring for the planet. His plea for banning single use plastic appeared in these pages last week.
And like so many adventurers who have ended up in Noosa, Lars and Jenny can’t stop smiling.
