On the road again...

When I was a young cadet journalist, back on a prominent Australian daily newspaper, they would send us “bush.” That was the word. No grand assignment, no breaking scandal. Just bush. They’d hand you the keys to a car that sounded like it had been coughing since birth, pair you with a photographer who smoked until the ashtray gave up, and say, go find characters.

And we did. We always did. A station master who ironed his shirt for the one train that limped through once a week, and still looked proud when it came. A stockman who blushed and admitted he was still learning to ride. A dog trainer who leaned close, like a man sharing state secrets, and said he much preferred cats. These weren’t stories you uncovered so much as tripped over, like stones in the road. They made you laugh, then think until the silence in the car got heavy.

Since then, the road has led me farther than I could have guessed. I walked the neon nights of Hong Kong through the handover, crossed America on highways that stretched like punishment, stood in corners of Africa where red dust coated everything, and the stories stuck deeper still. In New York, I lived through the smoke and the silence of 9/11 at ABC News, when the city itself seemed to stop breathing but would not lie down. Later, I ran Billboard, that great “bible” of the music industry, steering it through the wreckage and rebirth of making music matter.

Words matter

There were also stories to be told from the ruins of Afghan villages. The haunted faces of Pol Pot’s survivors in Cambodia, where resilience wasn’t a headline but something you saw in their eyes. And then there were the boardrooms, quieter but just as bruising; different kinds of conflict zones, where I still help brands fight to tell their stories and be heard above the noise.

Five continents of stories. Dusty roads. Newsroom coffee. CNN’s neverending cycles of news. The kind of days that etch themselves into your bones, even as you’re just trying to file on deadline. Through it all, the lesson from those rattling road trips to nowhere has outlasted them all: stories live in people, and you only find them if you go and ask.

Highlands ahead

Now I live in Scotland. The mornings roll in with mist, the evenings with midges, and the stone walls look older than memory. My name here — Scott McKenzie — is as common as John Smith, but the land feels right for something new. Once again I reach for the keys, stuff cameras into bags, and set off to look for characters. Only this time, the road leads to whisky and smells of malt and smoke.

I’m not here for tasting notes written like Latin homework, or velvet-rope rituals where men in tartan argue whether the peat is more moss than smoke. There are guides enough for that. I want the people. The dreamers with crackpot schemes. The old hands with whisky confessions whispered over a glass. The women carving space for themselves in a trade that has too often pretended they weren’t there.

That is the heart of Whisky Wagon. An old Land Rover with mud on its tyres, a couple of cameras that fog in the drizzle, a notebook, and the belief that the best stories are waiting at the side of the road. We’ll listen, we’ll laugh, we’ll let the road lead us. And maybe we’ll make whisky feel a little less like a locked cabinet and a little more like something you can pour without asking permission.

The test shoots have begun. The gear works, most days. The list of names is growing: distillers, rebels, dreamers, drinkers, and the ones who just keep the fires burning. The ride will be messy, and it will be funny, and if we’re lucky, it will be true.

So here I am, back to where I began: a notebook, a road, and people worth listening to.

Come along for the ride. Everyone gets a ticket.