YOU always remember your first.
So they say. I can't – but then not
many can remember where they were at age two, let alone two weeks.
Likewise, I only have my parents and some old black-and-white photos
showing that at some point in December 1980, we trekked down the old
Bruce Highway from our home in Townsville down to Mum's family in
Brisbane. It's a trip you could never repeat – me wrapped up in a
bassinet with a net over it, which in turn was secured to the Mighty
Datsun. Dad really had to drive carefully, lest his unsecured newborn
pinball between the sides of the bassinet. He somehow managed to do
this despite becoming one of the first to drive the coastal stretch
between Sarina and Marlborough, missing the turn-off for the old road
through the mountains and instead driving down the dirt highway still
awaiting its tarmac topping.
That was my first road trip. We had
plenty more through childhood – Dad's military career and my
grandmother's untimely passing from a brain tumour meant we pinballed
from Townsville to Canberra to Brisbane to Toowoomba to Queanbeyan to
Caboolture back to Brisbane; Dad driving his ever-increasing brood
while we did our best to drive him nuts. On top of that, with Mum's
parents living in Morayfield, Caboolture and Nanango, and Dad's in
Mildura, trips to visit relatives were always planned out well in
advance.
Thus childhood played out in a
succession of cars, vans, cheap motels, service stations, 80s mix
tapes and massive arguments between four young boys. The day before
would see Dad sound asleep in preparation for the drive ahead – Mum
never trusted herself not to fall asleep, and even if she did it's
moot whether Dad would have relinquished the wheel anyway – while
we had to pack our bags for the trip ahead. An early dinner, the car
packed, and by early evening we were away. Trips south would
inevitably find us at 2am in some country service station,
simultaneously warming up, stretching out and pestering both parents
for some chips or lollies. Daylight hours would involve mass games of
“I Spy” and outbreaks of spontaneous karaoke syndrome, when our
car alternated between a giant John Williamson jukebox of Australian
folk tune and all Dad's greatest hits, turned up LOUD. So ingrained
is the latter on my memory that it wasn't until I was 15 or so that I
realised that Elton John's falsetto chorus on Crocodile Rock
wasn't just Dad playing silly buggers.
The family settled
down a bit after that last move to Brisbane. We spent nearly four
years in the one house before heading slightly closer to the city in
late 1995. Soon after I began boarding school in Toowoomba, thus
getting to know the Warrego Highway rather well as we trekked up and
down for school sport, weekends away and holidays. In 1996 I made my
first solo trip down to Mildura on the Greyhound; in 1997 a bus took
me around New Zealand's South Island as part of a school trip.
THE next road trip was the biggest
though. These days it's hard to comprehend just how expensive it was
to fly around Australia back in the 1990s; my favourite statistic
from that time is that for the same price for a return trip from the
East Coast across to Perth, you could buy an around-the-world ticket
and really make a day of it. Wanting to visit an aunt over in the
western capital meant getting imaginative with the travel
arrangements, skipping the $1000+ airfare and paying around $800 for
an itinerary that read
Brisbane-Melbourne-Adelaide-Perth-Adelaide-Mildura-Canberra-Sydney-Brisbane.
The original plan saw the Melbourne and Sydney legs swapped around,
which would have given me daylight hours in the two major cities;
unfortunately the family in Mildura I wanted to see would be away
those dates.
The whole trip was one of those things
you can only do when you're young and stupid. It took 24 hours to get
down to Melbourne; an overnight trip to get across to Adelaide, then
another 30 or so to cross the Nullabor to Perth. Despite the trip
length it was all relatively comfortable – I managed to sleep most
of the time I sat next to someone, including the entire
Melbourne-Adelaide stretch where I jagged a seat at the top and front
of a double-decker bus, meaning I could fully stretch out onto the
raised platform directly in front of me. If ever there was a bonus to
topping out at 5'8”...
The sector to Perth was easily the most
fascinating. I remember not long after leaving Adelaide looking up to
see the world's bluntest sign:
Northern Territory →
Western
Australia ↑
It
definitely showed what kind of emptiness we were about to go through.
This was only heightened when we stopped off at Ceduna for a meal
(the first time I'd ever tried oysters) - I thought we'd crossed most
of South Australia, only to look at the map on the wall and realise
that not only were we not in Kansas any more, it'd be a very long
time before we were anywhere at all.
The
Nullabor came and went as we past the Great Australian Bight during
the Great Australian Night. The driver woke us as we crossed the
state border at some ungodly hour to let us know that we'd be
stopping at the local police station in case they wanted to search
the bus for drugs.
Drugs?
On a Greyhound? You reckon the bus yesterday was found with a whole
heap in the toilet? Pull the other one mate, it plays God
Save The Queen. After arriving
late the next afternoon into Perth it turned out that no, he wasn't
joking – one of the drivers from the day before had found a whole
bag of cocaine hidden away in the bathroom. Delayed that bus for a
while, which definitely makes the culprit a prime candidate for a
lynching in my books.
Then
again it had been a long trip.
Once in
Perth the sensible thing to do would have been stay put for two
weeks, venturing out for supplies and not much else before the 60-odd
hour trek back home. Which is why I found myself in a full car at
stupid o'clock with my uncle and his mad mate, heading back east to a
place called Peak Charles where the pair of them would climb up some
sheer rock faces and I'd try not to get hurt. We stopped at Wave Rock
along the way, before heading down over 100km of dirt road to our
final campsite. It was as remote as I'd ever been – should
something happen we were at least 100km as the crow flies from the
nearest communities of Norseman and Esperance, a figure all-too-real
when I managed to slide down a rock face as I tried to cut a new path
across the face of a mountain, rather than going back to the bottom
and taking the footpath back up the top. A couple of
fortunately-placed saplings impeded my progress but increased my
lifespan long enough to get back to Perth ok.
The road
trips were a lot shorter once back in Perth; the longest a trip out
to Fremantle to see the jail and try Australia's best fish and chips
out on the waterfront. Before too long though it was time to farewell
the relatives and jump back on the Greyhound heading east. On
boarding the driver said I was sitting next to a little blonde woman,
a trip highlight that last as long as it took to find my seat and
realise that in WA “little blonde woman” meant “big, fat blonde
man”. The whole way from Perth-Port Augusta I found myself with
half an arse hanging off the seat in order not to have any kind of
physical contact with the man; more than once I found myself looking
longingly at the luggage racks and wondering if I was just small and
light enough to squeeze in for the night.
Port
Augusta brought both physical and comedy relief. The physical relief
was that a few disembarked there and I could finally move into a
spare double-seat; the comedy from the Chinese man that must have
gone exploring and never made it back. After stomping up and down the
bus a number of times to confirm he could still count past 10, the
driver eventually muttered something about giving this bloke all the
time in the world and driving off, while the rest of us looked out
the windows for signs of a streak of panic and/or vengeance to come
tearing our way.
AFTER
more than 10,000km on the road I made it home. While I was 18 and
officially an adult at the time, my trek across to Perth was really
my adolescent self's last hurrah. Eighteen months later I headed west
out of Brisbane with a full car, a Canberra street directory and no
idea what would happen when it came time to actually use it. The
Triple M radio signal stayed with me right until Cunningham's Gap,
dropping out along with my childhood and adolescence once over the
crest of the pass. Adulthood kicked in along with the CD I had to
keep me company.
And just
like childhood, adulthood began with a road-trip.
