The idea of journeying to our one-time hometown of Melbourne by car was seeded in in the midst of Australia’s Covid experience.
Plane travel was and is still compromised by delays, cancelled flights, lost baggage, and the very real prospect of catching this rotten virus again. The days of the $335 plane ticket are well and truly over. Online searches bring up a slew of results around the $800 mark or more. Could travelling by car loom as a new prospect for many? The tide won’t turn that quickly. Few will be convinced, let alone have the desire. But, day by day, my mind was being made up.
I started voicing my idea to others. Very quickly, I found myself with a potential travelling companion and co-driver, my dear friend of 35 years Grazia.
As the ideas and discussions grew, a date for departure was set. It was August 15. I discarded a whole bunch of truths, half-truths and norms about what it means to travel across the Nullarbor. No caravan. No water bag. No spotties. No spare wheel. Just fuel up, fill the windscreen washer reservoir, pump the tyres up to 40 psi, check the oil, pack, and go.
The omission of a spare wheel raised the most eyebrows, my own included. It seems such a terrible risk, and goes against the grain of what most of us learn and know – or think we know – about travelling our back roads. I became peculiarly relaxed about it. I reasoned there are any number of possible calamities that can send us home before we get there. Heart attack? The car’s coming home on a truck. Blown transmission or engine? Unlikely, as the car’s not even in its adolescence, but yeah. It’s coming home on a truck. Wildlife collision? The car’s coming home on a truck. Tyre blowout? The car’s coming home on a truck. And anyway, what are the chances?
Dad’s following the journey keenly. This trip is many things. It’s an homage to the childhood journeys on the same roads leading to the same towns undertaken by us as a family during my childhood. We did it twice in the 1968 Belmont wagon with a single-axle caravan on the back and a hessian waterbag bolted to the front of the car. Those were a popular accessory of the time.
I’m still good, which is another crucial factor. The Pug’s a long-legged cruiser – at 110 km/h, the engine is ticking over at just double the idle speed. Everything just seemed right.
It came time to go.
Day 1: Perth to Norseman
Grazia took the wheel at our 7am departure. We got as far as the Bakers Hill Pie Shop. This is not an ambitious stint. But I couldn’t let go of the thought of a Monday-made vanilla slice and a flat white to keep us going to lunch time. A retired couple in the highway home opposite were watching us and the world go by as they sat in their dressing gowns on their verandah, hopefully with a pie of some sort of their own.
We bypassed Northam, took silo photos at Tammin, and kept those smaller towns of Meckering, Tammin and Hines Hill sliding past the rear view mirrors. Kellerberrin seemed to have some life in it, so we hauled up for a minor stop and more photography. After briefly admiring some historical buildings in the main street, I took off slowly with the window down. I could hear the rhythmical sound of a tap shoe coming from the right rear of the car. I wanted it quite badly to be a pebble caught in the tyre’s tread grooves. It didn’t take long to spot, right at the top of the tyre – a self tapping screw.
My heart sank. The dream was unravelling. My miscalculation on the spare wheel scenario was about to become an embarrassment. I needed a tyre shop in a one horse town. So I looked over to the other side of the street and spotted a tyre shop in a one-horse town. Inside this ghost shop were no cars, no racks of new tyres, and no people. Out On The Patio was blasting through a series of rather serious hi-fi speakers. The speakers were required to keep Hagrid happy. Hagrid, a towering, good looking young man with a shy country smile and sparkling lime-coloured eyes, was modelled directly on his Harry Potter film namesake. I don’t recall him entering the workshop. He was one of those mythical, apparition-like figures who simply emerge. His astounding mass of hair and heavy, dark-coloured rags hung vertically off him. After a quick look at the offending screw, he assured me in the slowest of country drawls, “Oh, yeah…..’bout twenny minutes”.
Grazia and I sauntered down to a cafe, and quite a good one. The cabinet housed a range of quality in-house baked goods. They even made their own confectionery. Remember the ‘poached eggs’ from the lolly jars at the deli when you were little? They had them! Grazia asked for coffees and four poached eggs. “On toast?”
“No. We want these ones here”. The woman almost collapsed with gratitude at the sight of passers-through wanting her crappy marsh-mallow poached eggs. They were fun, and they were good.
By the time we’d finished, Hagrid had our tyre repaired and we were underway. I’d never handed $44 across so gratefully. We’d added an unintended half hour to the day. It was time to motor to Southern Cross, and put some intent into the day.
Southern Cross and thereabouts is the start of the Goldfields. There’s a great deal more going on here than with the wheatbelt towns before it. There’s a buzz and a civility that would make the place easy to live in if you had to. With a bowls club, swimming pool and a Netflix account, you could do worse. The pints at the pub opposite our ant-infested lunchtime park bench are $7.50, just like at the North Perth Bowls Club.
The drive to Coolgardie is a long one, but Coolgardie’s always been a charmer. Its wide main street and classic stone buildings have formed the backdrop to the ABC’s latest Mystery Road series. I was saddened to note the disappearance of one of its main attractions. Coming in to town, and situated on the left, was a quaint corner block home with a white wrought iron fence and a front garden filled, not with plants, but pole-top glass insulators. Hundreds of them, all different sizes and colours. In the twenty two years since I last admired the place, its offbeat and off-station owner has died, and only the wrought iron fence remains.
Most cross-country travellers turn right at this point onto the Coolgardie Esperance Highway, in the direction of Norseman. Sure, you can go straight ahead to Kalgoorlie, but only if you intend to stop and look around. It’s stuck out on the edge of a little triangle on the map.
On our shortcut, the road narrows, the shrubbery looms closer and everything starts to hem you in. It eventually becomes a pretty drive. The distant Fraser Range adds a little mauve to the horizon’s topography and an abundance of large dried salt lakes might fool you into thinking you were driving through an interplanetary or lunar landscape. Lake Cowan looked too fascinating to keep driving. We stopped the car. I spied a railway line perhaps a hundred metres away, and instantly made a beeline for it. As I sought to clamber up to the line – these days, one seeks to clamber up to the line, instead of just clambering – I heard a rumble and saw a distant pin-prick of light. Just too good. An ore train was coming, and it was a ripper. Train drivers can get very worried about people walking on tracks in the middle of nowhere, so I made my intentions very clear with body language. I got the hell down, and well down, making sure he could see I was intending to take a photo.
They were clear shots. My smile and thumbs-up on his approach were duly acknowledged with a friendly and long blast of the horn. The same used to happen when I was the Karratha sales rep at Atkins Carlyle. The Hamersley Iron ore trains were a good 2 kilometres long, from memory. When I was driving along the Hamersley Iron Railway Access Road at 82 km/h, and these things were going 80 km/h, it can take a good half hour to pass them. Eventually, I drew level with the driver’s cabin. We’d be side by side for a minute or two. In the middle of nowhere, what do you do? You wave, of course, and both of us add a toot-toot for good measure.
We arrived at Norseman at dusk. We were lucky to avoid the four wild horses sprinting across the road in front of our fellow travellers in the motel next door. We’re in gold-mining country here. Norseman is a shady, sandy town, and bigger than I remember from my childhood travels. At the pub, there were plenty of diners and drinkers. It’s a bit like the North Perth Bowls Club on a Friday night. We ordered a fish and chips, chicken parmigiana, a beer, a wine, and headed back to our fluoro-lit, spearmint green lean-to for a good night’s rest.
