G’day!
Welcome to Letters From the Road, the story of the road trip around Australia that I took with my wife Katie and boys Henry and Oscar back in 2019.
I am telling this story in weekly-ish installments, and I feature the journal entries I wrote during the trip. The journal entries are word-for-word, and you’ll see them highlighted in the Letter.
This is letter number 60, and it is special because it actually takes place on New Years, which is one of the first times that I can think of where the time period in the Letter is synced up with real life.
It’s also special because we’re getting down to the pointy end of the journey. There’s not much road left, and probably only two more letters to go.
If you missed any letters and would like to catch up, you can find the other 59 letters here, being crumpled up and used to start a giant miner on fire.
And last but not least, I hope your new year is a good one, and filled with adventures.
Onya!
Luke
The car was quiet, filled with zombies.
We weren’t zombies in the modern sense, frantically marauding in search of brains or blood, or in the collegial sense, where they stumble around in search of a gyro cart or microwave burrito.
We were in a more traditional form, listless and stupid, made that way from a lack of sleep and a desire for more. Or, alternatively, a desire for coffee. Heading east on the highway with a large coffee sitting in my lap as I drove, I felt like I was on the way to returning to some human shape.
Not sleeping all night will do that to you. It had started off as simply being too stinking hot to sleep. The heat of the day did not relent even as night fell, and there was nary a whisper of wind. After finally drifting off into the listless sweaty sleep of the damned, Katie and I were awoken by a howling wind that threatened to pull a big bad wolf and blow our house down.
So Katie and I were running around in the sand, both of us half naked and shouting at each other over the wind, trying to shore up the tent to keep it from blowing over. I imagine this is what Burning Man is like. Meanwhile the boys slept and the tide rose, the waves coming ever closer to the tent.
Katie and I lay waiting for the water to reach us to kick off the next round of beach exercises. I wasn’t exactly sure what we’d do. The tent was integrated into the camper trailer, and thus the option of last resort would be to hook the trailer up to the car and drag the whole thing to higher ground. Aside from that, maybe we could make sandbags out of the boys pillows? Find the shovel that we used for digging holes for pooping in the bush and build a levee?
With these thoughts going through my head, the next thing I knew it was morning. The sun rose early over Streaky Bay, bright and hot. As much as we all wanted to sleep, there was no point in fighting it. So I sluggishly pulled myself upright, and looked down to where the boys were sleeping on the ground. They were still there, hadn’t floated away in the night, though they were covered in a fine layer of sand that the wind had blown in through the mesh doors and windows the night before.
The boys seemed to be perpetually covered in a layer of grit, so this didn’t bother me. I went outside to inspect. The high water line sat two meters, maybe three, from the tent. Beach camping sucks, I silently reminded myself.
We packed up slowly, quietly, no one saying much, all of us in a zombie-like stupor from the long night before. Except Henry, who had somehow slept through the entire event.
Like zombies, we left the beach without paying the $20 camping fee. Zombies don’t pay for camping. Like zombies, we immediately went in search of sustenance, in the form of life giving coffee in the little town of Streaky Bay, the same large coffee that I was sipping while driving down the highway in the direction of the Clare Valley.
It was a drive of 6 hours or so and, encouraged by the weather, we had no plans of making many stops along the way.
30 December 2019 - Edgehill Farm, Clare Valley
43 (109F) at 11.19 am. I think we’ll be staying in the car most of the day.
The Streaky Bay coffee called for a stop at the tiny town of Minippa so we could use the public toilets. There we met a fellow traveller I’ll call Redbeard, because he had a red beard, and also a tattoo of a knife on his neck, one of those ones with a little drop of blood at the end, which is very pirate.
Redbeard looked to have seen better days. He captained a shitty looking Holden Commodore wagon that was noticeably sagging under the weight of what was inside and of a heaving trailer. While he was pulling up, I noticed that the windows in the car were down, not a good choice in this weather.
‘Air conditioning is broken,’ he told me, sweating all over the road as he walked over to me. I sympathized with him, while silently hoping that he had no designs on hijacking our Toyota Prado, though I entertained thoughts of letting him seize the cargo and crew. When I saw his first mate, however, a round, sweaty woman in a singlet, I decided I was happy with what I had.
Fortunately he seemed more interested in telling me his tale of woe. He’d left Whyalla, a town 3 hours or so east of us, a week earlier when it was 46 degrees (115F). He had to drive to Western Australia to pick up a trailer full of furniture and other miscellaneous junk that he’d pirated, no doubt. By the time he’d driven an hour out of Whyalla the temperature had risen to 50 degrees (122F) and the asphalt road was melting and sticking to his tyres. One of them later exploded.
His return trip had been no better. The trailer was so heavily loaded that the rear wheels of the Commodore were rubbing against frame of the car.
‘Had to beat out the wheel well with a hammer,’ he said. It’d be a small miracle if Redbeard made it home without further issue. I wished him a safe voyage and we drove on.
46 degrees at 12.41.
Stopped in Kimba. Refilled the drinking water tank, took a picture of the Big Galah, and got more coffee.
Wind is howling. It’s perfect weather, if you’re a fire. The wind is kicking up giant clouds of dust that are the same straw color as the fields, making you feel like you’re driving through butterscotch.
The long drive through the dust gave me plenty of time to think, and I found myself thinking ahead. It’d be the new year in two days, and in three or four we’d be home. Once home, we’d need to prepare the boys for school, Katie would be back at work, and there was the obvious necessity of finding a place to live. Finding a rental in Melbourne is no small matter in Melbourne, where renting requires going through an archaic and backward process that can take weeks, time that we didn’t have.
So for the past month or so, Katie and I had been checking the internet regularly for rental opportunities. It was largely a futile and masochistic exercise, though we reasoned that if something really great opened up, we could ask for some of our friends in Melbourne to help us with the process. It hadn’t yet worked.
An inspection just happened for a perfect place, perfect location, nearly perfect otherwise. We couldn’t make it, couldn’t find a proxy. I’m hoping no one likes it and there will be another inspection.... disappointing.
A sign on the road pulled me from my daydreaming. It said “Welcome to Iron Knob”, and I knew we had to go see what a place called Iron Knob looked like. The sign also said that it is the “Birthplace of Australia’s Steel Industry”, and had some other things that were hard to read because of graffiti.
I was hoping for a place with a sense of humour, maybe it’d have a brewery with the tagline ‘Grab some Knob!’, or something else off colour involving lollipops or ice cream. Feel free to pause and use your imagination.
But Iron Knob was as humourless a place as we’d seen in quite some time. The whole town was desolate and empty, filled with abandoned tyres, piles of rock, and everything was covered in rust coloured dust. I left disappointed, and without much confidence in the Australian steel industry.
Almost equally charmless is Port Augusta, a town where we stopped for fuel. It’s industrial and dusty, the whole town having the ambiance of a large truck stop. That might be appropriate, though, because it is a significant crossroads. The Eyre Highway, the road that crosses the Nullarbor, ends in Port Augusta. It’s also home to the southern end of the Stuart Highway, a road we had driven two and a half months ago from Coober Pedy to Alice Springs, which I wrote to you about in a letter called Beyond Thunderdome: Escape from Coober Pedy.
Both roads, right there at one intersection. We could very easily turn left at the roundabout and do it all over again, I thought. That would at least save us from all the grind of domesticity that lay ahead in Melbourne, having to build a new life in short order. But I don’t think we could handle the grind… the grind of the outback, and its wilting heat stealing your will and leaving the rest for the flies to swarm.
We might actually be looking forward to some domesticity, living somewhere that wasn’t a tent and had rooms with doors and spaces one could choose to be alone.
No, we’d be following the highway south in the direction of the back paddock of a place called Edgehill Farm. Two more hours of driving through fields of gold and we were there.
We had two things to do on New Year's Eve.
First, we had to see the Big Miner. Map the Miner was erected in the mid-1980’s in recognition of mining in the area, and then burned down in 2006 by a local teenager who wanted to take a picture of Map in a ring of fire. Excellent plan, in theory. The original Big Miner was damaged so badly they had to replace him, and apparently it is tradition to dress him up like Santa for the holidays.
The second thing on our agenda was to meet some old friends.
We had stayed at Joe and Hennika’s house in Melbourne as we made the final preparations for our road trip. They were in South Australia for the holidays, and we planned to meet up at the Barossa Brewery and then camp together.
Seeing friendly faces was so good, refreshing and comfortable but strange all at once. They’re people we’ve known for as long as we’d been in Australia, but we’d not been face to face with any friends for three months.
31 December 2019 - Edgehill Farm, Clare Valley
To be back amongst our people, as much as anything this is a sign the trip is coming to a close. That we’ve seen some places in the past two days I recognise, places we’ve been before when we passed through here several years ago, is another sign that we’re getting close.
There was lots to catch up on, from the places we’d been to the size of my beard, which I hadn’t touched in the three months since we’d seen our friends and was now looking like something that would get me into Ned Kelly’s gang.
We would spend much of the next two days doing just that, and it felt good.
New Years has always been a second rate holiday for me. A reason for a celebration, sure, but you can turn most anything into justification for drinking beers and staying up late. You wake up into the new year, and it feels more or less like last year, and the one before that. Resolutions are made and forgotten.
But this one was different. 2020 really would be different. New house. New school for the boys. New job for me, one that I could not even fathom at the moment.
Getting back to Melbourne would be the start of it all, and we were so close that I was feeling the conflict. Maybe I should just turn off down a dusty track headed for the bush, and keep going. We could head east. We hadn’t even seen the entire east coast, hadn’t stepped foot into Queensland, with its rainforests, reefs, and strange beasts like cassowaries and Bob Katter. There were still seven UNESCO World Heritage sites that we hadn’t visited!
Let’s not forget about the Northern Territory, one of the most diverse places in all of Australia. We had swung through one red corner of the territory, when we’d been relegated to camping at the overflow parking lot at Uluṟu, swam in the mysteriously cold water holes in the MacDonnell Ranges, and stayed in the curious town of Alice Springs, but we totally skipped Darwin and the north. I still wanted to experience the rainforests of Kakadu, and anyways, who doesn’t want to spend more time in a land where people are injured by flying dildos?
It wouldn’t be unheard of, starting a trip like ours and never coming home. And I wasn’t the only one thinking about it.
The four of us plus Joe and Hennika sat around our campsite on New Years Eve telling stories about our travels, laughing, drinking lots of local wine, and doing very Australian things like playing with popping bonbons, wearing the paper hats found inside, and listening to The Horses by Daryl Braithwaite. At some point during the discussion, someone asked Henry if he had enjoyed the trip.
When we dream up these crazy adventures, we hope that our kids get into the spirit, embrace the challenges, and appreciate the unique landscapes and places you see, but we worry that they’ll only be tolerated, and at worst, loathed. I didn’t know what to expect from Henry’s response, but thought it would be something along the lines of a hard no with a vague insult hurled at his brother. But then he surprised us.
“I want to do another big trip. I don’t want this to be over,” Henry said.
That made me happy. I smiled at him, and shared a look with Katie.
It also made me melancholy. I knew that things would be over soon.
“It’s a road trip. It’s about adventure! . . . It’s not like we have somewhere to go,” wrote John Green in his young adult novel An Abundance of Katherines, describing the excitement at the start of a road trip, when the possibilities seem endless.
We’d had our road trip, 92 days of one, we’d had our adventure, and now we did have somewhere to go. It was time to go home.