Roads, Tourism and Cultural History: On the Road in Australia 9781845416690

Citation preview

Roads, Tourism and Cultural History

TOURISM AND CULTURAL CHANGE Series Editors: Professor Mike Robinson, Ironbridge International Institute for Cultural Heritage, University of Birmingham, UK and Professor Alison Phipps, University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK Understanding tourism’s relationships with culture(s) and vice versa is of ever-increasing significance in a globalising world. TCC is a series of books that critically examine the complex and ever-changing relationship between tourism and culture(s). The series focuses on the ways that places, peoples, pasts, and ways of life are increasingly shaped/transformed/created/packaged for touristic purposes. The series examines the ways tourism utilises/makes and re-makes cultural capital in its various guises (visual and performing arts, crafts, festivals, built heritage, cuisine etc.) and the multifarious political, economic, social and ethical issues that are raised as a consequence. Theoretical explorations, research-informed analyses, and detailed historical reviews from a variety of disciplinary perspectives are invited to consider such relationships. Books in this series are externally peer-reviewed. Full details of all the books in this series and of all our other publications can be found on http://www.channelviewpublications.com, or by writing to Channel View Publications, St Nicholas House, 31–34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK.

TOURISM AND CULTURAL CHANGE: 53

Roads, Tourism and Cultural History On the Road in Australia

Rosemary Kerr

CHANNEL VIEW PUBLICATIONS Bristol • Blue Ridge Summit

DOI https://doi.org/10.21832/KERR6683 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Names: Kerr, Rosemary - author. Title: Roads, Tourism and Cultural History: On the Road in Australia/ Rosemary Kerr. Description: Bristol, UK; Blue Ridge Summit, PA, USA: Channel View Publications, [2019] | Series: Tourism and Cultural Change: 53 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018031278| ISBN 9781845416683 (hbk: alk. paper) | ISBN9781845416706 (epub) | ISBN 9781845416713 (kindle) | ISBN 9781845416690 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Tourism—Social aspects—Australia. | Automobile travel—Social aspects—Australia. Classification: LCC G155.A75 K47 2019 | DDC 306.4/8190994—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018031278 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13: 978-1-84541-668-3 (hbk) Channel View Publications UK: St Nicholas House, 31–34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK. USA: NBN, Blue Ridge Summit, PA, USA. Website: www.channelviewpublications.com Twitter: Channel_View Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/channelviewpublications Blog: www.channelviewpublications.wordpress.com Copyright © 2019 Rosemary Kerr. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. The policy of Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products, made from wood grown in sustainable forests. In the manufacturing process of our books, and to further support our policy, preference is given to printers that have FSC and PEFC Chain of Custody certification. The FSC and/or PEFC logos will appear on those books where full certification has been granted to the printer concerned. Typeset by Nova Techset Private Limited, Bengaluru and Chennai, India. Printed and bound in the UK by the CPI Books Group Ltd. Printed and bound in the US by Thomson-Shore, Inc.

For my parents Bill and Carmel Kerr

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Contents

Abbreviations and Metric Conversions Acknowledgements Introduction: Imagining the Road

ix xi 1

1 Making Tracks

15

2 The Call of the Open Road

42

3 ‘Discovering’ Australia

73

4 Travelling North

98

5 ‘Going Around’: On the Road to Nowhere?

122

6 Freedom on the Wallaby?

141

7 What Goes on Tour… .: Communities and Rituals of the Road

165

8 Blood on the Bitumen: The Dark Side of the Road

183

9 Politics and Protest on the Road

204

10 Romancing the Road: Constructing Australian Icons

223

Are We There Yet? Conclusions on the Road

255

Select Bibliography

264

Index

281

vii

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Abbreviations and Metric Conversions

Abbreviations

AIF CIIC ICOMOS ML MS/MSS NLA NRMA RACV UNESCO

Australian Imperial Force International Scientific Committee on Cultural Routes International Council on Monuments and Sites Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales Manuscript National Library of Australia National Roads and Motorist’s Association (NSW) Royal Automobile Club of Victoria United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation

Metric Conversions

1 mile = 1.6093 kilometres 1 foot = 30.5 centimetres 1 yard = 0.9144 metres £1 = $2

ix

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Acknowledgements

This book represents the culmination of a long journey. It began as a doctoral thesis, and I am extremely grateful to the Department of History at the University of Sydney for the opportunity to study in such a vibrant scholarly community, and for financial assistance in the form of a scholarship and grants. Professor Richard Waterhouse was not only the most generous, erudite and inspiring supervisor, but continues to be a constant source of encouragement, support and friendship. I am especially thankful for his insightful comments and suggestions on the book manuscript. The camaraderie, intellectual vigour and moral support of fellow University of Sydney colleagues made the journey so much more enjoyable. I would particularly like to thank Drs Judith Bonzol, Emma Dortins, Hannah Forsyth, Emmanuelle Guenot, Barbara Kearns, Julie McIntyre, Greg Murrie, Penny Nash, Briony Neilson, Kath Reynolds, Robert Scoble and Lynne Swarts for their much-valued friendship. The origins of the project can be traced in part to my work as a heritage consultant, where studies of historic bridges and road-related heritage inspired an interest in examining roads from a cultural perspective. I am thankful to Dr Sue Rosen, a friend and colleague of many years, for the experience gained with her consultancy fi rm – experience which proved invaluable in writing both the thesis and the book. I also thank public history colleagues and friends Pauline Curby, Laila Ellmoos and Virginia Macleod for their interest and support. Staff at the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, National Library of Australia, Northern Territory Library, Queensland State Archives, Royal Australian Historical Society, State Library of South Australia and the State Library of Victoria provided gracious assistance and advice regarding research materials, images and copyright. Catherine Seccombe at the National Film and Sound Archive office in Sydney assisted in facilitating access to several fi lms and provided a pleasant space in which to view them, as well as offering many useful suggestions of lesser known Australian road movies. I thank the following authors, publishers, literary agents and other copyright holders for permission to reproduce extracts or images, and for their generous assistance: Lee Atkinson; Renatta Ahwon; Bill Bachman; Tim Bowden and Maggie Thompson, Allen & Unwin; Ian Carroll, xi

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Edward Bean Le Couteur and Anne Marie Carroll, for extracts from the work of C.E.W. Bean; Bernard Cohen; Sean Condon; Ali Ireland of Curtis Brown (Aust) Pty. Ltd. on behalf of the Estate of Kenneth Cook; Explore Australia Publishing; Hannah Goodman, Orion Publishing Group; Louise Stirling, Melbourne University Publishing; Alicia Ofori, Penguin Random House, UK, Jessica Galliver, the Wylie Agency, and Keelan Pacot, Grove Atlantic on behalf of Richard Flanagan; Tony Horwitz and Vianny Rizo, ICM Partners; Tom Thompson, ETT Imprint and Idriess Enterprises Pty. Ltd. for extracts from the work of Ernestine Hill and Ion Idriess; Pat Jacobs and Jane Fraser, Fremantle Press; Catherine Jinks and Carey Schroeter, Allen & Unwin; Marlene Karkadoo; Max Leason; Josef Lebovic Gallery; Kim Lockwood, for extracts from the work of Douglas Lockwood; Michael McGirr; Suzanne Monks, Editor-in-Chief of NRMA’s Open Road magazine; Les Murray, Margaret Connolly & Associates Pty. Ltd., Foichl Miah, Carcanet Press Ltd. (UK) and Lori Andiman, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (US), for extracts from Les Murray’s Collected Poems (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2006); Kermalde Pty. Ltd. c/o Tim Curnow, Literary Agent & Consultant, on behalf of D’Arcy Niland Estate; Maria Pyro; Megan Wintle and Dymphna Peterson c/o Tim Curnow on behalf of Coralie and Leslie Rees Estate; Jane Grant and Craig Rowe, Hardie Grant Publishing; Graeme Ussing, Westprint Maps; Deborah Franco and Claire Grady of Currency Press, on behalf of David Williamson; Tim Winton and Jenny Darling Associates; Eleanor Shorne Holden and Vicki Grundy, Penguin Random House Australia on behalf of Tim Winton and Robert Drewe; Pauline O’Carolan, HarperCollins Publishers for permission to reprint text from Judith Wright’s Collected Poems 1942–1985 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994). Full acknowledgements are provided in the notes following the initial citations. I am also thankful for assistance from Professor Alan Mayne, the Copyright Agency Limited and the Australian Society of Authors. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book. I would be pleased to hear, through the publisher, from copyright holders whom I have not been able to contact. I have met many fellow travellers along the way who have enlivened and enlightened the journey through their hospitality, collegiality and friendship. I thank particularly Dr Dawn Duensing, Dr Timothy Hubbard, Marlin Ingalls, Dr Paul Daniel Marriott and Professor Mike Robinson. Mike not only generously shared his expertise in the fields of tourism and heritage, but his talents as a fabulous conference host and karaoke singer. Professor Grace Karskens, who is a renowned ‘roads scholar’ among her many other achievements as a historian and historical archaeologist, took a keen interest in the project and I thank her for all she did to encourage its publication. Utmost thanks must go to the series editors, Professors Mike Robinson and Alison Phipps, and to Sarah

Acknowledgements

xiii

Williams and the team at Channel View Publications for their help in making the publication a reality. The long and sometimes lonely road of research and writing would not be endurable without the support of lifelong friends and family. For their constant encouragement, enthusiasm, comfort, good humour, companionship, welcome distractions, and so much more, heartfelt thanks to Rosemary Broomham and Graham Hill, Kirri Hillyer, Sandra Narborough, Antoinette and Christine Rakvin, David Smith, Gareth Wild and Lure Wishes. My deepest debt of gratitude is to my parents, Bill and Carmel Kerr, for inspiring my love of travelling and for sharing so many journeys with me; but above all, for their unfailing love, support and encouragement in this and every endeavour. Sadly, my mother died before this ‘road trip’ ended, but her memory and her faith in my long-held dream to write a book helped me to complete it, and I dedicate it to Mother and Dad. Cultural Sensitivity

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware that this work may contain the names of deceased persons. Some material may contain terms that reflect other authors’ views, or those of the period in which the item was written, but may not be considered appropriate today. While the information may not reflect current understanding, it is provided in a historical context.

Introduction: Imagining the Road

On a chill winter’s evening in the Australian outback – Saturday, 14 July 2001 – a young English couple, Peter Falconio and Joanne Lees, were travelling in their orange Volkswagen ‘Kombi’ van along a lonely stretch of the Stuart Highway, heading from Alice Springs to Darwin. Like so many travellers, they were taking the road trip of a lifetime, doing part of the ‘lap’ around the continent: Sydney–Melbourne–Adelaide, then up through the Centre via Alice Springs to Darwin – seeing the ‘real Australia’, the outback, far removed from the more familiar coastal cities. About 200 km into their 1500 km journey, the couple stopped at Ti Tree, where they bought petrol and watched the spectacular Red Centre sunset, sharing a marijuana joint. Setting off again, another 100 or so kilometres further on, they noticed a fi re burning by the roadside – unusual, but not too alarming, possibly left by another traveller or local Aborigines, although they saw nobody. Not long after passing the fi re, a white four-wheel-drive vehicle following closely behind their van signalled for them to pull over. They stopped. The driver approached and told Peter that he could see smoke coming from the van’s exhaust. Peter accompanied the man to the rear of the vehicle to check out the problem. Lees, waiting in the passenger seat, heard a sound like a car backfi ring, or … a gunshot. She never saw Peter again. A pool of blood beside the highway is the only remaining trace of Peter Falconio that has ever been found. For Joanne Lees, however, the ordeal was just beginning. The gunman returned, assaulted her and then attempted to kidnap her. Somehow she managed to escape, hiding among the mulga and spinifex scrub for hours while the gunman and his dog searched for her – remarkably, without success. Eventually, Lees fl agged down a passing road train, whose drivers took her to Barrow Creek, about 280 km north of Alice Springs, where they raised the alarm. So began one of the most bizarre criminal investigations in Australia’s history. Doubts over Joanne Lees’ improbable story, the search for the killer, his four-wheeldrive and Falconio’s body, dragged on for years until mechanic, Bradley John Murdoch, was convicted of the assault and murder in December 2005.1 With a storyline more fantastic than any fi lm script, the case 1

2

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captured Australia’s and much of the world’s imagination. It was the ultimate road-trip dream turned nightmare. Australians love a road trip. Summer holiday pilgrimages up and down the coast, outback adventures and ‘going around’ have become national tourism rituals. Yet danger and death also loom large when imagining the road in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. After every holiday period, the nation counts the toll of road fatalities. Once again, debate rages over how to curb the repercussions from excessive speed, alcohol and fatigue in Australia’s ongoing love-hate relationship with the road. Across the 20th century, images of the Australian road shifted from romantic bush tracks to badlands haunted by serial killers, ‘horror stretches’ and ‘black spots’. How did we get there? Roads are an integral part of daily life worldwide, but they are so much more than simply routes to a destination. Roads form part of the physical and cultural landscape. They embody multiple layers of history, meaning and symbolism. They are constructed as much in the imagination – through journeys and representations – as by material fabric and engineering. The ancient Romans were renowned for their extensive and efficient road building. Straight, well-made roads were vital to the Roman Empire’s expansion, and a symbol of its domination and civilising influence. For Medieval itinerant kings in northern Europe, roads were the means by which they administered their kingdom, patrolled their territory and maintained their rule. Travelling the ‘King’s Highway’ – on which only the king and his cohorts could travel freely – was a public performance of power. 2 Historically, roads have been essential to military conquest, trade, commerce, transport and communication, governance, religious crusades and pilgrimages and, of course, tourism. ‘The road’ is also an enduring metaphor in philosophy, literature, music, art and fi lm. It is a symbol of journeying through life, of decision points or crossroads when one must choose which path to follow, and into the afterlife – from the Biblical Isaiah’s ‘highway’ or ‘way of holiness’, Robert Frost’s poem ‘The Road Not Taken’, to more recent popular expressions such as rock band AC/DC’s ‘Highway to Hell’ or Cormack McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel, The Road. ‘The road’ is a space onto which dreams, desires, memories and fears are projected. In Western culture ‘the road’ has, at times, represented: civilisation, progress and modernity; a route of hope, opportunity or escape; freedom and adventure; self-discovery; a stage for activism and protest; and, sometimes simultaneously, a space associated with danger and death. Meanings of ‘the road’ are constructed within particular historical and cultural contexts. Since ancient times, road travel has incorporated touristic elements as people also travelled for recreation, enjoying sightseeing, scenery and the hospitality of establishments offering food, drink and accommodation along the way. Chaucer’s Medieval pilgrims told tales to entertain

Introduction: Imagining the Road

3

themselves and pass the time on their long journey from London to Canterbury, much as modern-day road trippers might break the monotony of long-distance drives by playing games like ‘I spy’ or ‘Spotto’, 3 singing, or telling jokes and stories. Education and self-improvement motivated young noblemen of the 17th and 18th centuries on their grand tours through Europe, but they also indulged enthusiastically in pleasure seeking on their extensive overland travels. During the Enlightenment – an era of geographical exploration and discovery – explorers’ and scientists’ narratives of their journeys, by land as well as sea, became popular forms of travel literature. The Romantic period, which followed in the early 19th century, influenced the development of modern tourism generally, and road tourism especially, as artists and writers celebrated the aesthetics of the natural world, stimulating travellers’ desire to witness the picturesque and often awe-inspiring beauty of landscapes. Touring for leisure, however, was an activity open only to the more privileged classes in society until the mid- to late 19th century. The coming of the railway at that time revolutionised overland transport and was a catalyst for the development of mass tourism. Road tourism is essentially a modern phenomenon, closely tied to the emergence of motor vehicles. Motorisation was key to the development of road tourism in Australia and worldwide. This is the story of how roads and road tourism beyond urban settings have been imagined, experienced and represented in Australia, particularly focusing on the motoring era from the late 19th century onwards. Imaginings of ‘the road’ have been largely dominated and defi ned by American popular culture. In North America, ‘the road’ occupies a central, even ‘sacred’ place in the national psyche, particularly since the advent of the motor car, and with the boom in private car ownership following WWII.4 The American road is familiar, even to those who have never visited America, due to the multitude of road movies and literature that emerged in the 1950s and flourished in the 1960s and 1970s. The American road genre is epitomised by Jack Kerouac’s Beat novel, On the Road (1957) and fi lms such as The Wild One (1953), Dennis Hopper’s counterculture-generation classic, Easy Rider (1969), Vanishing Point (1971) and, more recently, Thelma and Louise (1991). 5 The American road is a road which conjures images from the heyday of American road tourism in the mid-20th century. It is a road of neon-lit diners, motels and gas stations, of Route 66 – a two-lane blacktop stretching infi nitely ‘West’ towards the horizon. In some ways, ‘the road’ has come to defi ne images of America itself. French philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote in his impressionistic account of his travels during the 1980s, simply titled, America: I went in search of … America … the America of the empty, absolute freedom of the freeways … the America of desert speed, of motels and mineral surfaces. I looked for it in the … succession of signs … and ritual acts on the road. … To understand it, you have to take to the road.6

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Baudrillard understood that the essence of America was defi ned through mobility. He continued: ‘The freeways … are ideally suited to the only truly profound pleasure, that of keeping on the move.’ 7 The centrality of ‘the road’ and automobile in the American national consciousness is often attributed to the unique influence of the ‘frontier’ in American culture. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner explained the signifi cance of the frontier in a landmark address at the Chicago International Exposition in 1893. He argued that the ‘frontier’ – which had ceased to exist by the end of the 19th century – was a place of opportunity, hope, discovery and cultural interaction, as successive waves of pioneers moved westward across the continent, expanding European settlement and ‘mastering’ the harsh environment.8 While Turner’s ‘frontier thesis’ has been subjected to much criticism and debate, it remains a powerful national mythology.9 Americans’ embrace of the road and automobility is linked to a national desire to perpetuate the frontier, lost physically, but able to be reinvented through new forms of mobility and technology.10 The ‘open road’ represented the ‘new frontier’, a metaphor for the defi ning national qualities of freedom, mobility and independence. The road genre, which traces its origins to earlier ‘frontier fiction’ and the Western film, married the American love of mobility and nostalgia for the pastoral ideal or lost rural frontier, with its embrace of the futurist technology of the automobile.11 Australia and North America share similarities to some extent, in size, topography and culture. The ‘tyranny of distance’, movement and mobility have also shaped Australian history, culture and identity. Historian Geoff rey Blainey suggests that the concept of distance, as a means of understanding Australia, could be compared to Turner’s concept of the frontier.12 The following chapters will reveal that frontier mythologies have also been important in understanding Australian experiences, representations and imaginings of the road. As John Knott notes, Australians embraced the motor vehicle at a rate second only to America.13 The road has been overshadowed at times by other means of communication, but overland travel and the idea of ‘the road’ has occupied and continues to occupy a prominent place in the Australian cultural imagination, albeit largely unexplored. In Australia, like America, the long-distance road trip is a quintessential tourism experience in itself, for domestic and international tourists. According to Tourism Research Australia’s National Visitor Survey, Australians took nearly 57 million driving holidays involving at least one overnight stop during the year ending September 2017. Self-drive vehicles were the main mode of transport used for over 80% of all overnight trips by domestic leisure travellers.14 For those with sufficient time and resources, driving is regarded as the best and most authentic way to see the country beyond the major cities and to witness its diverse and unique landscapes. A study of Australian drive tourism in the early 2000s found

Introduction: Imagining the Road

5

that, as well as being a cheaper alternative to air travel, self-drive holidays offered a greater sense of freedom and independence. Many road trippers considered themselves ‘travellers’ rather than ‘tourists’, preferring ‘real’ experiences and greater contact with locals in the areas visited.15 ‘Grey nomads’ – local retirees taking extended tours around Australia by car, caravan or campervan – have been a growing sector of the road tourism market since the 1990s. Until recently, each weekend at car markets in capital city tourist hubs such as Sydney’s Kings Cross, hundreds of young backpackers bought and sold campervans or other vehicles as they set off or returned from their travels around Australia by road. Most backpacker car markets are now conducted online, and demand remains strong, with backpacker numbers increasing. Backpackers, and some grey nomads, frequently combine work with travel, picking fruit and performing other agricultural labour. These travellers often form the backbone of a seasonal workforce, doing jobs that cannot be filled by locals. They also spend billions of dollars each year in regional areas.16 Most recently, Tourism Australia, the nation’s peak tourism marketing body, reported significant growth in the number of Chinese visitors taking self-drive holidays in Australia. A campaign conducted over three months in 2015 successfully promoted self-drive packages in regional South Australia to this lucrative and expanding market.17 Road tourism allows travellers to visit areas not otherwise easily accessible. It thus contributes significantly to local and regional economies as well as to the wider Australian economy. As the setting for the opening scene – the Stuart Highway – indicates, however, the Australian road could be imagined very differently from its American counterpart. The Stuart is one of Australia’s more iconic highways. One of its local nicknames, ‘the track’, is indicative of its physical origins and the fact that, like many Australian ‘roads’, it remained undeveloped and unsealed until the mid-20th century. The highway traverses the so-called ‘dead heart’ of the continent. With the majority of the Australian population scattered around the coastal fringe, the vast uninhabitable areas in the centre of Australia have no parallel in America, which was much more densely settled from an earlier period.18 To some extent, an Australian ‘frontier’ still exists. This, among other factors, has implications for the way in which roads developed and are imagined in Australia. Both roads and the lack thereof have shaped tourism practices, and the continued existence of a ‘frontier’ – in the deserts of Central Australia and other outback regions – makes Australia a prime destination for adventure and off-the-beaten-track tourism, a growing trend in tourism worldwide.19 Australia’s history as a settler colonial society is also significant in shaping imaginings, experiences and representations of the road over time. As the opening chapter details, Aboriginal songlines were the earliest ‘roads’ that connected people physically and spiritually across the

6

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continent, despite the spurious notion of an ‘empty’ land, on which the colony was founded. The fiction of a ‘trackless bush’ provided a blank slate upon which explorers and pioneers could blaze trails, creating Australia’s own ‘frontier’ legends. For the early colonists, roads symbolised order, ‘civilisation’ and ‘progress’ imposed upon a wild, unfamiliar and often threatening landscape. As the 19th century progressed, tracks made by feet, hooves, wagons and railways stamped the tenuous and sometimes brutal imprint of European occupation across the country. Unresolved doubts regarding the legitimacy of settlement and the often violent displacement of Aboriginal peoples left an ongoing legacy which influenced road travel and tourism, and its representations, into the 20th century and beyond. Australia’s topography and climate made road building difficult and uneconomical. Water and rail dominated transport and tourism until the late 19th and early 20th century, when the bicycle and then the motor car revolutionised overland transport and ushered in a new era of road building and road tourism. These revolutions in transportation coincided with broader economic, technological, social and cultural transformations, and Australia’s response to the changes and challenges wrought by modernity is also crucial to understanding experiences and representations of the road. Chapter 2 chronicles the rise of the road trip, from pioneering transcontinental endurance tests to the development of four-wheel-drive touring. As roads and cars propelled us towards the future, why did Australians so often look backwards through the rear-view mirror? Tourism is closely connected to national identity. 20 Between the wars and in the mid-20th century, road tourism in Australia was promoted as a patriotic duty. Chapter 3 explores the ways in which road travellers imagined, experienced and constructed their journeys in relation to ideas about the nation and national identity. In attempting to fi nd and identify with a uniquely Australian landscape and people, road tourists went in search of a so-called ‘real Australia’, defi ned as lying somewhere beyond the urban coastal fringe, in the ‘Bush’ or ‘Outback’ – a romanticised region, similar to the mythological American ‘West’. For all the romance of the outback, Australians are essentially a coastal-dwelling people, and the beach has long held a prominent place in the national imagination. After 1950, the coast began to rival the inland as a mythologised space for tourism. In the 1960s, young surfers took to the road in Kombis or panel vans, on ‘surfi ng safaris’ in search of good waves and undiscovered surfi ng spots. They played a huge role in the growth of tourist destinations such as Byron Bay on the north coast of New South Wales, Queensland’s Surfers Paradise and Bells Beach on Victoria’s Great Ocean Road. With the rise of car ownership, a new national ritual emerged – the summer holiday pilgrimage, going up or down the coast. For weekends, holidays or more permanent sea changes, crowds escaped the cities of Melbourne or Sydney and headed ‘North’ for

Introduction: Imagining the Road

7

the promise of sun, surf, sand and sex. Chapter 4 examines the rise of the coastal road trip and how it has captured the imagination of travellers, writers and fi lmmakers. As well as journeys towards the Centre or outback, and the North, the circular or around-Australia road trip is of immense cultural significance. The idea of embracing the nation by car was powerful from the earliest days of motoring and continues today, as backpackers and grey nomads follow ‘National Highway 1’ and its various incarnations, around the perimeter of the continent. Roads and road journeys that go around in circles or lead nowhere are also central motifs in Australian literature and film. This partly reflects the poor and physically ill-defined nature of many Australian roads, particularly in remote regions. There is also a deeper meaning, however, reflecting underlying issues in Australian society and culture, including legacies of the colonial past. Chapter 5 exposes the significance of the circular road journey in Australian culture and its broader symbolism. It asks: Is the Australian road really a road to nowhere? Road tourism exemplifies the concept of ‘liminality’, which scholars of travel and tourism defi ne as an ‘in-between’ state, where social norms are suspended as tourists move from ‘home’ or a familiar place to a faraway place, and then return home again. 21 The road is a space set apart from normal life, offering travellers freedom and escape from their usual routines and surroundings, and the opportunity for transformation, selfdiscovery and healing. Freedom and escape on the open road are central themes in tourism promotion and the road genre. Yet, as Chapter 6 reveals, the concepts of freedom and escape can take on different meanings within the Australian context. From its earliest days as a penal colony, there was constant tension between enabling versus restricting freedom of movement. For an immigrant nation, with doubts over claims to place, the spirit of wanderlust could also betray a sense of aimlessness, and lack of belonging or ‘home’. This is reflected in representations of road travellers, from swagmen and sundowners to ‘motor gypsies’ and caravanners. When travellers ‘escape’ by taking to the road, they form new communities and engage in new behaviours. The idea of the road as a distinct space, with its own unwritten codes and conventions, continues in Chapter 7, which examines rituals and communities of the road, including swagmen on the ‘wallaby track’, bikers, truckies and grey nomads. This chapter also takes a look at the changing nature of hospitality, including what we eat, where we sleep and how we entertain ourselves on the road. It traces the development of hotels, motels, roadhouses, and the ubiquitous ‘big’ roadside attractions that have become a unique part of Australian road tourism folklore. As the opening scene detailing the shocking attack on British backpackers, Peter Falconio and Joanne Lees, revealed, the road is not always a place of fun and freedom. Chapter 8 explores the dark side of the Australian road in popular imagination. As roads encroached around and

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across the continent throughout the 20th century in response to the demands of modern motor transport, anxiety over the destructive potential of that new technology followed. Recent fi lms such as The Cars That Ate Paris, Mad Max and Wolf Creek reflect a violent roadscape of ‘horror stretches’, fatal ‘black spots’, and a frightening space stalked by murderous psychopaths. The seeds of that vision, however, were sown much earlier. The chapter offers insights into the origins and trajectory of the Australian road as a ‘badland’. In the late 20th century, the road and road genre became a stage for expressing protest against some of the darker aspects of Australian history, society and culture, particularly relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Chapter 9 examines the road as a site of activism and protest – from civil rights campaigns, such as the Freedom Rides of the mid-1960s, to road movies and novels which comment directly on Australia’s ongoing struggle with race relations. In the 1990s and early 2000s, in the context of native title claims, the Aboriginal ‘Stolen Generations’ report, and the so-called ‘History Wars’ – a bitter public and political debate over the nature and control of national memory – writers and fi lmmakers employed the road and road journeys as motifs to explore the legacies of colonialism and ideas about identity, heritage, memory and forgetting at both personal and national levels. A process of remembering and forgetting, or selective memory, also contributes to how roads and routes are interpreted as tourism and heritage resources. While Australia may not have an equivalent of America’s iconic Route 66, certain roads have captured the public imagination, locally and internationally. The final chapter focuses on three of Australia’s best known roads. The Birdsville Track is a legendary inland stock route which entered folklore through the stories of epic droving expeditions and characters like Tom Kruse, the outback mailman immortalised in the 1954 film, The Back of Beyond. Today it is a popular route for four-wheeldrive tourism. The Stuart Highway was Australia’s first transcontinental highway, which is now an essential part of any round-Australia road trip. The Great Ocean Road, built between 1919 and 1932 as a memorial to WWI servicemen, was also one of the fi rst roads designed specifically as a scenic touring route. It recently achieved National Heritage listing and is renowned as one of the world’s most spectacular coastal drives. Chapter 10 explores the roads’ physical and cultural ‘construction’. It asks: How and why have some roads become more famous than others? Which stories and meanings are privileged? What are the implications for heritage preservation and tourism interpretations of these routes? Those questions have practical and political as well as theoretical significance. Over the past two decades, the heritage profession globally, has become increasingly interested in identifying, interpreting and preserving roads and ‘cultural routes’22 as heritage resources and as part of national and regional tourism strategies. 23 Which routes are identified, how they

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9

are interpreted, what sections are preserved and which meanings are promoted have important implications for a nation’s understanding of its past and the stories we pass on. The three roads’ stories reveal multiple layers of history and mythology. Tourism and heritage interpretations, however, often privilege particular aspects or periods of their history while ‘forgetting’ others, particularly those of Indigenous journeys and stories. The heritage profession usually imagines roads as predominantly physical entities, focusing almost exclusively on their technical and engineering attributes, and on specific items of road infrastructure or roadside architecture. Similarly, tourism interpretation strategies tend to highlight specific sites along a route. This chapter offers a new approach to thinking about the cultural significance of roads and routes, which goes beyond the bitumen and allows for more dynamic imaginings. It recovers lesser known or forgotten stories and meanings from other cultural groups, which challenge the dominant narratives. It reveals that the routes’ meaning and significance are continually constructed and reconstructed through a dynamic, ongoing process of interaction between tangible and intangible elements, including the physical environment, technology, visions of planners and promoters, travellers’ journeys, and representations in popular culture. Such an approach may yield richer understandings of roads’ and routes’ cultural significance, and enhance tourism and heritage interpretations. In comparison to the wealth of American literature, there are relatively few major studies of roads in Australia. Those that do exist focus mainly on economic, engineering and technical perspectives24; roads in urban and regional settings25; or genre studies of road movies26; while road tourism has been subsumed within broader histories of Australian travel and tourism. 27 In the following chapters, you will not fi nd a detailed technical history, comprehensively documenting the physical development of Australia’s roads. Rather, the focus is on relating experiences and representations of roads and road travel, including tourism, to the changing physical nature of roads as well as to broader historical and cultural changes. In doing so, the book covers a lot of ground, and engages with several disciplines, including history, heritage, tourism, literature, fi lm and cultural studies, cultural geography, and the emerging fields of spatial history, mobilities, and settler colonial and postcolonial studies. In attempting to offer a more comprehensive history of the road and road tourism, and their representation in Australian culture, this book draws on a wide range of sources. Published and unpublished non-fiction road travel narratives are important primary sources, as well as periodicals, including The Australian Motorist, Australia’s fi rst national motoring journal, published monthly by the Australian Automobile Association from 1908 to 1956; Walkabout, the journal of the Australian National Travel Association (now Tourism Australia), published between 1934 and

10

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1974; and the Open Road magazine, published by the National Roads and Motorists’ Association (NRMA) since 1927. Fictional representations of the road and road travel in Australian literature – including novels, poetry and prose – and feature films, are also considered alongside those non-fictional sources to reveal a more holistic picture of the relationship and interaction between experiences and representations in ‘imagining’ the road. Moving beyond traditional genre studies – which usually focus on film or literature in isolation and analyse works in relation to each other – texts and films are discussed within their wider historical context. As well as revealing a rich body of previously unexamined Australian road movies and road literature, new readings emerge of classics such as The Shiralee, Wake in Fright, the Mad Max series, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Wolf Creek. In recent years, historians have become increasingly interested in space as a concept for historical enquiry. The burgeoning field of spatial history puts space and spatial relations – the movement of people, goods, objects and information through space – at the centre of analysis. 28 The ‘spatial turn’ in historiography was informed by the work of earlier historians such as Fernand Braudel, who demonstrated the importance of geography in explaining historical change; philosophers and cultural theorists, including Gaston Bachelard, Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre; and cultural geographers such as Edward Soja. 29 In focusing on ‘the road’ as a physical and imagined space, Lefebvre’s ideas about how space is ‘produced’ are particularly relevant. Lefebvre conceptualised space as a dynamic construct, produced by interactions between the way space is experienced, represented and thought about or imagined, not only by inhabitants and users, but also by artists, writers and philosophers. 30 In the social sciences, there is growing interest in the related field of ‘mobilities’ studies, which explore how people, objects and ideas move or travel through space, as well as the broader social, political and cultural implications of those movements. Within this field, ‘automobilities’ focus on the relationships between cars, drivers, and the associated products, technologies, landscapes and culture created by the motor vehicle. Sociologists, including Mimi Sheller and John Urry, have applied these paradigms to tourism research. 31 Much attention has been given to the impact of motor vehicles on tourism, and how the car dramatically altered the ‘tourist gaze’, with the view now framed by the windscreen. 32 Automobilities studies, however, often do not move very far beyond urban settings, or the vehicle itself, treating the road as an almost static backdrop. The road also impacts significantly upon the tourist gaze. By placing the road at the centre of analysis, this study explores how interrelationships between the changing physical nature of roads and modes of transport influence experiences, representations and imaginings of the road. Ultimately, this book is a cultural history. It is informed by Raymond Williams’ defi nition of ‘culture’ as ‘a process’, and as ‘simultaneously

Introduction: Imagining the Road

11

invoking symbolic and material domains’. 33 Roads, road tourism, indeed tourism more broadly, are strands in those ‘webs of significance’ spun by mankind which, according to anthropologist Clifford Geertz, constitute ‘culture’. 34 Tourism comprises social and cultural practices that have evolved within historical and cultural contexts. While road tourism and its history form a significant part of this study, it also explores imaginings, experiences and representations of ‘the road’ in wider Australian culture. In his 1846 Thanksgiving Day sermon at the North Church in Hartford, CT, theologian and essayist Horace Bushnell delivered a discourse on ‘The Day of Roads’ in which he proclaimed that ‘The road is that physical sign or symbol by which you best understand any age or people’. 35 Roads tell us about ourselves. The way roads are experienced, represented and interpreted reveals much about the culture that produces and travels them. Australians’ relationships to landscape, modernity, the nation and colonialism are crucial in shaping their relationship to the road, including tourism practices. The Australian road is a space that troubles physical and imaginative boundaries between: Aboriginal and European conceptions of space, road and off-road, coast and outback, nostalgia and modernity, nature and technology, freedom and constraint, memory and forgetting, dream and nightmare. The following chapters tell the stories of the Australian road and of Australians on the road. Notes – Introduction: Imagining the Road (1)

(2)

(3) (4)

(5)

(6) (7) (8)

Timeline in the disappearance of Peter Falconio, The Australian, 10 January 2007. See http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/timeline-in-the-disappearance-of-peterfalconio/story-e6frg6n6-1111112810506 (accessed May 2009). Bernhardt, J.W. (2012) ‘On the road again’: Kings, roads, and accommodation in High Medieval Germany. In L. Mitchell and C. Melville (eds) Every Inch a King: Comparative Studies on Kings and Kingship in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds. Boston, MA: Brill, p. 304. ‘Spotto’ is a game where players are awarded points for spotting cars of a certain colour, usually yellow. Patton, P. (1986) Open Road: A Celebration of the American Highway. New York: Simon & Schuster, p. 21; Primeau, R. (1996) Romance of the Road: The Literature of the American Highway. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, p. 1. Patton and Primeau are among several authors who refer to the American road as a ‘sacred’ space. Other key works of the period include novels such as Tom Wolfe’s (1968) The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Hunter S. Thompson’s (1971) Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Robert Pirsig’s (1974) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; and fi lms including Zabriskie Point (c.1970), Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), Duel (1972) and Badlands (1973). Baudrillard, J. (1989) America (trans. C. Turner). London: Verso, p. 5. Baudrillard, America, p. 54. Faragher, J.M. (1998) Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner, ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’ and other Essays. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

12

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(9) Grossman, J.R. (ed.) (1994) The Frontier in American Culture: Essays by Richard White and Patricia Nelson Limerick. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 3–4. (10) Jakle, J.A. and Sculle, K.A. (2008) Motoring: The Highway Experience in America. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press; Patton, Open Road; Primeau, Romance of the Road; Shaffer, M.A. (2001) See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880–1940. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press; Carfrae, M. (1994) Roads to heaven: The American road genre in fi lm and literature 1945–1992. MPhil thesis, University of Sydney; Koshar, R.J. (2008) Driving cultures and the meaning of roads: Some comparative examples. In C. Mauch and T. Zeller (eds) The World Beyond the Windshield: Roads and Landscapes in the United States and Europe. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, pp. 14–34. (11) Carfrae, Roads to heaven, pp. 2–3. (12) Blainey, G. (2001) The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia’s History (revised edn). Sydney: Macmillan, p. x. (13) Based on car ownership statistics in 1929, when there was one car per ten people in Australia whereas in America the ratio was one car to four people. See Knott, J.W. (2000) The ‘conquering car’: Technology, symbolism and the motorisation of Australia before WWII. Australian Historical Studies 31 (114), 3. (14) Tourism Research Australia, Domestic Visitor Survey Results: Overnight visitors by number of overnight stops on trip by type of transport used. See https://www.tra.gov. au/research/view-all-publications/all-publications/national-visitor-survey-results/natio nal-visitor-survey-results-september-2017 (accessed 2 February 2018). Figures in the National Visitor Surveys (NVS) are extrapolated from annual surveys of around 120,000 Australian residents aged 15 and over. Figures cited include both holidays and ‘visiting friends and relatives’ as the main reason for travel. (15) Carson, D., Waller, I. and Scott, N. (eds) (2002) Drive Tourism: Up the Wall and Round the Bend. Altona, Vic: Common Ground Publishing, pp. 12–13. (16) Tourism Research Australia, International Visitor Survey Results: Regional trip expenditure – backpackers. See https://www.tra.gov.au/Research/Internationalvisitors-to-Australia/international-visitor-survey-results (accessed 2 February 2018). (17) Tourism Australia, Annual Report 2015–2016, p. 37. See http://www.tourism. australia.com/content/dam/assets/document/1/6/x/5/r/2002527.pdf (accessed 1 February 2018). (18) As Geoff rey Blainey points out, America’s settlement was also aided by its extensive internal waterways. See Blainey, Tyranny of Distance, p. 122. (19) The growing popularity of adventure tourism and ‘off the beaten track’ destinations is a worldwide trend which has been explored in tourism literature in recent years. See, for example, Buckley, R. (2006) Adventure Tourism. Wallingford: CABI; Laing, J. and Frost, W. (2014) Explorer Travellers and Adventure Tourism. Bristol: Channel View Publications; Novelli, M. (ed.) (2005) Niche Tourism: Contemporary Issues, Trends and Cases. Amsterdam: Elsevier; Taylor, S., Varley, P. and Johnston, T. (eds) (2013) Adventure Tourism: Meaning, Experience and Learning. New York: Routledge. (20) See, for example, Bhandari, K. (2014) Tourism and National Identity: Heritage and Nationhood in Scotland. Bristol: Channel View Publications; Frew, E. and White, L. (eds) (2011) Tourism and National Identities: An International Perspective. Abingdon and New York: Routledge; Shaffer, See America First. (21) Urry, J. (2002) The Tourist Gaze (2nd edn). London: Sage, p. 11. (22) The concept of ‘cultural routes’ or ‘cultural itineraries’ was refi ned by UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee in 1994 and by the ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites) International Scientific Committee on Cultural Routes (CIIC) established in 1998. A cultural route or itinerary represents spatial links between

Introduction: Imagining the Road

(23)

(24)

(25)

(26) (27)

(28)

(29)

13

societies based on population movements, encounters, exchange and dialogue across countries or regions, where the meaning of the whole route is greater than the sum of its parts, a prime example being the Silk Road. See ICOMOS/CIIC website at http://www.icomos-ciic.org/INDEX_ingl.htm (accessed October 2007). The US National Scenic Byways Program, which recognises and protects roads that demonstrate outstanding historic, scenic, recreational, cultural, archaeological and/ or natural qualities, was established with the fi rst designations of ‘All American Roads’ and ‘National Scenic Byways’ in 1996. A biennial conference, Preserving the Historic Road, was founded in America in 1998, bringing together experts from around the world to discuss the latest issues and methodologies in historic road preservation. The conference’s founder, Paul Daniel Marriott, has also published on the subject – see Marriott, P.D. (1998) Saving Historic Roads: Design and Policy Guidelines. New York: John Wiley and Marriott, P.D. (2004) From Milestones to Mile-Markers: Understanding Historic Roads. Duluth, MN: America’s Byways Resource Centre. Australia ICOMOS has organised two conferences dedicated to exploring issues associated with identifying, assessing and preserving roads and routes of historical significance, and select papers from each have been published in two special issues of the ICOMOS journal, Historic Environment. See: ‘Making Tracks’ Conference, May 2001, papers published in Blair, S., Brazil, S. and Truscott, M. (eds) (2002) Making tracks. From point to pathway: The heritage of routes and journeys. Special issue, Historic Environment 16 (2); and ‘Corrugations, the Romance and Reality of Historic Roads’ Conference, November 2005, papers published in Hubbard, T. (ed.) (2007) Corrugations, the romance and reality of historic roads. Special issue, Historic Environment 20 (1). The concept of ‘cultural routes’ is further explored by Australia ICOMOS in Blair, S. (ed.) (2013) Connecting cultures and continents: The heritage of routes and journeys. Historic Environment 25 (3); and Altenburg, K. and Hubbard, T. (eds) (2014) Connecting cultures and continents: The heritage of routes and journeys – Part 2. Historic Environment 26 (1). For example, Lay, M.G. (1984) History of Australian Roads. ARRB, Special Report No. 29. Melbourne: Australian Road Research Board; and Lay, M.G. (1993) Ways of the World. Sydney: Primavera Press. Davison, G. (2004) Car Wars. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Davison explores the physical and social impact of the private car in transforming the urban landscape, by examining the development of the freeway system in post-WWII Melbourne. For studies of the development of roads in various Australian states, see: Anderson, W.K. (1994) Roads for the People: A History of Victoria’s Roads. South Melbourne: VicRoads and Hyland House; Broomham, R. (2001) Vital Connections: A History of NSW Roads from 1788. Alexandria: Hale & Iremonger; Diamond, M. (c.1990) From Bulldust to Beef Roads and Beyond: Main Roads – the First 50 Years. Brisbane: Queensland Department of Main Roads; Edmonds, L. (1997) The Vital Link: A History of Main Roads Western Australia, 1926–1996. Perth: University of WA Press. Cohan, S. and Hark, I.R. (eds) (1997) The Road Movie Book. London: Routledge. Davidson, J. and Spearritt, P. (2000) Holiday Business: Tourism in Australia since 1870. Carlton South, Vic: Melbourne University Press; White, R. (2005) On Holidays: A History of Getting Away in Australia. North Melbourne: Pluto Press Australia. White, R. (2010) What is spatial history? Working Paper, Spatial History Lab, Stanford University, 1 February. Stanford University, Spatial History Project website at http://www.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/pub.php?id=29 (accessed June 2010). Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II was fi rst published in French in 1949. Bachelard, G. (1994 [1958]) The Poetics of

14

(30) (31)

(32) (33)

(34) (35)

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Space (trans. M. Jolas). Boston, MA: Beacon Press; Foucault, M. (1986) Of other spaces (trans. J. Miskowiek). Diacritics 16 (1), 22–27. The former was based on material for a lecture delivered by Foucault in 1967 and published posthumously in France in 1984; Lefebvre, H. (1991 [1974]) The Production of Space (trans. D. NicholsonSmith). Oxford: Blackwell; Soja, E.W. (1989) Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London and New York: Verso; Soja, E.W. (1996) Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Oxford: Blackwell. Lefebvre, Production of Space, pp. 33, 38–39. For example, Featherstone, M., Thrift, N. and Urry, J. (eds) (2005) Automobilities. London: Sage Publications; Miller, D. (ed.) (2001) Car Cultures. Oxford: Berg; Sheller, M. and Urry, J. (eds) (2004) Tourism Mobilities: Places to Play, Places in Play. London: Routledge; Urry, J. (2000) Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century. London: Routledge. Urry, Tourist Gaze, pp. 54–55. Grossberg, L., Nelson, C. and Treichler, P.A. (eds) (1992) Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, p. 4; Williams, R. (1983) Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Flamingo, Fontana Paperbacks, p. 90. Cited in Waterhouse, R. (1995) Private Pleasures, Public Leisure: A History of Australian Popular Culture Since 1788. South Melbourne: Longman Australia, p. ix. Cited in Schlereth, T.J. (1997) Reading the Road: U.S. 40 and the American Landscape (revised edn). Indianapolis, IN: Indiana Historical Society, p. 1. Bushnell’s ‘discourse’ was published in a book of his essays; see Bushnell, H. (1864) Work and Play. London: Alexander Strahan, pp. 77–115.

1 Making Tracks

Songlines

During the creation time or ‘Dreaming’, the Native Cat, or tjilpa (pronounced chill-pa), totemic ancestor of the Arrernte Aboriginal peoples of Central Australia, travelled on an epic journey across the continent, from ‘the south coast, where seagulls lived … to the north coast, the crocodile’s home’. The tjilpa men entered Arrernte territory west of Alice Springs, and continued north. As night fell over the land behind them, the tjilpa laid down huge sand dunes covered with stands of desert oak as a barrier to stop others following. And so the landscape of the south-western Northern Territory came into being.1 The Native Cat songline is one of the longest, traversing all of Central Australia, from Port Augusta on the coast of South Australia to the top end of the Northern Territory. Today, the Stuart Highway spans this cultural route. Tens of thousands of years before Europeans set foot on the continent we now call Australia, the land was covered with networks of tracks or ‘roads’. They were not drawn on maps or carved into the landscape. These ‘songlines’ or ‘Dreaming tracks’ are the footprints of ancestral beings who wandered the continent, creating it as they went – singing the country into existence. Every plant, animal, bird and geographical feature – rocks, creeks, waterholes, sand dunes – has sacred meaning, relating to important events in the ancestors’ journey. At Uluru (Ayers Rock), for example, the songlines of several ancestral groups intersect. In the Kuniya (pythons) story, the Kuniya converged on Uluru from the north, south and west. While they camped at Uluru, a party of Liru (poisonous snake) warriors attacked the Kuniya. Pock marks on the south-west rock face of Uluru are the scars left by the warriors’ spears. 2 The songlines are carried in memory, passed on through stories and songs, commemorated in ceremony and ritual. 3 They do not follow straight lines; they are winding, circular; they back-track, intersect and disappear. The songs and stories enable their custodians to read and understand the landscape, to navigate their way across the country, and to fi nd water, food and safety. They bring people together, often across vast distances, to perform the songs and dances, to trade and feast. The songlines carry people, goods and knowledge, connecting people physically, spiritually and culturally across space and time.4 15

16

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Each Aboriginal language group, defi ned by territorial boundaries, has its own songlines. Only those who belong to the songline may sing the songs, tell the stories, participate in the rituals and travel the route. 5 Aboriginal people feel a strong sense of belonging to the land and to their region, or ‘country’. To them, land is the source of life, and something to look after rather than to own and exploit. It should be left unscarred, unwounded.6 The Aboriginal concept of a ‘road’ was very different from that understood by Europeans. The title of Stephen Muecke’s narrative, No Road (bitumen all the way), is based on the response of an Aboriginal man from an outlying community in the Northern Territory in the 1970s when asked if there was a good road to get out to where he lived. The man appeared puzzled, before replying, ‘Road? No road … NO ROAD. Bitumen all the way. Bitumen aaall the way’.7 The ‘Trackless Bush’?

The British colonisers who landed at Botany Bay, then Port Jackson (Sydney), in January 1788, could not imagine the vast networks of Aboriginal ‘roads’ that lay beyond the shrub and forests of eucalypts, turpentine, ironbark and fig trees that lined the Sydney Harbour foreshores. Even if they did, they could not have understood their significance. All they saw at fi rst was impenetrable bush and scrub. Governor Arthur Phillip reported to the British Home Secretary, Lord Sydney, in May 1788, that ‘the country appears to be one continued wood’.8 Australia’s colonisation was founded on the assertion that Aboriginal people did not own the country because they did not ‘settle’ in one place, or farm the land; nor did they have any recognisable – to the Europeans – social, political or religious institutions. The legal fiction – later termed terra nullius, effectively meaning ‘nobody’s land’ – legitimised British colonisation by denying or dismissing Aboriginal possession, sovereignty, law and customs.9 In reality, the interlopers could not ignore Aboriginal presence for long. Initial interactions were complex, ranging from avoidance to curiosity, fear, aggression, warmth and generosity, on both sides. Despite the diseases, social dislocation and dispossession wrought by colonisation, Aboriginal people resisted, retaliated, cooperated and survived. The early colonists, and later explorers, relied heavily on Aboriginal knowledge, including existing tracks and pathways, many of which laid the foundations for the development of future roads and highways. For the officers of the First Fleet, however, road building was not a high priority. While the reasons for Australia’s colonisation have been the subject of much historical debate, the official aim was to establish a selfsufficient agricultural colony using convict labour.10 In time, the British hoped to develop profitable local agricultural and pastoral industries.11 Ultimately, however, the colony was a gaol – albeit a gaol without

Making Tracks

17

walls  – with the majority of the early population being convicts. Consequently, authorities faced an inherent conflict in the need to restrict rather than encourage freedom of movement. The earliest recorded overland ventures beyond the settlement at Sydney Cove were to Botany Bay, the site of the fi rst landing. On 26 January 1788, just as the British fleet were heading north in search of a more sheltered anchorage, better soil and fresh water, two French ships, on a scientific expedition under the command of the Compte de La Perouse, entered the bay to rest and replenish their supplies. If they had arrived a few days earlier, Australia might have been a French colony. As it happened, they stayed only six weeks. With the British flag fi rmly planted on the sands of Port Jackson, some of the British officers sought society and news of the outside world, making frequent visits to La Perouse and his company who were camped on the northern side of Botany Bay. It is possible that in travelling between Sydney and Botany Bay, the British followed an existing Aboriginal track.12 Some months later, on 1 June 1788, surgeon John White recorded in his journal that after visiting the grave of Pere Receveur, one of the Frenchmen who died there, ‘we fell in with an Indian path, and as it took a turn towards the camp, we followed it about two miles … to the northward of Botany Bay’.13 The officers were not the only ones on the move. In the first two weeks, up to 400 convicts – over half the number who arrived with the First Fleet – escaped from the settlement at Sydney Cove. Many found their way across swamps and sand dunes to Botany Bay and, desperate to return home, begged to be taken aboard La Perouse’s ships. As historian Grace Karskens points out, despite stories of convicts trying to reach an ‘inland paradise’ or China, most escape attempts were by sea rather than land.14 Others disappeared into the bush and were assumed to be lost or to have been killed by Aborigines. Despite the authorities’ efforts to contain them, in the following years convicts continued to escape, abscond or venture beyond their supposed limits – to forage for food or to collect animals, insects and artefacts. A few fell in with Aboriginal groups and ‘went native’, living with them for years in some cases.15 Thus, the first European tracks began to overlay and intersect with indigenous pathways. In the first months and years of settlement, Governor Phillip and some of his officers began exploring further to the north, west and south of Sydney. Their chief motivation was the urgent need to fi nd good farming land, to grow food for the fledgling colony, as the fi rst crops planted near Sydney Cove failed. They travelled mainly by water rather than land, as the thickly timbered country and steep sandstone cliffs around Sydney made overland exploration difficult. The coastal waters and inland rivers were much easier to navigate for these naval men. They found good soil and clearer ground for agriculture along the Parramatta River, and established a second settlement in November 1788 at the place they named Rose

18

Roads, Tourism and Cultural History

Hill (later Parramatta) about 12 miles west of Sydney. While the Parramatta River was the most reliable means of travelling between Sydney and Parramatta, between 1789 and 1791 convicts cleared a rough track, laying the foundation for the first major European-built road in the colony.16 It took about eight hours to walk the road from Sydney to Parramatta and any non-official use was discouraged. Horse-drawn carts did not travel on the road until 1794.17 One of the most enthusiastic explorers was marine, Captain Watkin Tench. When not performing his military duties, he spent much of his free time leading or taking part in expeditions. His account of the colony’s early years, first published in 1793, is one of the more engaging and literary of the many written by colonial diarists for an eager audience back home. In describing the country around the Hawkesbury River to the north-west of Sydney in 1789, Tench reveals, with some poetic license, a European view of the landscape: Here we paused, surveying ‘the wild abyss’ … Before us lay the trackless immeasurable desert, in awful silence. … We continued to march all day through a country untrodden before by an [sic] European foot.18

Betraying both his awareness and denial of Aboriginal presence, Tench’s portrayal of the country as a ‘trackless bush’ renders the land empty and unruly, ready and waiting to be tamed by European ‘civilisation’. The irony of Tench’s description is revealed in his later self-deprecating commentary on the Europeans’ incompetence in navigating difficult country, compared to their Aboriginal guides. As he wrote of another expedition to the Hawkesbury in April 1791: Our natives continued to hold out stoutly. The hindrances to walking by the river side, which plagued and entangled us so much, seemed not to be heeded by them, and they wound through them with ease; but to us they were intolerably tiresome. Our perplexities afforded them an inexhaustible fund of merriment and derision:– did the sufferer, stung at once with nettles and ridicule, and shaken nigh to death by his fall, use any angry expression to them, they retorted in a moment, by calling him by every opprobrious name which their language affords.19

The British were clearly not at home in the Australian bush. The Road to ‘Civilisation’ and Progress

Lachlan Macquarie, who became Governor of New South Wales in January 1810, was the first administrator to see roads both as an economic necessity and as symbolic of progress and ‘civilisation’. He wrote in his second dispatch on 30 April 1810 that he considered that ‘the making [of] Permanent Roads and Bridges is one of the first steps towards improving a New Country’. 20 A year later, in April 1811, he proclaimed that ‘The Construction and Preservation of safe and commodious High-ways is a

Making Tracks

19

matter of great and general Importance, and tends greatly to increase Commerce, and promote Civilisation’. 21 Macquarie was the great improver – a visionary with grand plans for Sydney and the expanding colony, which by then extended to the west, north-west and south-west of Sydney, as the military officers, free settlers and emancipists (ex-convicts) established farms on land grants along the Parramatta, Hawkesbury, Nepean and Georges rivers. On Macquarie’s watch, some of Sydney’s major public buildings, infrastructure and thoroughfares took shape. He also imposed some order and aesthetics on the streets, roads and layout of satellite towns including Parramatta, Windsor and Richmond – important centres of developing agricultural and pastoral districts. In his plans for road infrastructure, Macquarie’s chief concern was to make it easier and safer to travel between the settled districts, and to transport produce and goods to and from the markets and port of Sydney. He introduced turnpike roads to New South Wales. Under the turnpike system, which originated in England in the mid-17th century, road users paid tolls that would contribute to cost of the roads’ construction and maintenance. The first such road that Macquarie proposed was between Sydney and Toongabbie, near Parramatta. The earliest ‘roads’ were little more than earthen tracks, cleared of trees, stumps and large rocks, and covered with soil, clay and stone. They often became impassable in wet weather. Macquarie directed that the new turnpike road was to be 30 feet wide with trees cleared 66 feet on either side. It was to be made of durable material, with a higher centre and ditches either side to improve drainage. As testament to the high importance Macquarie placed on roads, a stone obelisk, erected in the centre of Sydney in 1818, marked the distances from Sydney by ‘principal roads’ (Figure 1.1). This obelisk still stands in Macquarie Place, near Circular Quay, and is the place from which all major roads in New South Wales are measured. 22 It was during Macquarie’s governorship that the now-legendary explorers, Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson and William Charles Wentworth, made the first successful European expedition into the Blue Mountains in May 1813. The mountains are part of the Great Dividing Range, which extends along the entire east coast of Australia from Cape York in Queensland to western Victoria, and Tasmania, dividing the east coast from the inland. The Blue Mountains, so named because of their colour when viewed from a distance, formed a natural barrier, marking the western boundary of settlement, about 40 miles west of Sydney. The explorers’ feat was celebrated and romanticised much more in later years than at the time. 23 The Sydney Gazette’s reporting of the trio’s safe return from their ‘trackless journey into the interior’24 was understated, as well as being typically oblivious to the contribution of Aboriginal guides and mediators – who knew a few tracks of their own – to the expedition’s success. Over the years, the legend of ‘crossing the Blue Mountains’ grew into

20

Roads, Tourism and Cultural History

Figure 1.1 Macquarie’s Obelisk, Macquarie Place, Sydney, 1926 Source: State Library of NSW.

one of the most mythologised stories of early Australian exploration – a story of European triumph over the harsh, rugged landscape. While the explorers did report seeing ‘a prodigious extent of fi ne country’ beyond the mountains, their expedition did not herald the great pastoral expansion for which it was later credited. Macquarie was more concerned with encouraging the expansion of agriculture rather than grazing at the time, as the colony again faced starvation due to drought and crop failure. Keen to confi rm Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth’s observations, he immediately instructed surveyor George Evans to mark out a road. It was Evans, then, who actually ‘crossed’ the mountains. 25 The cart road, extending 101 miles to the Bathurst Plains, complete with bridges, was built in only six months by convicts supervised by William Cox, and was fi nished by January 1815. 26 The 30 convict labourers were granted their freedom as a reward for their efforts, and Cox received the fi rst land grant west of Bathurst – a handsome 2000 acres. 27 Cox’s road to Bathurst was the genesis of what became the Great Western Highway. Significantly, the Blue Mountains crossing in 1813, and subsequent explorations to the north and south, confirmed that the colony’s future lay with grazing rather than agriculture. This contradicted a long-held European belief that agriculture was the hallmark of a settled, civilised society, representing a higher stage of evolution from nomadic pastoralism. 28 Wool was emerging as a more reliable staple than crops such as wheat and maize, which were often destroyed by fire, drought or floods.

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It was not until the late 1820s, however, that pastoralists travelled along the western road and onto the Bathurst Plains in any great numbers. 29 Some Early ‘Road Trips’

In April 1815 Governor Macquarie went on a road trip of his own to the Bathurst Plains to inspect the recently discovered country. Touring the countryside with ‘Mrs M.’ was one of his favourite pastimes. Happily, this also allowed him to indulge his other passion of naming places after himself or his wife, Elizabeth Campbell. Australia is particularly well endowed with places named Lachlan or Macquarie. On this occasion, his party travelled for just over three weeks by carriage over the new western road, camping overnight or staying at military depots, and making excursions on foot or horseback to explore the region further off-road. Delighting in the scenery, as well as assessing the quality of the country and state of the road, he wrote in his journal on 4 May 1815: The Grand Depot at Bathurst Plains is beautifully situated on a fi ne commanding eminence on the left bank and south side of the Macquarie River, distant 10¼ miles from our last stage at the Campbell River; the road being very good and easy for a carriage the whole of this last stage. The appearance of Bathurst Plains from the Depot extending for many miles on both sides of the Macquarie River, and surrounded at a distance by fi ne verdant hills, is truly grand, beautiful and interesting, forming one of the fi nest landscapes I ever saw in any country I have yet visited. 30

Macquarie’s detailed journals reveal the romantic tourist-like gaze of the man who was probably the colony’s fi rst real long-distance road-tripper. It was fitting that Macquarie oversaw the construction of the colony’s fi rst recreational road. A signal station was built on South Head, at the entrance to Sydney Harbour, in 1790. It signalled the much-anticipated arrival of ships – the colony’s only link to the outside world, bringing supplies, mail and news from home. A track from Sydney to South Head was cleared in 1803, but it was upgraded to ‘a good carriage road’ in 1811, and funded by private subscriptions. While it was originally built for strategic purposes, the South Head Road later became popular as ‘a beautiful avenue of recreation’, where the fashionable could enjoy a carriage ride to picnic and take in the fresh air and picturesque views of the harbour (Figure 1.2). 31 Driving for pleasure came into vogue in England in the 1790s as roads and carriages improved, making travelling more comfortable. 32 The 19th century saw the emergence of scenic tourism, with an emphasis on appreciating picturesque and sublime landscapes. 33 In New South Wales, at first only the governor travelled by horse-drawn carriage, but as the colony became more established, the local elite sought to identify themselves as antipodean versions of the English gentry by copying their recreational habits. 34 By the mid-1820s, the South Head Road was described as

22

Roads, Tourism and Cultural History

Figure 1.2 Watson’s Bay and North Head from the South Head Road, by S.T. Gill Source: State Library of NSW.

‘the grand equestrian resort, along which gigs with well-dressed people, and spruce dandies a cheval, may be daily seen careening’. 35 Many late 18th- and early 19th-century travellers in the colony were incidental tourists, enjoying scenery, collecting ‘souvenirs’ of plants, animals or artefacts, and taking an interest in the customs of Aboriginal inhabitants. For the most part, however, road-building was motivated by practical, economic and strategic concerns, rather than pleasure seeking. Great Roads!

By the 1820s, the majority of European settlement was confined to a relatively small area of eastern Australia. Most towns began as isolated penal settlements: Newcastle, north of Sydney, in 1801; Sorrento, Victoria, in 1803; Hobart and Launceston, Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), in 1803 and 1806; Redcliffe and Brisbane, Queensland in 1824 and 1825; Albany, then Perth and Fremantle, Western Australia, in 1826 and 1829. The settlements were located near the coast so that supplies, officials and more convicts could be transported there by water, while being sufficiently remote to prevent convicts from escaping overland. In 1819 the convict outpost at Newcastle was relocated further north to Port Macquarie because by that time parts of the Hunter River region had been cleared by cedar cutters, and Newcastle was no longer sufficiently isolated. 36 Likewise, Norfolk Island, which operated as a convict colony from 1788 to 1814, was reoccupied in 1825 as a place of banishment for some of the

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worst reoffenders. 37 South Australia was an exception, with Adelaide being founded in 1836 by free settlers. Melbourne, Victoria’s capital on the Yarra River, began in 1835 as an illegal frontier trading post, when pastoralists and traders sailed into Port Phillip Bay from Van Diemen’s Land. 38 Originally, Tasmania, South Australia, Queensland and Victoria were all part of the colony of New South Wales, until they became independent in 1825, 1836, 1849 and 1851, respectively. Colonial and imperial authorities also faced ongoing tensions between restricting and promoting the spread of free settlement. From 1826, New South Wales established official ‘Limits of Location’ beyond which no land was to be granted or sold. The measure was meant to ensure that land settlement was orderly and confined to areas already surveyed. When the British Government ended the land grant system in 1831, land was sold at auction and became expensive within the defi ned limits. Pastoralists and land speculators ignored the restrictions and illegally occupied land beyond the limits, with their sheep, cattle, horses and bullocks, and assigned convict servants who acted as shepherds, stockmen and overseers. They became known as ‘squatters’, simply pitching camp and marking out the boundaries of the land they were claiming. By the late 1820s, pastoralists were moving westwards across the Blue Mountains, south into Victoria, and northwest through the Hunter onto the Liverpool Plains, and as far as the Darling Downs in southwest Queensland. By 1844 there were around 10,000 people, 3 million sheep and almost 600,000 cattle outside the official limits. Authorities fought a losing battle and by 1847 the British fi nally abandoned the policy of containing settlement within boundaries. So Australia’s inland regions were first settled in defiance of colonial authority. 39 The tracks made by these unofficial settlers formed the genesis of future roads. In the so-called ‘great roads’ era of the late 1820s and 1830s, the government funded public highways to open up the country for settlement beyond the Great Dividing Range, and to improve communication links between Sydney and other major settlements. This period saw the further development of the Great Western Road to Bathurst, the Great North Road to the Hunter region, and the Great South Road, which crossed the Razorback mountain range in the Southern Highlands and traversed the Goulburn Plains, to reach the Murrumbidgee River in south-west New South Wales.40 These roads incorporated new techniques developed in Britain during the Industrial Revolution including macadamised surfaces. Scottish engineer John McAdam devised a method of paving roads using layers of hard broken stone rolled onto dry soil, with smaller interlocking angular stones between, making the surface more durable and better drained. McAdam and fellow-Scot Thomas Telford, a renowned road and bridge builder who was known as ‘the colossus of roads’, had a huge influence on road building

24

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worldwide, including Australia.41 The new technology probably came to Australia with military engineers who were posted there.42 Convict road-gangs provided the main labour force to build these and other roads until transportation ended in the 1840s. Many worked in legirons by day, breaking rocks and stone. At night they slept, sometimes 20 to a hut, in the cramped stockades. Working in road-gangs was severe punishment for convicts who had reoffended since being transported. Governor Darling described these men as ‘double distilled villains’.43 Authorities faced an ongoing battle to maintain discipline and productivity. Many convicts took their chances and fled into the bush. Several became bushrangers, operating alone or in gangs, stealing from settlers and ambushing road travellers. Bushranging was at its peak in the late 1820s and early 1830s, but it continued throughout the 19th century.44 Authorities saw roads as symbolising order, progress and prosperity, taming distance and the environment,45 but it is clear that there was a fi ne line between control and chaos or lawlessness. While the ‘great roads’ improved grades, alignment and surfaces somewhat, they were still far from ‘great’ for those who had to use them. In July 1841 Sophia Stanger travelled to Bathurst to settle with her husband and five children. She wrote a letter to her mother describing the difficulties of travelling the Great Western Road in a bullock-drawn dray after heavy rains: ‘As there are no such roads in good old England, you can form no idea how really bad they are. Notwithstanding all that has been done to mend them, they remain, like Bunyan’s “Slough of Despond,” very little better.’46 Beyond the Edge of the Road

In the early years of the colony, roads were important in authorities’ and settlers’ attempts to impose some control over an unfamiliar, and often hostile and threatening environment. While the road may have provided a – relatively – safe path, there is evidence of ongoing unease among travellers about what might lie beyond the edge of the road. Mrs Louisa Anne Meredith, a writer newly arrived from Birmingham, England, travelled the Great Western Road to Bathurst in September 1839. In her account of the journey, which was later published in Notes and Sketches of New South Wales (1844), she remarked on the ‘continual depredations of bushrangers’, which were an ever-present threat. After seeing the ‘villainous countenances’ of members of a convict road-gang near Mount Victoria, who asked her party for money or tobacco, Meredith commented that The idea of being waylaid by bushrangers gained tenfold horrors, and the knowledge that many were out made me often look very earnestly at a misshapen gum-log or crooked tree, fancy transforming it to ‘a highwayman, with pistols as long as my arm’.47

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It was not only bushrangers that made early settlers uneasy, but the landscape itself. Elizabeth Hawkins made the journey over the Blue Mountains with her family in 1822, as her husband was appointed government storekeeper at Bathurst. Observing the barren ‘solid rock’ in parts of the mountains, she saw a land that seemed ‘as if it were never intended for human beings to inhabit’.48 Louisa Meredith wrote of The inhospitable Blue Mountains … before, behind and on either side of us, rising in grand and dreary monotony of form and colour. Forest of tall gum trees covered them from base to peak, but instead of a beauty in the landscape, these were a deformity…49

The tree trunks and branches had been blackened by recent bushfi res. These depictions reflect what Marcus Clarke called the ‘weird melancholy’ that often characterised early representations of the Australian landscape. 50 This ‘melancholy’ was often heightened at the edge of the road. Despite the improvements made to the Great Western Road by the late 1830s, Meredith wrote of the narrow road winding around the sides of steep mountains, which left no room for error, being barely wide enough for two vehicles to pass, and ‘deep holes in the road’ requiring the driver’s full attention ‘to avoid an upset over the precipice’. Other reminders of death were not far away. In places, the ‘white skeletons’ and carcasses of draught animals that had perished on the long, difficult journey lay by the roadside as ‘melancholy proofs’ of the ‘ravages’ of the recent drought. 51 Even as Gregory Blaxland ‘cut a road’ – as he described the explorers’ marking and clearing of their path through the mountains – he often recorded hearing noises in the surrounding bush, unsure if they were animal or human sounds. One night as they camped, their dogs began to bark, then ‘they heard something run through the bush very distinctly’. They assumed it was one of their horses that had got loose, but in the morning discovered all the horses tethered, and so assumed it must have been a ‘Native’. 52 Both Blaxland and Evans, who surveyed the road in 1813–1814, made frequent references in their journals to hearing or seeing evidence of Aboriginal presence – such as camp fires, tracks or abandoned huts – yet did not come into direct contact with them. For the Europeans, this created a slightly disturbing feeling of being shadowed. As Evans wrote: ‘I think they are watching us, but are afraid and keep at some distance.’53 Aboriginal people may have avoided contact with the Europeans at first out of fear, but as settlers and their animals began to encroach further onto their traditional hunting grounds, polluting water supplies and abusing Aboriginal women, they often retaliated against the intruders, stealing or spearing stock, killing settlers or raiding their farms. Violence escalated, with attacks and atrocities, including massacres, committed on both sides of the frontier warfare that accompanied the spread of European

26

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settlement. Captain William Dumaresq, Governor Darling’s brother-inlaw and an inspector of roads and bridges, wrote of ‘a ride to Bathurst’, published as a series of letters in the Australian newspaper in March 1827. While staying overnight near the head of the Campbell River south of Bathurst, he and his party were Surprised at the arrival of two friends, on horseback, who had lost themselves in a place called ‘Dead Man’s Valley’, which obtained its horrid name from five of M. – men, several years ago, being attacked here by the black natives, and murdered, mangled and scalped. Lord Byron somewhere says – ‘There is a pleasure in the pathless woods’ – but we settlers know better; and having tried both, prefer the turnpike road. 54

A series of attacks by Aborigines along the Great South Road to Melbourne in the 1830s made the improvement of that road more urgent. 55 The unsettling, unknown space beyond the edge of the road gave rise to an enduring folklore. Henry Lawson’s story of ‘The Hairy Man’ recounts a ‘yarn’ told in the Blue Mountains district about a creature reputedly heard of and seen in the bush from the eastern slopes of the Great Dividing Range to its western extremities. Tales of the hairy man ‘scared children coming home by bush tracks, … and even grown bushmen, when going along a lonely track after sunset’, who thought of it whenever they heard sounds in the surrounding bush – perhaps the thud of a kangaroo leaping through the scrub. 56 The ‘hairy man’ embodied the fears of an unfamiliar environment that often troubled the colonial imagination. Dumaresq’s preference for staying on the well-trodden road was motivated by another powerful fear – that of being lost. Stories of ill-fated explorers like Ludwig Leichhardt, the German scientist who simply vanished without trace while exploring the north-west region of Australia in 1848, or Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills, who perished in the desert of Central Australia in 1861 when trying to cross the continent from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria in far north Queensland, also entered Australian folklore. Leichhardt’s disappearance inspired novels, including Patrick White’s Voss (1957). Children lost in the bush became a prominent and recurring motif in Australian literature, art and film over the 19th and 20th centuries. 57 Blazing Trails

Many of Australia’s major highways are named after the explorers who discovered the route – Eyre, Hume, Mitchell, Oxley, Sturt and Stuart, for example. Many of these men, including Major Thomas Mitchell, John Oxley and John McDouall Stuart, were surveyors. Others, like Hamilton Hume, Charles Sturt and Edward John Eyre, were ‘overlanders’ – pastoralists searching for new pastureland or driving sheep and cattle to new

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settlements. The Hume Highway developed as an extension of the Great South Road, and eventually became the main inland route linking Sydney and Melbourne. Mostly, the routes followed the natural topography – the Sturt Highway parallels the Murrumbidgee and Murray Rivers from Tarcutta in south-western New South Wales, to Adelaide. Eyre followed the coast around the Great Australian Bight, across the Nullarbor Plain to link South Australia to the west coast at Albany – an overland route of over 1500 km. 58 Stuart’s route, in 1862, bisected the continent from south to north – from Port Augusta in South Australia to Darwin, through Central Australia. The explorers’ routes formed rough tracks along which people followed with their sheep, cattle, horses, bullocks, drays, carts and wagons, but it was not until the 20th century that they were named after the men who blazed their trails, or indeed resembled anything like today’s ‘highways’. The great age of exploration, from the 1820s to the 1860s, was driven by the search for productive land, tracing the course of river systems, and pure curiosity to discover what lay in the centre of this vast continent. For a time there were hopes and rumours that a great inland sea or river might exist. In fact, just below the surface lay the world’s largest subterranean water reservoir, the Great Artesian Basin, which extends beneath central and north-eastern Australia. Mound springs around its margins, where the pressurised water reaches the surface, are the only permanent source of water. The Arabana, Wangkangurru and other Aboriginal groups, in whose songlines the mound springs featured prominently, knew this well; however, Stuart was the fi rst European to realise, by observing ‘native tracks’, that the springs were ‘stepping stones to the interior and, ultimately, the northern shores of Australia’. 59 As well as defi ning a route for the movement of stock, Stuart’s track determined the path of the Overland Telegraph Line, a vital communications link between Australia and Britain, built in the early 1870s.60 The peculiarities of Australia’s geography and climate – the lack of extensive inland waterways, the hot, dry deserts of the interior and long periods of drought – meant that the majority of settlement remained around the coastal fringe. It also meant that pastoralism rather than agriculture dominated the economy, as the high cost and difficulties of overland transport made it unprofitable to farm too far from the coast or rivers. 61 By the 1820s, government policies regulating land tenure also actively encouraged pastoralism, which drove the expansion of settlement. Despite efforts later in the 19th century to encourage more small-scale agriculture, there was only so much viable land. Mixed farming, including wheat and other cereal crops, wool, beef and dairy cattle, characterised much of Australia’s rural economy. 62 The deep interior of the country remained sparsely populated, with isolated sheep and cattle stations, where stock ranged over thousands – sometimes millions – of acres throughout Central Australia, far-western Queensland, the Northern Territory and northwest Western Australia.

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Figure 1.3 Map of Australia’s national highway system Source: UBD (2012) Gregory’s Touring Atlas, Australia (26th edn). St Leonards, NSW: Explore Australia Publishing.

These factors influenced the way in which Australian roads developed. Even today, with the exception of the Stuart, Australia’s major highway system mainly skirts the perimeter of the continent (Figure 1.3). This is in stark contrast to North America, where extensive internal rivers favoured agriculture and more intensive settlement, which spread from east to west, across the fabled ‘frontier’. Towns grew and roads developed to link small-scale farming districts. Hence, the American road network resembles a patchwork pattern, criss-crossing the entire country. Foot, Hoof and Wagon Tracks

In general, road construction remained a low priority for Australia, as water then rail proved the more efficient and cheaper means of transport and communication until the late 19th and early 20th centuries. River and coastal shipping became important in the mid-1800s, with river boats and steamers carrying supplies, produce and people between stations, ports, towns and cities. River boats opened up country west of the Darling River in far-western New South Wales for the wool industry from the 1850s. River trade reached a peak in the 1880s, when some 300 steamships plied

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the mighty Murray, Australia’s longest river, which runs over 2400 km across south-eastern Australia, along the border of New South Wales and Victoria, and into South Australia. As railways extended further inland, providing more reliable and faster services in the late 19th century, river transport began to decline in importance, and its era ended by the 1930s.63 The first railway lines opened in the mid-1850s, but did not reach far beyond the coast until the later 19th century. Railways stimulated commercial farming, slashing the time and cost of getting produce to markets. They also led to the growth of country towns, and allowed closer communication between the cities and rural communities. Railways rather than roads became the symbols of economic advancement.64 Meanwhile, roads languished, hardly improving during the second half of the 19th century beyond major towns and cities. Early Australian roads engaged all the senses and were closely defi ned by the natural environment. They were coloured by red or grey earth, or the chocolate brown of Queensland’s black soil plains. Others shimmered white with the reflected heat, glare and dust of the Australian bush in summer, as in Henry Lawson’s ‘white road, so hot that you could cook eggs in the dust’.65 Roads echoed to the sound of horses’ hooves, bullock teams’ creaking yokes and tinkling bells, teamsters whistling, bullockies swearing, and the clatter of coach wheels stirring earth and gravel. Travellers inhaled and became covered in dust in dry weather, or splattered with mud in the wet. Sir John Kirwan wrote of travelling in Western Australia, near the mining district of Kalgoorlie: ‘My travelling companion’s face and hands and clothes assumed the chocolate colour of the roads through the layers of dust on them.’66 Brian Penton’s novel, Inheritors (1936), the story of a 19th-century pioneering family in New South Wales, describes the ‘dustclogged nostrils of the poor devils’ in the Cobb & Co. coach travelling up the Black Mountain in Queensland. The coach fi nally drew up ‘in an allobscuring cloud of dust, like a pack of red devils that had been chasing it for nearly two days and had at last caught and swallowed it, in front of the Grand Central Hotel’.67 A distinctive early Australian road type was the corduroy road, found in heavily timbered regions such as parts of northern New South Wales and Tasmania.68 Fashioned from cut logs laid side by side, compacted with mud or sand, stones and branches, these roads made for a bone-jarring journey which left both a physical and emotional impression on travellers. The corduroy road is described in Mary Gaunt’s short story, ‘A Good Samaritan’, as a road that ‘when you’ve fi nished travelling over it would make angels weep’.69 The gold rushes, which began first in New South Wales and Victoria in the 1850s, then Queensland in the 1870s and Western Australia in the 1890s, were another major catalyst for the spread of settlement, the growth of towns, and to some extent further road development. In Victoria, gold discoveries prompted the construction and improvement of

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roads between the goldfields and the ports of Melbourne and Geelong.70 Wherever people went in search of gold, and later silver, tin, lead, copper and other valuable resources, roads followed, but they remained very rough. The gold rushes also resulted in some improvements in road transport. Before the railways, and beyond their reach, squatters, rural workers and miners travelled the country on foot, on horseback and on drays, buggies and coaches drawn by bullocks or horses.71 Mail coaches also carried supplies and passengers, but the journeys were often slow and extremely uncomfortable. The now famous Cobb & Co. coach line began in Victoria in 1853 to meet the huge demand for transport to and from the goldfields. Their vehicles, which were imported from America, had better suspension than the earlier English designs, giving passengers a more comfortable ride. They also travelled much faster. Cobb & Co.’s reputation for speed and efficiency ensured that it soon became the leading carrier for public road transport, although it was relatively expensive.72 Emily Soldene, an opera singer, travelled by Cobb & Co. coach from Sydney to Melbourne in the 1860s. She described an exhilarating ride on the coach with six horses, travelling over Soft sand, cut into deep ruts … winding in and out huge trees, sharp corners, unexpected fallen trunks, monster upturned roots, every kind of obstacle … the coach banging, creaking, swaying from side to side! Then suddenly down we go, down over a mountain as steep as the side of a house, down into and through a rushing, roaring, tumbling, bumping, yellow river! … Then with a … big lurch, out again and up the opposite side … the driver cracking his whip, and the horses shaking the water from their sides, tossing their heads, and jingling their harness. … I liked to sit on the box, though it made one sick, not with fright exactly, but with excitement and the anticipation of some possible calamity.73

Not everyone was a fan. Clara Aspinall complained of the miserable, suffocating atmosphere inside a crowded Cobb & Co. coach.74 And there was certainly risk of calamity, as the lack of bridges meant that coaches and carts often overturned when crossing creeks. The solid wood or metal wheels of coaches and other vehicles also destroyed road surfaces, leaving deep ruts and stirring up so much dust that travellers could not see tree stumps, rocks and stones that often littered the road.75 The goldfields coaches, with their cargoes of gold, cash and wealthy passengers, also became popular targets for bushrangers. The most spectacular attack on a Cobb & Co. coach took place on 15 June 1862, when the gold escort travelling from Forbes to Orange in western New South Wales was held up at Eugowra Rocks. The coach was carrying several thousand ounces of gold, as well as cash and bank notes. A large group of bushrangers, thought to be members of Frank Gardiner’s gang, fi red shots from behind the rocky outcrop as the coach drew near. The horses bolted,

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the coach overturned, and the bushrangers escaped with their haul. Some of the gold was recovered later and some members of the gang were captured. One was sentenced to death, two others to life imprisonment.76 The ambush is depicted in Tom Roberts’ painting, ‘Bailed Up’ (Figure 1.4). Apart from gold, wool became Australia’s most lucrative commodity from the mid- to late 19th century and well into the fi rst half of the 20th, with strong demand both here and overseas, especially in England. It became a cliché that ‘Australia rode to prosperity on the sheep’s back’. Between 1860 and 1890 sheep numbers rose from 20 million to 102 million, and wool remained Australia’s largest export.77 Wool’s profitability justified its transport over long distances. Bullock and horse teams hauled carts and drays laden with wool and other produce from the pastoral stations and farms to ports, and later railheads, where it could be taken by river, sea or rail to markets. Teams of up to 18 bullocks hauled box carts with loads that could weigh as much as 8 tonne. Bullocks were slower than horses, but they could travel for longer periods, needed less feed, and handled difficult conditions better.78 Nevertheless, it was hard going. Bullockies gained a reputation for their toughness and bad language. Sophia Stanger described the convoy of five bullock teams with which she and her family journeyed to Bathurst: each team with three men to ‘swear at, beat, and take care of the bullocks’. After heavy rains, the roads were ‘in a most horrible state from the wet; sometimes our wheels sank to their axles – and then, oh, the beating! the shouting! and the swearing!!’ 79

Figure 1.4 ‘Bailed Up’ by Tom Roberts, 1895 Source: State Library of NSW.

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Camels were introduced into some of the driest, most remote regions of Central Australia in the early 1860s to aid exploration and to carry wool, station supplies and building materials, travelling to and from the railway lines and pastoral stations. Camels endured the desert conditions better than bullocks or horses, travelling for long spells without water or rest, often over hard, stony ground, which did not suit horses.80 With their ‘Afghan’ handlers, who came mainly from what is now Afghanistan or parts of Pakistan and India, camel trains plied inland stock routes including the Birdsville, Strezlecki and Oodnadatta Tracks as well as the Overland Telegraph Line.81 The wool and pastoral industry created a huge mobile workforce of men who travelled the country roads and tracks, moving from station to station looking for work. Most were shearers, but they also worked at boundary riding, building and mending fences, sinking tanks and bores, horse breaking, lamb marking and harvesting. They were the original ‘swagmen’, carrying their possessions in swags slung over their shoulder, with billy-can in hand (Figure 1.5). Mostly they walked, but some rode on horseback or in carts. In the late 19th century, with the expansion of railways and as bicycles became more popular, they often travelled by rail as far as they could, and then rode between stations. The station owners provided them with food and accommodation. While the swagmen were regarded as the backbone of the rural workforce, their counterparts, known as ‘sundowners’, had a reputation for arriving at stations at sundown, demanding rations, but too late to do any work. In the 1880s and

Figure 1.5 ‘On the Wallaby Track’, 1910 Source: National Library of Australia.

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1890s, drought and economic depression led to the temporary disappearance of the traditional swagmen. Many selectors took on shearing themselves in order to earn extra income, and unemployed men from the cities went ‘on the wallaby track’ in a desperate search for seasonal work, competing with and diluting the ranks of the swagmen.82 And so, from the mid- to late 19th century, tracks worn by explorers, pastoralists, swagmen, railway and telegraph line workers, miners, drovers, Afghan cameleers, and their animals and vehicles, laid the basis for a rough road network that gradually spread beyond major settlements, ports and railheads. Roads remained fairly primitive, however, until well into the 20th century, particularly in the larger states of Queensland and Western Australia, where distances were great and overland transport was uneconomical to build and use.83 Birth of Legends – On and Off the Road

Poor and non-existent roads enhanced the bush and pioneering legends being constructed in late 19th- and early 20th-century popular culture in the face of increasing urbanisation, industrialisation and technological change. As railways and the telegraph lessened the distance and distinction between the cities and the bush, writers, poets and artists who were seeking to defi ne a distinctly Australian national identity nostalgically celebrated a pre-industrial rural Australia, where swagmen, drovers, horses and bullocks ruled the tracks. Like the American ‘frontier legend’, central to these legends is the idea of movement and mobility across a ‘frontier’ environment in shaping the character of the nation and its people. Historian Russel Ward, author of The Australian Legend, published in 1958, argued that it was the ‘nomad tribe’ of itinerant bush workers of the 19th-century pastoral industry – the shearers, drovers, boundary riders and rouseabouts – who came to represent most powerfully a distinctive Australian type. They embodied qualities of courage, determination, resilience, resourcefulness, mateship, generosity, pragmatism, a laconic wit, and a love of freedom and wide open spaces.84 Such figures were popularised and romanticised by poets and writers, and epitomised by Banjo Paterson’s drover, ‘Clancy of the Overflow’, who saw ‘the vision splendid’ as he rode on horseback behind ‘cattle slowly stringing’ across the broad ‘sunlit plains’.85 Here it was the boundless freedom, unrestricted by paved roads, that was the essence of the drover’s lifestyle. The swag and the nomadic lifestyle as symbols of supposedly uniquely Australian qualities occur repeatedly in literature. Henry Lawson declared in The Romance of the Swag (1907): ‘The Australian swag was born of Australia and no other land – of the Great Lone Land of magnificent distances and bright heat; the land of Self-reliance, and Never-give-in, and Help-your-mate.’86

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Journalist Charles Bean’s On the Wool Track, first published in 1910, was based on a series of articles about the wool industry which Bean wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald in 1909 during his trip to the far west of New South Wales. Bean celebrated the shearers and other pastoral workers who roamed across the ‘red country’ of the Australian outback, whom he saw as ‘the outstanding national type’ because of their toughness and endurance. Bean wrote of the ‘mobilisation’ of the workforce during shearing season: ‘there began a great movement, away back in the heart of Australia’ and ‘some part of Australia is always in motion with it’. From July to November the shearers came across New South Wales ‘on horseback, some in sulkies, some on foot’, although by the time he was writing, most rode bicycles. Bean also admired the men who travelled across the country from east to west to the goldfields of Western Australia, likening them to explorers. 87 Bean is best known as the creator of the Anzac legend, which valorised the courage, determination and strength of the Australian soldiers during WWI, but the origins of that legend can be seen in his characterisation of the Australian bushman. Alongside the ‘bush legend’, the ‘pioneer legend’ was defi ned by historian John Hirst. Emphasising individual rather than collective enterprise, and employers more than their workers, it celebrated ‘those who fi rst settled the land as pastoralists or farmers’, as well as the explorers who preceded them, braving hardships, ‘subduing the land and battling the elements’.88 Hirst argued that in the absence of great warrior figures in Australia, explorers were seen as heroic for their bravery and initiative, often laying down their lives in their quest to make known country previously untouched by Europeans and to blaze trails for others to follow.89 The word ‘pioneer’ originally referred to: Those in an army who went as pioneers before the main body to prepare the way by clearing roads and making bridges and so on. It was then extended to the initiator of any new enterprise or new undertaking who ‘showed the way’ for those who came after.90

The early settlers often had to make their own roads and bridges. Paterson’s poem, ‘The Pioneers’ (1896), is a nostalgic celebration of ‘the brave old pioneers … who rode the trackless bush in heat and storm and drought’, forcing their way ‘by tangled scrub and forests grim towards the unknown west’.91 In Penton’s Inheritors, Derek Cabell, the patriarch of the family, looks back to the days when he ‘drove [his] wool to Brisbane on [his] lonesome when there wasn’t any road to follow’.92 Venturing into the trackless unknown implies a sense of bravery, daring, nonchalant risk taking and resilience, essential to personal success and nation building. In Lawson’s short story, ‘Roll Up at Talbragar’, Ben Duggan rides to rally friends to the funeral of his old bushman pal, Jack Denver. During the ride, Duggan thinks back to his roving days with Denver:

Making Tracks

35

Far away … and near away: up in Queensland and out on the wastes of the Never-Never. Riding and camping, hardship and comfort, monotony and adventure, drought, flood, blacks, and fi re. … Long dry stretches on Dead Man’s Track. Cutting across the country in No Man’s Land where there were no tracks into the Unknown. Chancing it and damning it. Ill luck and good luck. Laughing at it afterwards and joking at it always.93

Most works ignored or dismissed as inevitable the frontier violence that accompanied European ‘settlement’. Edwin Brady’s King’s Caravan (1911b) describes one of the fi rst white men to go into the far north of Australia. Concluding that ‘the Stone Age and the Age of Iron cannot exist side by side’, Brady wrote that this man, ‘carried civilisation – bullet winged’, and that present travellers are now ‘bound North, across rivers which he was the first white man to ford, through jungles where he had to cut his way’.94 Once again, the fiction of a ‘trackless bush’ dismisses Aboriginal presence, enabling the ‘pioneers’ to claim all the glory for taming and knowing the country. An unforgiving landscape devoid of any signs of ‘civilisation’ is a hallmark of the American Western, which is widely seen as a forerunner to the road genre, and has some parallels in Australian culture.95 Such a landscape offers a blank canvas ‘on which man can write, as if for the first time, the story he wants to live’.96 These Australian legends also serve the needs of a settler colonial society to construct positive, progressive stories or myths of origin in which heroic male ‘settlers’ battle a hostile environment to impose order and civilisation upon an ‘empty’ and untamed landscape, so making the settlers more ‘at home’ as the country’s rightful or ‘natural’ occupants.97 The road, when it existed at all, was often the stage on which those heroic myths could be enacted. Poetry and literature often expressed nostalgia for a disappearing frontier society, when times were harder. Lawson’s ‘Song of the Old Bullock Driver’ celebrates the ‘days when the bushman was bred’; when they: Journeyed on roads that were rougher and longer Than roads where the feet of our grandchildren tread.98

C.J. Dennis’s poem, ‘An Old Master’, valorises an elderly bullock driver as one of a disappearing breed: Heroes of an ancient order; men who punched across the border; Vanished giants of the sixties; puncher-princes of the track.99

The old bullocky’s identity and heroism is strongly associated with his relationship to the road, punching his way through, making inroads into the country with his team, like a true pioneer. The bush and pioneer legends became powerful and enduring national foundation mythologies, the pioneer legend being especially broad and influential. These legends also had a strong and lasting impact on how

36

Roads, Tourism and Cultural History

travellers and tourists imagined, experienced and represented their road trips in the motoring era, as will be seen in the following chapter. Roads and Tourism

Despite the difficulties and discomfort of travelling over long distances by road, there were moments of romance when travellers delighted in the scenic beauty of the surrounding landscape. Sophia Stanger was awestruck by the sublime ‘beauty of Lapstone Hill, with its overhanging rocks on our left hand, and its awful gullies on our right’.100 After descending Mount Victoria, where the dray’s wheels had to be locked to slow it down, the steepness eased to a ‘gradual descent, the road good, and the scenery beautiful by the setting sun’, while the next part of the journey was ‘beautiful in the extreme, and romantic beyond description’.101 Nathan Spielvogel offers a particularly charming vision of the ‘ideal Australian road’ in the Gippsland region of Victoria: That lovely drive home! That forty-four mile journey behind a pair of fi ne horses along an ideally Australian bush road! A narrow long track bounded on both sides by clean, straight ironbark and stringy barks, the occasional grey trunk of a white gum, the silver blue leaves of the blue gum … this real bush of Australia, unmarked by fence or house, or any sign of humanity save this long narrow winding thread connecting Buchan with the world!102

It was railways rather than roads, however, which led to the burgeoning tourist industry that emerged in the late 19th century. The railways were more comfortable, reliable and faster than horse-drawn transport, and offered more choice of destinations than ships and steamers. Railways were instrumental in creating almost all of Australia’s tourist resorts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The railway extended to Katoomba and Mount Victoria by 1868, and initially the Blue Mountains’ temperate climate attracted the wealthy, who built villas and chalets to escape the heat of Sydney in summer. By the 1890s, cheap railway excursion fares, accommodation in the form of hotels and guest houses, as well as guide books extolling the magnificent vistas and natural wonders of the region, made the Blue Mountains Australia’s premier tourist region.103 Beyond railway hubs, visitors could take shorter road trips by coach. One of the most popular attractions beyond Mount Victoria was the Jenolan Caves. The caves were supposedly discovered during the hunt for a bushranger in the Bathurst district. Visitors rode to the caves on horseback from the 1850s. A road was built in the 1870s, but it was still only a bridle track.104 In 1888 it took just under five hours to reach Mount Victoria by train, and a daily coach service ran from Mount Victoria to the Jenolan Caves. It took four hours, departing at 8 am, arriving at midday, and returning to Mount Victoria by 8 pm.105 In 1896 a road and bridge were built through the Grand Arch of the caves, making the road

Making Tracks

37

Figure 1.6 Grand Arch, Jenolan Caves c.1910 Source: Royal Australian Historical Society.

trip an impressive and integral part of the tourists’ experience (Figure 1.6). Tourism to the Wombeyan Caves, near Bowral in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales, also benefited when a road opened from Bowral railway station to the caves. This road, together with the improved road from Mount Victoria to the Jenolan Caves, created a scenic touring route of over 300 miles, linking the south coast with the Blue Mountains by road and rail. A new road from the railway station at Cooma to Mount Kosciuszko in the Australian Alps helped the remote region develop as a snow resort in the late 19th century. In Victoria, Cobb & Co. coaches still served isolated areas and catered for holidaymakers travelling to mineral spa resorts such as Daylesford and Hepburn Springs, or more distant seaside resorts. The Dandenong Ranges, outside Melbourne, were also popular for excursions.106 By the late 19th century, roads were beginning to work with railways to enhance the growth of tourist destinations. State governments built roads chiefly to encourage more people to travel on their railways, which were far more profitable than roads. Railways overtook horse-drawn transport and dominated overland travel until the 1920s. While Henry Lawson lamented that the railroad hath ruined the Cherry-tree Inn … For the coach comes no more over Cherry-tree Hill107

38

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both the railway and the horse were about to face even greater challenges. The arrival of the bicycle and the motor car would revolutionise road travel from the 1890s and early 20th century, ushering in a new era of road tourism. Notes – Chapter 1: Making Tracks (1) (2) (3)

(4) (5) (6) (7) (8)

(9)

(10) (11) (12)

(13) (14) (15) (16)

Donovan, V. and Wall, C. (eds) (2004) Making Connections: A Journey along Central Australian Aboriginal Trading Routes. Brisbane: Arts Queensland, p. 41. Layton, R. (1986) Uluru: An Aboriginal History of Ayers Rock. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, pp. 7, 12. Bruce Chatwin fi rst used the term ‘songlines’ to describe the epic ancestral song sagas that connect people through time and space, in his book recording his travels in Central Australia. See Chatwin, B. (1988) The Songlines. London: Picador, pp. 2, 15. See also James, D. (2013) Signposted by song: Cultural routes of the Australian desert. Historic Environment 25 (3), 33–34. Aboriginal people living in remote regions of Australia continue to travel and practise the traditions associated with their songlines. Kerr, R. (2013a) The bitumen and beyond: The Stuart Highway as a cultural route. Historic Environment 25 (3), 76. Mulvaney, J. (2002) … these Aboriginal lines of travel. Historic Environment 16 (2), 4. Chatwin, Songlines, p. 13. Muecke, S. (1997) No Road (Bitumen all the Way). Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, p. 18. Phillip to Sydney, 15 May 1788, Historical Records of Australia (HRA), I, 1, 22, cited in Broomham, R. (2001) Vital Connections: A History of NSW Roads from 1788. Alexandria: Hale & Iremonger, p. 13. Terra nullius is a term meaning ‘both a country without a sovereign recognised by European authorities and a territory where nobody owns any land at all’. In 1889 the Privy Council ruled that Australia had been ‘a tract of territory practically unoccupied, without settled inhabitants or settled law’. See Rowse, T. (2001) Terra nullius. In G. Davison, J. Hirst and S. Macintyre (eds) The Oxford Companion to Australian History (revised edn). South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, p. 643. Karskens, G. (2010) The Colony: A History of Early Sydney. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, p. 6. Waterhouse, R. (2005) The Vision Splendid: A Social and Cultural History of Rural Australia. Fremantle, WA: Curtin University Books, p. 18. While it is difficult to determine the exact location of Aboriginal pathways, it is thought that an Aboriginal track existed leading from Sydney to Botany Bay, following the Cooks River, approximating the line of the later Cooks River Road (now King Street and Botany Road). See City of Sydney website, The Newtown Project – ‘Gadigal Newtown’ at http://www.sydneyarchives.info/cadigal-newtown?start=2 (accessed 5 February 2013); Aplin, G. (ed.) (1988) A Diffi cult Infant: Sydney before Macquarie. Kensington, NSW: New South Wales University Press, p. 45 and Figure 2.3. White, J. (1962) Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, p. 136. Karskens, G. (2005) ‘This spirit of emigration’: The nature and meanings of escape in early New South Wales. Journal of Australian Colonial History 7, 1–34. Karskens, Colony, pp. 284–285. Broomham, Vital Connections, p. 21; Wotherspoon, G. (2010) ‘Roads’. Dictionary of Sydney. See http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/roads (accessed 16 February 2016).

Making Tracks

(17) (18) (19) (20) (21) (22) (23)

(24)

(25) (26) (27)

(28) (29) (30)

(31) (32) (33) (34) (35) (36) (37) (38) (39) (40) (41) (42) (43) (44) (45) (46)

(47) (48) (49) (50) (51) (52)

39

Lay, M.G. (1984) History of Australian Roads. ARRB Special Report No. 29. Melbourne: Australian Road Research Board, p. 3. Tench, W. (1961) Sydney’s First Four Years. Sydney and London: Angus & Robertson, pp. 153–154. Tench, Sydney’s First Four Years, p. 227. Macquarie to Castlereagh, 30 April 1810, cited in Broomham, Vital Connections, p. 33. Sydney Gazette, 6 April 1811, cited in Broomham, Vital Connections, p. 33. Broomham, Vital Connections, pp. 33–34, 37, 42. Karskens, G. (1988) An Historical and Archaeological Study of Cox’s Road and Early Crossings of the Blue Mountains, New South Wales. Sydney: Crown Lands Office, Bicentennial Project Unit. Sydney Gazette, 22 May 1813, cited in Cunningham, C. (1996) The Blue Mountains Rediscovered, Beyond the Myths of Early Australian Exploration. Kenthurst, NSW: Kangaroo Press, p. 16. Cunningham, Blue Mountains Rediscovered, p. 143. Broomham, Vital Connections, p. 38. Hickson, E. (2018 [1966]) Cox, William (1764–1837). Australian Dictionary of Biography. Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National University. See http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/cox-william-1934/text2309 (accessed 22 February 2016). Waterhouse, Vision, p. 23. Waterhouse, Vision, pp. 19–20. Macquarie, L. (1979) Journals of his Tours in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land 1810–1822. Sydney: Library of Australian History & Library Council of NSW, p. 98. Broomham, Vital Connections, p. 37. Broomham, Vital Connections, p. 37. Urry, Tourist Gaze, p. 4. Waterhouse, Private Pleasures, p. 19. Cunningham, P. (1827) Two Years in New South Wales. London: H. Colburn, p. 71. Broomham, Vital Connections, pp. 39–40. State Records NSW website at https://www.records.nsw.gov.au/state-archives/ research-topics/convicts/convict-settlement-norfolk-island (accessed 1 March 2016). Davison, Hirst and McIntyre (eds) Oxford Companion, p. 426. Waterhouse, Vision, pp. 20–22. Broomham, Vital Connections, pp. 49–54. National Archives of Scotland website at http://www.nas.gov.uk/about/070806.asp (accessed 7 March 2016). Broomham, Vital Connections, p. 49; Lay, Australian Roads, p. 16. Blainey, Tyranny of Distance, pp. 131–132. Karskens, Colony, p. 300. Lay, Australian Roads, p. 5. Mackaness, G. (ed.) (1965) Fourteen Journeys Over the Blue Mountains of New South Wales 1813–1841. Sydney: Horwitz Publications, pp. 260, 262. Stanger refers to John Bunyan’s story, The Pilgrim’s Progress, in which the protagonist sinks into a swamp of despair under the weight of guilt for his sins. Mackaness, Fourteen Journeys, pp. 244, 247. Mackaness, Fourteen Journeys, p. 106. Mackaness, Fourteen Journeys, p. 243. Turner, G. (1986) National Fictions: Literature, Film, and the Construction of Australian Narrative. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, p. 26. Mackaness, Fourteen Journeys, pp. 244–245. Mackaness, Fourteen Journeys, p. 6.

40

(53) (54) (55) (56) (57) (58) (59) (60) (61) (62) (63) (64) (65) (66) (67) (68) (69) (70) (71) (72) (73) (74) (75) (76) (77) (78) (79) (80) (81) (82) (83) (84) (85) (86) (87)

(88) (89) (90) (91) (92) (93)

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Mackaness, Fourteen Journeys, p. 27. Mackaness, Fourteen Journeys, p. 192. Lay, Australian Roads, p. 14. Lawson, H. (1913) The hairy man. In H. Lawson (ed.) Triangles of Life and Other Stories. Melbourne: Lothian, p. 210. Examples include the fi lm The Back of Beyond (1954), Picnic at Hanging Rock (novel and fi lm: 1967, 1975) and Walkabout (1971). Lay, Australian Roads, pp. 14–15. Harris, C. (2002) Culture and geography: South Australia’s Mound Springs as trade and communications routes. Historic Environment 16 (2), pp. 8–9. Clune, F. (1947) Roaming around Australia. Melbourne: Hawthorne Press, p. 193. Blainey, Tyranny, pp. 121–122. Waterhouse, Vision, pp. 22–32. Waterhouse, Vision, p. 37; Davison, Hirst and McIntyre (eds) Oxford Companion, p. 449. Waterhouse, Vision, pp. 35, 177. Lawson, H. (1924 [1907]) The Romance of the Swag. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, p. 87. Kirwan, Sir J. (1936) My Life’s Adventure. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, p. 62. Penton, B. (1936) Inheritors. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, p. 117. Corduroy roads did exist in America, but were rare or non-existent in Britain. Gaunt, M. (1916) A good Samaritan. In M. Gaunt (ed.) Ends of the Earth: Stories. London: T. Werner Laurie, p. 152. Waterhouse, Vision, pp. 24, 34–35. Cuffey, P. (1981) Buggies and Horse-Drawn Vehicles in Australia. Lilydale, Vic: Pioneer Design Studio, p. 23. Broomham, Vital Connections, pp. 60–61, 75. Broomham, Vital Connections, p. 75. Broomham, Vital Connections, p. 75. Lay, Australian Roads, p. 23. Austin, K.A. (1972) The Lights of Cobb and Co. Adelaide: Rigby, pp. 171–172. Davison, Hirst and McIntyre (eds) Oxford Companion, p. 695. Lay, Australian Roads, p. 23. Mackaness, Fourteen Journeys, pp. 260, 262. Blainey, Tyranny, pp. 294–295. Stevens, C. (2002) Tin Mosques and Ghantowns: A History of Afghan Camel Drivers in Australia. Alice Springs: Paul Fitzsimons, pp. 2, 13–14, 16–20. Waterhouse, Vision, pp. 37, 103–104. Diamond, Bulldust to Beef Roads, p. 5; Edmonds, Vital Link, p. 16. Ward, R. (1977 [1958]) The Australian Legend. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, p. 245. Ward, Australian Legend, p. 252. Lawson, Romance of the Swag, pp. 2–3. Bean, C.E.W. (1963 [1910]) On the Wool Track. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, pp.  v–vii, ix, 143–145. Reproduced by permission of the copyright holders, Mr Edward Bean Le Couteur and Mrs Anne Marie Carroll. Hirst, J.B. (1978) The pioneer legend. Historical Studies 18 (71), 316. Hirst, Pioneer legend, pp. 316–319. Hirst, Pioneer legend, p. 336. Paterson, A.B. (1917a) Pioneers. In A.B. Paterson (ed.) Saltbush Bill, J. P. and Other Verses. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, pp. 59–60. Penton, Inheritors, p. 307. Lawson, H. (1910) Roll up at Talbragar. In H. Lawson (ed.) The Rising of the Court and Other Sketches in Prose and Verse. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, pp. 20–21.

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(94) Brady, E.J. (1911b) The King’s Caravan: Across Australia in a Wagon. London: Edward Arnold, pp. 221, 223. (95) Tomkins, J. (1992) West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns. New York: Oxford University Press, p. 74; Carfrae, M. (1994) Roads to heaven: The American road genre in fi lm and literature 1945–1992. MPhil thesis, University of Sydney, p. 2. (96) Tomkins, West of Everything, p. 74. (97) As Johnston and Lawson (2000), Veracini (2010) and others argue, among the legacies of colonialism are anxieties and uncertainties over claims to place, which are resolved through constructing progressive, heroic narratives of origin to indigenise or naturalise the settler society and expunge the memory of Indigenous presence, and of the often violent practices by which Indigenous peoples were displaced. Outback or frontier landscapes are key sites in this indigenisation mythology. Settler colonialism is an ongoing process and is manifested in cultural practices and representations. See Johnston, A. and Lawson, A. (2000) Settler colonies. In H. Schwartz and S. Ray (eds) A Companion to Postcolonial Studies. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 360–377; Veracini, L. (2010) Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. (98) Lawson, H. (1900) Song of the old bullock driver. In H. Lawson (ed.) Verses Popular and Humorous. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, p. 35. (99) Dennis, C.J. (1918) An old master. In C.J. Dennis (ed.) Backblock Ballads and Later Verses. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, p. 14. (100) Mackaness, Fourteen Journeys, p. 259. (101) Mackaness, Fourteen Journeys, pp. 260–261. (102) Spielvogel, N.F. (c.1914) The Gumsucker at Home. Melbourne: George Robertson, p. 32. (103) Davidson and Spearritt, Holiday Business, pp. 12–18, 154. (104) Davidson and Spearritt, Holiday Business, pp. 9–10. (105) Goodlet, K. (2013) Blue Mountains Journeys. Hazlebrook, NSW: Goodlet, p. 140. (106) Cuffey, Buggies, p. 88. (107) Lawson, H. (1912) Cherry-tree inn. In H. Lawson (ed.) In the Days when the World Was Wide (revised edn). Sydney: Angus & Robertson, p. 135.

2 The Call of the Open Road

On 10 March 1897 Jerome Murif cycled down the firm sands of the beach at Glenelg in South Australia and dipped the wheels of his bicycle, which he christened ‘Diamond’, into the waters of the Southern Ocean before setting off on the fi rst south-to-north transcontinental crossing of Australia by bicycle (Figure 2.1). As he left, he recalled ‘a glad feeling of being alive, untrammelled, free. And so we gaily sped along. It was a very dance on wheels. We are on the track at last!’1 Murif’s ‘track’, which he also often referred to as a ‘road’, even ‘highway’ at times, scarcely resembled anything like a road by today’s standards. He followed a barely marked route, sometimes consisting only of animal tracks, or the path roughly laid by those who worked on the Overland Telegraph and Transcontinental Railway lines, getting directions from supply depots or telegraph stations along the way. As Murif rode or pushed his bicycle through sand and spinifex, he looked ‘longingly for signs of a mulga thicket’, as ‘there … the ground will be much fi rmer’ and ‘the road improves to very good’. 2 Jolted by riding over old wooden telegraph poles lying across his track, and plagued by flies, thirst, heat and burrs, which punctured his tyres, he nevertheless marvelled at witnessing the transformation of the landscape, enjoying the sensory appeal of the experience, and a spiritual awakening as he moved through the centre of the continent, then reached the tropical north. Murif marked the completion of his journey with another ritualistic bathing of the bicycle in the Arafura Sea off Palmerston, now Darwin, on 21 May 1897. 3 He saw himself as a pioneer, following in the footsteps of explorer John McDouall Stuart, who was the fi rst to successfully complete a south–north transcontinental crossing in 1862. Stuart, too, had dipped his feet and washed his face and hands in the waters of the Indian Ocean off Van Diemen’s Gulf when he reached the north coast of Australia.4 Murif also wanted to prove the reliability of the bicycle and, like a true explorer or pioneer, to open the way for others to follow, and make the inland of Australia and its Northern Territory better known. 5 Murif’s journey evokes the zeitgeist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Australia, when the allure of bicycling and then motoring captured people’s imagination. Yet many of the sentiments expressed by 42

The Call of the Open Road

43

Figure 2.1 Jerome Murif with ‘Diamond’ Source: State Library of NSW.

Murif – the freedom of the road, connection with the landscape, identifi cation with explorers and pioneers, discovery of nation and self, and the idea of the road or track as a distinctive and separate space – resonated well into the 20th century and beyond as the road trip became an essential part of Australian culture. The cycling and motoring era coincided with enormous technological, economic, social and cultural upheaval in Australia as the social and economic base shifted between a rural-pastoral tradition and a developing urban-industrial one, particularly from the 1920s. 6 On the road, an increasing tension was played out between the desire to embrace an emerging, modern urban-industrial Australia and its representative technology, including the motor vehicle, and nostalgia for an earlier, fading, rural-pastoral era.7 Anxiety over the changes wrought by modernity were not unique to Australia or to the motor age. Britain, Germany and America also struggled to reconcile established ideas about their national identity with the transformations wrought by modernising urban industrial economies and motorisation, especially in the 1920s and 1930s. 8 What is distinctive and surprising is how long the resistance to modernity persisted and how it was expressed in Australian culture.

44

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Good roads were a long time coming in many parts of Australia. In general, however, as roads and vehicles improved, the relationship between travellers, the road and the landscape shifted from a close connection, whereby the road was little differentiated from the surrounding environment, to one in which travellers became increasingly detached and insulated from their surrounds. Faster, smoother, straighter roads, then freeways, together with the increasing numbers of vehicles, created a greater imposition and impact on the roadside landscape and weakened the sense of physical engagement between road travellers and their environment. Improved roads and vehicles also altered travellers’ perceptions of space and time, and hence the imaginative dimension of their journeys. By the late 20th century, many leisure travellers increasingly sought the spirit of adventure, achievement and exhilaration that characterised the early years of bicycling and motoring, by travelling off rather than on the road. Setting off on Two Wheels

The invention of the safety bicycle, with brakes, chain drive and pneumatic tyres, in the late 19th century, revolutionised road travel in Australia and around the world. The bicycle provided a safe, affordable means of transport that was cheaper and easier to maintain than the horse, requiring no food or rest. Cyclists, including many women, enjoyed a new sense of independence, being able to go wherever they chose, and to cover far greater distances at faster speeds in a day, on terrain not suited to carriages. Cycling literally opened up new horizons for travellers. By the turn of the century, around 200,000 bicycles had been sold in Australia.9 The cycling boom from the 1890s to the 1920s both previewed and laid the foundations for the coming age of motor vehicles. The bicycle allowed a much closer, more intimate connection between the traveller, the machine, road and surrounding environment than earlier forms of transport, including the horse, coach and railway. The cyclist felt keenly every bump, corrugation, pothole and steep grade, and so road conditions acutely affected the cyclist’s experience. Conditions that were merely uncomfortable or inconvenient for horse, wagon, stagecoach travellers or pedestrians could be fatal to cyclists. Even by the end of WWI, the majority of Australia’s roads were in poor condition, described as ‘natural surface’ or ‘cleared only’.10 In Australia, as in North America, cyclists started Good Roads Associations and the Cycle Pathways and Roads Improvement and Touring Associations in the 1890s to lobby for improved roads, not only for their enjoyment, but for their own safety.11 The cycling craze of the 1890s also ushered in new attitudes to pleasure touring by road. Cycling clubs, forerunners of motoring organisations, arranged day, weekend or longer tours and avowed the health-giving benefits of exercise and exploring the scenic beauty of nature away from

The Call of the Open Road 45

the city.12 Cyclist Frank Walker captured the unique sensory experience of road travel by bicycle – sentiments more often associated with a much later era of motor touring. In his recollections of cycling in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Walker wrote: Who has not felt the ‘call of the Road’, after many years experience of travelling on a bicycle through the Australian Bush? … There comes a day when the ‘call’ can be no longer ignored … The exhilaration of rapid motion, the sights and scents, and scenes of the bush, and the feeling of complete independence that comes over one, must be experienced to be appreciated. The affection one soon comes to feel for the machine that carries its rider so swiftly and safely, and that intoxication of the senses when the long descents are skimmed like a swallow on the wing; these are the main factors in that ‘call of the Road’, which all who possess the true love of Touring are bound to feel, sooner or later.13

These pleasure-seeking cyclists helped to pave the way for the development of tourist resorts such as the Australian Alps region, which attracted cycling tourists from the mid-1890s, being within a day’s trip from Melbourne.14 Cyclists were also influential in developing touring maps, particularly focusing on road conditions. The first road map of Victoria was compiled for cyclists. George Broadbent, a keen cyclist and early advocate for the ‘good roads movement’, produced maps in which the road was a leading feature, and which also showed intermediate distances between towns and cities. These maps represented a new phase in geography. For cyclists, and later for motorists, Broadbent’s maps became an indispensable part of any road trip.15 As well as extolling its appeal as a pleasure machine, many cycling enthusiasts and promoters were keen to prove the bicycle’s reliability over long distances and harsh terrain, advertising it to a rural as well as an urban clientele. Between 1893 and 1900, several overland cycling expeditions took place. Alongside Murif’s south–north crossing, others travelled routes from the Gulf of Carpentaria to Melbourne, Croydon, in Queensland to Sydney, Sydney to Melbourne, and Perth to Brisbane via the Nullarbor. Intrepid overland adventurer Francis Birtles completed two circuits around Australia and seven transcontinental crossings between 1905 and 1912.16 Such feats demonstrated the bicycle’s suitability for longterm use by rural workers and travellers. Many shearers eagerly adopted the bicycle to travel between stations. When the safety bicycle appeared in Longreach, Queensland in 1895, teams of shearers could travel the 128 miles between Longreach and Winton within a day. By comparison, the most impressive walker, Frank Gaunt, reportedly walked the 72 miles between Muttaburra and Longreach in 20 hours.17 Rural workers helped to popularise the bicycle, just as squatters would do for the motor car a few decades later.18

46

Roads, Tourism and Cultural History

Early Motoring: An Endurance Test

The fi rst motor vehicles were developed in Europe and America in the 1880s and 1890s. In Australia, early experiments in building steam or petrol-driven cars also began around this time. Engineer Herbert Thomson of Armadale in Victoria built Australia’s fi rst steam-powered car in 1896. Thomson and his business partner, E.L. Holmes, embarked on the fi rst interstate motoring trip in 1900, travelling from Bathurst to Melbourne – a journey of just under 500 miles.19 Like most pioneering road trips, the main purpose was to demonstrate the car’s reliability and suitability for Australian conditions. Australia did not develop its own successful car manufacturing industry until the mid-20th century; therefore most models were imported from Britain, continental Europe or America. Accounts of motor vehicle travel in the period before and immediately following WWI, which were often published as pamphlets, were dominated by journeys aimed at promoting particular car manufacturers and related accessories (Figure 2.2). The earliest vehicles were open, with no windscreens, roofs or doors, leaving motorists exposed to the elements. As roads remained relatively undeveloped and unsealed, dust

Figure 2.2 Early road-trip narratives promoted particular brands of vehicles and accessories, aiming to demonstrate their reliability in Australian conditions Source: Burton, J.L. (1918) Across Australia in Seven Days – J.L. Burton’s Story of his Record Drive on a Hupmobile Shod with Barnet Glass ‘Boomerang’ Tyres. Sydney: Marchant’s Patent Highlight, cover. (State Library of NSW.)

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and bogs were a constant menace, forcing travellers to negotiate with the surrounding landscape intimately and directly. In this respect, they had something in common with cyclists; however, unlike a bicycle, it was not possible to walk the car around boggy ground or through sandhills, or to carry it over creek and river crossings. In early accounts of motoring, understandably, the travellers were preoccupied with road conditions, or the lack thereof. Holmes concluded his narrative of the Thomson car’s overland journey with a summary of daily mileage, running times and fuel consumption, which he considered ‘a gratifying result, comparing favourably with recent English trials, especially when the beautiful English roads are classed against the wretched Australian tracks – not “roads”’. 20 These rough conditions suited car manufacturers’ agenda, as their vehicles’ ability to survive long journeys in the toughest of environments could only enhance their prospects of winning over potential future motorists. They also allowed pioneering motorists with a sense of adventure to demonstrate their own resourcefulness and skill in conquering the landscape, with the new technology of the motor car. Henry Dutton and his mechanic, Murray Aunger, made the fi rst successful transcontinental crossing from Adelaide to Darwin in a motor car – a 25 horsepower Clement Talbot – on their second attempt in 1908 (Figure 2.3). In an interview for the Australian Motorist, Aunger commented on the journey: Motoring is strenuous work when you have not only to fi nd your course through a wilderness, but make a road for your car whilst advancing, and even build your own bridges. Crossing the Warrender, we had to make a corduroy track of branches and saplings, which we cut out of the scrub, for in the bottom of the creek was a treacherous quicksand. 21

For the fi rst long-distance motorists, the landscape was something to be fought with and mastered, leaving little time for appreciating the scenery. Francis Birtles made several epic overlanding journeys by bicycle and car in the early 20th century, including transcontinental, around-Australia and international routes – driving from London to Melbourne in 1928.22 The title of the book recording his adventures, published in 1935, is Battle Fronts of Outback, which sums up his approach to the harsh Australian landscape. 23 As with the bicycle, the car fi rst made the greatest impact in rural Australia. Pastoralists and farmers quickly realised its usefulness for patrolling and working their properties, and in travelling to and from towns and visiting neighbours. 24 The Model T Ford reached Australia soon after its release in 1908 and became known as ‘The Squatter’s Joy’. Like many American-made vehicles, it suited Australian conditions due to its high ground clearance which made it suitable for travelling over paddocks and rough ground. The location of the Model T’s steering box and

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Figure 2.3 Henry Dutton and Murray Aunger’s first attempt at crossing the continent in their car, ‘Angelina’, 1907 Source: H. Dutton Collection, Northern Territory Library, Photo No. PH0227/0009.

magneto ignition system also made it less vulnerable to flooding if the car was driven through water. 25 Motoring enthusiasts continued in their efforts to ever more convincingly prove the worth of particular makes of vehicles or accessories as well as their own prowess, by record-breaking feats into the 1920s and beyond. 26 Motoring for Pleasure

Although people living in rural areas adopted the car more readily than city dwellers, interest began to develop in its possibilities for pleasure touring in the early 20th century. The Automobile Club of Victoria was formed in December 1903 and, although membership was initially small at around 20, they organised tours and club outings. When the US Atlantic Fleet visited Melbourne in 1908, members of the club assembled over 80 cars – reportedly the largest fl eet in the Southern Hemisphere – to take the visitors on a run to the ‘Blacks’ Spur’ [sic] in the Dandenong Ranges and Yarra Valley, as ‘a pleasant means of showing off the beauties of Victoria’. One participant described the ‘winding dustless roads’ steadily climbing up the hills, leading to ‘one of the most

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beautiful scenes in Victoria. The fertile Yarra Flats extending right past Yarra Glen and Lilydale, surrounded by the Dandenong and the Dividing Ranges’. 27 The Australian Motorist, Australia’s fi rst motoring journal, was founded in 1908 in Melbourne. Claiming to ‘represent the motorists of Australia’, it promoted news from the various state automobile clubs, which were being established at this time. 28 The journal featured motor trade advertisements and regular articles on pleasure touring by specialist motoring and travel writers as well as members of the public. Tasmania was one of the fi rst places to be heavily promoted as a desirable destination for a driving tour, with its great scenic beauty and good roads. By 1914 a touring department was established within the Automobile Club of Victoria. Dr Edwin Charles Temple Smith’s trip from Winton in Queensland to Sydney in 1908 is significant as he and his companion, Mr Palmer Kent, undertook the long journey primarily for leisure. Neither were specialist mechanics and they travelled in a small eight horsepower Darracq car. Most notably, although they still encountered difficult terrain, bogging and mechanical problems, these travellers appeared to be much more aware of the beauties of the landscape through which they passed and the pleasure afforded by travelling on good sections of road through picturesque locations. Despite their hardships, Smith declared, ‘We are seeing life and having a real good time’. 29 The Motor Car Journal in London, which reported the duo’s successful trip, claimed that theirs was ‘the longest overland journey yet undertaken … made by practically a novice, on so small a car’. More importantly, the press reports saw the journey as proving ‘the reliableness [sic] of the motor car, even in amateur hands’, but also as demonstrating ‘the suitability of our Western roads for motoring in fi ne weather’. 30 It was during WWI that the motor vehicle most convincingly proved its worth for long-distance transport. By the 1920s, cars had improved and were more plentiful and accessible to a larger section of the population, rather than being the preserve of the upper classes. 31 Women played an important role in further democratising the motor car, as their enthusiasm for motoring encouraged manufacturers to make cars easier to drive. In the 1920s women such as Marion Bell and Gladys Sandford undertook ambitious round-Australia road trips, which the media and public followed with great interest. 32 The Australian Motorist used the romantic imagery of the open road, with its promise of escape and adventure, to promote motor touring in the early 1920s (Figure 2.4). 33 The vision of a long, straight stretch of country road disappearing into the horizon was designed to appeal to motorists’ desire to escape the confi nes of their life in the city for the freedom and exhilaration of speeding along in the fresh air, seeing new sights. The Australian Motorist’s 1927 Christmas touring section was headed

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Figure 2.4 The Australian Motorist encouraged Australians to answer ‘the call of the open road’ Source: Australian Motorist, January 1923. (State Library of NSW.)

‘The siren’s song’, and urged motorists to answer the ‘call of the open road’ with the invitation: We have yielded to the lure of the open road, which called, saying, Come and let happiness reign in your hearts. … Does the longing never seize you … to travel some country road in early morning, when the dew sparkles like diamonds in the rays of the rising sun? … As a form of recreative amusement the motor has no equal. Away from the routine grind – from the mail, the telegraph and the telephone – Mother Nature’s anodyne dispels ennui and cures most of the ills that flesh is heir to. … The elusive denizens of stream and forest are not to be found near thickly populated centres. One must go far afield to fi nd them. Trains and trams will signally fail to take you to their haunts. Therein, to the sportsman, lies the utility of the motor, which conveys him wither he wills. 34

From the 1920s onwards, the Australian Motorist also began to promote long-distance outback motor travel to a wider audience. Articles such as R.P. Saunier’s account of his trip from Perth to Sydney and back in 1925 over ‘roads like a billiard table’, and another’s ‘2638 Mile Pleasure Jaunt … in a Morris-Cowley’ gave a grossly over-optimistic impression of conditions. 35 By the late 1920s new speed records were set for east–west transcontinental trips in sedan cars, and long-distance touring began to be considered as being within the capabilities of ordinary Australians. 36 By 1939 more than 1000 crossings between Adelaide and Perth, and

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Adelaide to Alice Springs had been made in the dry season. 37 Oil companies also began to provide fuel dumps along major routes such as the east– west and north–south transcontinental routes from the late 1920s so that it was no longer necessary for motorists to take or arrange their own fuel supplies before leaving. By the mid-1930s the oil companies were also publishing guides detailing: road surface conditions; approximate average speeds obtainable from point to point; recommended campsites, water supplies and hotel accommodation; and commentary on the general nature of the country and climatic conditions. 38 Despite the Australian Motorist’s enthusiasm, actual road conditions in many parts of rural and outback Australia remained relatively primitive – mostly unsealed – even into the late 20th century. What was known as a ‘road’ or even ‘highway’ in Australia was very different from roads in Britain, Europe or America. In many cases, there was very little distinction between the ‘road’ and the ‘natural’ landscape. Unsealed roads were affected by weather conditions, with Queensland’s notorious black soil plains roads turning to the consistency of porridge after rain. Sheep and cattle walking along sand or dirt tracks cut into the surface with their hooves, leaving ridges which hardened into corrugations, making for an extremely rough travelling surface during the dry season. 39 The names given to roads by travellers indicate something of their nature. ‘Tragedy Mile’, encountered by Gladys Sandford on her transcontinental trip in 1927, was ‘a narrow track over deep hummocky sand’ made worse by its recent traversing by cattle, near Alice Springs.40 ‘Purgatory Highway’ was christened by Frank Hurley on his motor tour from Adelaide to Alice Springs in 1935. The type of roads he experienced were ‘scarcely roads in the motoring sense, but rather trails made by infrequent wheels running in the same grooves’, where ‘careful driving is compulsory, as the way meanders among gnarled old gumtrees’ and ‘crosses sandy creek beds’.41 According to William Hatfield, ‘Madman’s Track’, between Port Hedland and Broome, was ‘a hundred mile stretch of sand’ bounded by ‘walls’ of ‘thin scrub’ and was named by men who walked along it looking for work, following the cleared line for the telegraph. When Hatfield drove along it in 1932, he wrote, ‘Only a hundred miles of it; but it stands out as the most depressing drive I have ever made, and I have been on some rotten tracks’.42 Leslie and Coralie Rees discovered on their trip through north-west Western Australia in the early 1950s that, ‘soon [they] were swirling along two deep sand-tracks that were the road to De Grey [Station] – indeed to all points north. These wheel-tracks were the Great Northern Highway’.43 Motoring and Modernity: Ribbons in the Landscape

Closer to cities, on major intra- and interstate routes and in tourist regions, roads did improve to some extent from the mid- to late 1930s as

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the economy recovered from the Great Depression. Many new touring routes were constructed as unemployment relief projects. Commonwealth assistance to state roads organisations, such as the New South Wales Department of Main Roads and Victoria’s Country Roads Board, helped to create more systematic improvement programmes, including widening and further extension of dustless surfaces on sections of the Hume, New England, Pacific and Great Western Highways. By this time, motor vehicles were fitted with balloon tyres and could travel at faster speeds, averaging 30 miles per hour (mph), compared to earlier years when average speeds ranged between 15 and 25 mph. Such changes altered the design and construction of road surfaces, curves, rises and shoulders, to enable motorists to see further ahead.44 In the aftermath of WWI, the 1920s and 1930s brought major changes in road engineering and technology, particularly in Britain, Germany and the United States. America led the way in adopting a scientific approach to road building, and in testing and utilising new materials such as reinforced concrete, bitumen and asphaltic concrete surfacing. While Australia’s road system did not develop to a comparable extent, the authorities took a keen interest in American and European trends. William Calder, Chairman of Victoria’s Country Roads Board, visited Britain and America in 1924, paying close attention to American developments due to the similarities with Australian conditions.45 From the 1920s to late 1940s, Australia’s programme of road improvement involved the introduction of new manmade materials. Asphaltic concrete and bitumen replaced more ‘natural’ dirt and gravel surfaces, and reinforced concrete bridges replaced earlier timber structures. Yet, during this period, road designers also paid attention to aesthetics and attempted to build roads that harmonised with the surrounding environment. Another founding member of the Country Roads Board, Major William McCormack, insisted that roads should, as far as possible, ‘follow the lines of Nature’ for both aesthetic and practical reasons.46 Roads were also beginning to be built specifically as tourist routes. California’s coast road, which became scenic Highway One, was built between 1919 and 1937. The Columbia River Highway, Oregon, built in 1921, and the Blue Ridge Parkway through Virginia built in 1935 are other examples.47 The American parkway system – limited access roads with smooth concrete surfaces and graceful curves, facilitating safe, fast travel with optimum views and access to scenic locations – was a significant development, which also influenced the development of German autobahns. Emphasis on streamlined design in roads and vehicles reflected the modernist aesthetic of clean, graceful lines, marrying form and function: speed, efficiency and beauty.48 The Great Ocean Road, on the south-west coast of Victoria, was one of the fi rst roads in Australia purposely constructed as a scenic tourist route. Built between 1919 and 1932, the 150-mile road provided

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employment for more than 3000 returned WWI servicemen, and was also intended to be a memorial to those who fought and died in the war. Promoters compared the Great Ocean Road to California’s coast road, and were keenly aware of the enormous benefits which increasing tourist traffic brought to the state of California.49 From the 1930s, Australian motorists’ travel narratives reflect an increasing awareness of the road itself as an active agent in mediating and facilitating views of the landscape and in contributing to the sensory and aesthetic experience of travelling. A road’s alignment, grade and design played an important role in the way in which landscape was unveiled before the travellers’ gaze. The road from Melbourne to Bendigo, which for years had been an impassable track, was by 1935 ‘a beautiful bitumen road all the way’, where ‘every bend in the road turns into a new vista’. 50 Roads through developing tourist regions such as the Australian Alps were described as ‘rising and falling smoothly, curving gently around contours and opening up surprise views at each new bend’. 51 For Frank Dalby Davison and his party, travelling the Pacific Highway in the mid-1930s, the road itself often formed a decorative element of the landscape. He described the road as ‘a ribbon of brown gravel’, or as ‘a thin, grey ribbon’ following ‘the winding ridges, sometimes running with a cutting of bright yellow stone towering up on one side and a vista of untrodden valleys on the other – bronze green with overtones of misty blue’. 52 That’s Progress?! Reacting against Modernity on the Road

How did travellers, writers and fi lmmakers respond as roads and vehicles constantly evolved across the 20th century? Not everyone greeted the modern technology with enthusiasm. Literary representations of the road in Australia often expressed strong antagonism towards the impact of ‘progress’ on roads themselves as they improved and motor vehicles became more common. A recurring theme is the contrast between the more natural bush road and the increasingly sophisticated new or improved road, upon which the manmade mark of technology was more starkly imprinted. In King’s Caravan, Edwin Brady made his preference clear: Our track from Bundaberg was no macadamised highway echoing the familiar sounds of progress, but a grassy trail that frequently lost itself in faint pathways or a blazed tree. … What matter if the rivers knew not the bridge-builders nor the roads macadam?53

When the bicycle first became popular, some resented the ‘inanimate soulless thing of metal’ which posed a threat to horse transport. 54 Banjo Paterson expressed this contemptuous attitude in his poem, ‘Mulga Bill’s Bicycle’, which ridicules a man who ‘caught the cycling craze’, spurning ‘the good old horse that served him many days’. When he loses control of

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the bicycle while descending a hill, and plunges into Dead Man’s Creek, a shaken Bill decides to leave it there, declaring that ‘a horse’s back is good enough henceforth for Mulga Bill’. 55 For some, the mechanical cycle and its successor, the motor vehicle, challenged cherished images, born at a time when Australia was defi ned primarily by its rural culture and equestrian tradition, a culture based on the central figures of the bushman, stockman and drover. 56 Similar anxieties accompanied the arrival of the railway in early 19th-century Europe and America. As the new mechanised technology replaced animal-powered transportation, altering the relationship between the traveller, the vehicle and the journey, people viewed the old pre-industrial ways as more ‘natural’ and as having more ‘soul’ than their usurper. 57 In Australia, reactions ranged from nostalgia for the old ways, to fear and suspicion, to outright contempt and hostility towards modern forms of transport. In a nostalgic tribute to an old teamster, who had been on the road in central Queensland for the past 50 years, an article in Walkabout magazine in December 1937 lamented: Soon there will be very few of the old teamsters left, as the motor lorry and road trains have displaced the old horse-drawn wagon, which has proved much too slow for modern times. A stirring narrative of courage, determination and resourcefulness could be written about the horse and bullock teamsters of the old days. 58

Dora Birtles’ novel, The Overlanders, which accompanied the feature film released in 1946, centres on the Parsons family: Pa, Ma, and their two daughters, Mary, the eldest, and teenaged Helen, who are both accomplished horsewomen. The Parsons run a cattle station in north-western Australia. They do not own a motor car and always travel in a ‘four-wheeled eight-horse light waggon [sic] called “The Shay”’. Birtles establishes the tension between clinging to this old-fashioned form of transport versus the lure of the modern motor vehicle, exemplified by the ‘cream Rolls Royce station waggon [sic]’, owned by the publican’s wife, 200 miles away: ‘The Shay’ was a thoroughbrace waggon all the way from the days of Cobb and Co. There was more history than paint to it. It could do in a day, with luck, what the cream station waggon could do in an hour on the rough Territory roads. Admittedly it was a handy vehicle for following the cattle on a drove, but a bit of an anachronism on the King’s highway. Helen loved the shay. She would have loved the cream station waggon if Pa Parsons had owned it … but she didn’t hanker after it or any other car. Horses were enough for Helen – as they had been for Mary until she’d got a sense of shame that her Dad didn’t even own a motor car. 59

Travel writer George Farwell expressed contempt for the encroaching motor transport that would eventually take the place of the drovers on outback stock routes. Although Farwell himself was travelling by car

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through the Gulf country of northern Queensland in 1950, he compared the image of modern travellers unfavourably with that of the drover: Some diesel truck will lumber on, wheels ploughing up the black soil, or a swift indifferent sedan. But they do not seem to be part of the country; not in the old style. So apparent is this that a drover passing down the track with cattle will hardly spare a glance for the approaching motorist. Meet him on horseback, and he will yarn half the day. But, such is the old campaigner’s pride, he will studiously ignore alien modes of travel.60 Changing Perceptions

As roads improved and cars became faster and more enclosed, travellers’ perceptions of distance, space and time altered. In the early 19th century, the effect of railroad travel was described as the ‘annihilation of space and time’.61 Motor vehicles also had a huge impact on ways of seeing and relating to the environment. William Hatfield’s narrative of his trip around Australia in a Hillman ‘Minx’ in the 1930s is titled, Australia through the Windscreen, indicating that his view of the country was mediated by the frame of the car itself. Hatfield contrasted the modern motorist’s perspective with that of the drover on horseback. He felt that car travel was ‘too fast’. Whenever he met cattlemen on his travels he longed to spend time with them, yarning around a campfire, reliving more leisurely times. He claimed that given a choice he would prefer to, ‘stick [his] few belongings on a packhorse and mooch along the old droving trails’.62 Hatfield noted the impact of motorised travel on concepts of distance and perceptions of the landscape: ‘In a speeding car you lose, somewhat, the impression gained in earlier years travelling with stock, of endless sweeps of treeless plain’.63 Hatfield’s vision of the vast expansive Australia that he sought was diminished and narrowed by the car window and the need to focus on the line of road ahead, in contrast to the drover who was fully immersed in the landscape, his gaze from horseback panoramic and uninhibited. The physical impact of the journey had also changed. What was once ‘a gruelling dry stage of forty miles over which you had to punch cattle nearly mad with thirst, is only an hour’s run between two insignificant water holes’.64 Harry Watt’s 1946 fi lm, The Overlanders, brought the ‘no road’ frontier world of the drover on horseback into direct contact with the motor age and the recently completed North-South Road, which later became the Stuart Highway. Set in 1942, with the spectre of Japanese invasion looming over the continent, a scorched-earth policy forces the Parsons family to destroy their cattle station. They team up with drover Dan McAlpine, played by Chips Rafferty, to drive their thousand-head of cattle to central Queensland, 1600 miles away. The majority of the fi lm’s action takes place off -road, with the droving party following the cattle

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Figure 2.5 Stuart Highway, November 1944 Source: Northern Territory Library, Tilson Collection, Photo No. PH0779/0028.

spread out and meandering over the vast spaces of inland Australia, with few signs of ‘civilisation’. A stark reminder of time and place occurs when the party approach the North-South highway. Overhead they hear aircraft, then before them, the road – on which rolls a convoy of military vehicles – cuts straight across the landscape. The scene juxtaposes old and new Australia, as Dan, on horseback, talks to the Army personnel as they drive along the road. For a short sequence, Mary rides beside the road, keeping up with the convoy, cheered on by the troops. As the convoy rolls on, a shot taken from the back of one of the vehicles looks at the highway stretched out behind – a completely straight line that seemingly goes on forever, bisecting the surrounding country. The stark linearity of the road, constructed to speed military supplies and personnel to Darwin as quickly and efficiently as possible, contrasts with the streaming cattle and droving party, who cross it at right angles, emphasising at once their contrast, yet inevitable collision, with the modernising nation. The description of this episode in the novel is also revealing: ‘For Helen it was like crossing the equator for the first time, only more so because here the line was visible, drawn like a dirty yellow crayon mark from horizon to horizon’.65 The evolution of roads such as the Stuart Highway altered the conception of space in outback Australia. In contrast to the unbounded expansive off-road landscape occupied by the drovers and their cattle, the modern road increasingly defined Australia’s vastness in terms of a bounded, narrow line stretching infinitely towards the horizon (Figure 2.5). Towards the Broad Horizon

Australia emerged from WWII into a period of rapid industrial development, technological progress and growing prosperity. Roads and motor

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vehicles were key symbols of this era, with the launch of the Holden, Australia’s first mass-produced car, in 1948, signalling a boom in private car ownership which intensified in the post-war years. Between 1949 and 1955 car ownership almost doubled, averaging 15 cars per hundred people, a ratio second only to America.66 By the 1960s there was one car per 3.5 people, indicating that the majority of Australian families had access to a car. In the late 1940s around half the population travelled away from home on holiday. Within 20 years the figure was approaching 80%. By the 1970s nearly 87% of trips within Australia were by car, according to the Domestic Tourism Monitor survey conducted by the Bureau of Tourism Research.67 The war also accelerated the development of improved road networks, particularly key strategic routes such as the Stuart Highway, the main north–south inland corridor; the Eyre Highway, connecting east and west across the Nullarbor Plain; and the Barkly Highway between Mount Isa and Tennant Creek. The process of upgrading and extending major highways and arterial roads to cope with the greater volume and diversity of motor traffic such as trucks, and road trains for livestock transport in outback regions, continued after the war. Bitumen sealing of parts of the Stuart Highway north of Alice Springs from the 1940s also helped facilitate the road tourism boom that began in the second half of the 20th century.68 Changes in road design and construction in the years following WWII transformed both the nature of roads and their surrounding physical environment. A more utilitarian approach, focused on coping with the demands of traffic and safety concerns, took priority over the attention to aesthetics that had characterised the interwar period. As roads were improved by better surfacing and grading, realignment and widening, the creation of shoulders and the installation of guard rails on bridges, their impact upon the physical environment was also greater. Bituminising an outback highway imposed a black ribbon of asphalt on a red or brown earth, further distinguishing the road from the natural landscape. ‘Boring Bitumen’: Doing It the Hard Way

For better or worse, most travellers seemed happiest when the road enabled them to closely engage and interact with the surrounding landscape. The sense of adventure and reward for effort achieved by ‘doing things the hard way’ contributed to the appeal of long-distance road travel for many. Muriel Dorney, on her ‘adventurous honeymoon’ in 1928, declared that ‘what proved to be the most dreary and monotonous portion of the whole trip’ was when ‘the track was good most of the time’ and they ‘had neither sand nor rivers with which to contend’.69 After circuiting Australia in 1932, William Hatfield remarked: ‘With a Roman road from Sydney to Darwin there would have been no adventure in taking a Minx up there.’ 70 Bone-shuddering corrugations and potholes that broke crockery and left cars and caravans – and sometimes their occupants – damaged and covered

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in dust were all part of the experience, as Edith Crake discovered on the Eyre Highway which, in 1954, was only partly bituminised. Nevertheless, she concluded that ‘for all our dirt, punctures, etc., we were the ones really enjoying the Eyre Highway. To us it was a holiday of fun, to the others it was simply a bad necessity to overcome to reach the other side’.71 Travellers like Crake considered the hardships of rough roads and difficult driving as a worthwhile effort which would be repaid with the reward of magnificent scenery, access to lesser known parts of Australia, or simply a smoother, easier coast along bitumen. Huldah Turner, who travelled around Australia with her husband in a Volkswagen Kombi van in 1972, recorded in her diary: ‘The last weeks have been hard travelling and not always very comfortable travelling – the price one has to pay for the privilege of seeing wonderful things not seen the easy way.’ 72 Many travellers chose to go by road as opposed to the railways or by air because they wanted to experience a closer connection with the land and its people. The railway offered a relatively smooth and uniform travelling surface, but its speed forced the travellers’ gaze towards the distance, reducing the foreground to a blur. By continuing to travel through day and night, railway passengers missed much of the scenery. Although air travel became increasingly popular in the later 20th century, it further removed the traveller from the landscape. As Douglas Lockwood wrote: ‘Like all painless operations, flying is more expensive. And, for all you’ll see from 20,000 feet, you might as well be anaesthetised or deep-frozen.’ 73 Leslie and Coralie Rees explained that they chose to hitchhike through northwestern Australia because: We wanted to do things the hard way. … In the plane you saw nothing of the country but a coloured, continually dissolving map, and met almost nobody but city commercial gentlemen doing their rounds. We wanted to see the land as the pioneers saw it, and to meet the people who belonged to the land and were in some instances still pioneers.74

While travellers generally appreciated the improved highways, many were nostalgic for earlier times, feeling that the country itself became dull as soon as it was easy to traverse.75 H.F. Broadbent expressed this sentiment well, commenting on his family’s tour through the north-west of Western Australia in the mid-1950s: Travel on bitumen detaches one from the countryside and inhibits enjoyment of it. On bush tracks and rough roads, on the other hand, where it is impossible to move at speed, there is a wonderful feeling of being part of the changing pattern of the surrounding country. It is this sense of forced identification with nature, so to speak, that explains why we found the 800 miles of bitumen relatively dull and the 2000 miles of dirt tracks exciting.76

In the post-war era, some travellers became increasingly discontented with ‘boring’ bitumen roads. While key routes such as the Stuart, Eyre

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and Barkly Highways were bituminised during and after WWII, becoming straighter, smoother and faster – and hence, more comfortable to travel – for many travellers they lost something of their character and altered the experience of driving. Kathleen Woodburn lamented the change in the route that became the Stuart Highway as it was transformed from a ‘track’ to a ‘road’: Now we travel on gravel, levelled and coated with sand and bitumen. And yet, with the attainment of speed and comfort, we have lost something. The adventurous touch and the excitement of a hazardous enterprise will never return. The thousand miles from ‘The Alice’ to ‘The Top End’ is now a tourist’s run, and often decried as monotonous. … There is no spirit of adventure to keep one awake. … The utilitarian highway, graded, sheeted and bitumenised, [sic] stretches before you as a twenty-foot-wide grey snake, sometimes a straight line for thirty, forty, fi fty miles … giving the impression of any ordinary highway.77

After looking forward to travelling the Stuart Highway, hailed as one of the best roads in Australia and considered world class, Leslie and Coralie Rees found that in a way it was ‘distressingly dull’ as it had lost all sense of adventure and the unexpected. That spirit was only recaptured once they turned off the bitumen onto a makeshift road towards Daly River.78 Douglas Lockwood commented that he found it harder to concentrate while driving the long, straight sections of the Stuart and Barkly Highways, preferring winding through hills to keep him mentally engaged with the surrounds. There was also the danger that on those straight, smooth, mind-numbing sections one could become mesmerised, lose control and run off the edge of the bitumen into the soft gravel.79 Road journeys are marked as much by psychological as physical ‘boundaries’. Regardless of the time period, a journey does not necessarily begin and end at the points of departure and return. Many writers did not start their narrative until well into their travels, dispensing with the more familiar or easy part of the journey. Similarly, in many travellers’ minds, their journey effectively fi nished when the most difficult, physically and mentally engaging phase ended. Edith Crake’s narrative of her Nullarbor crossing ends just before Iron Knob, when they struck the bitumen. She continued: Although we journeyed many miles further on for three months, taking in the contrasts and wonders of this truly amazing country Australia, that is not part of this story. Only this unsealed long, long stretch from West to East … that used to be … and here it comes just in front of us … THE BITUMEN! Smooth and soft under the tyres. No corrugations, no potholes, no high mounds, and no real challenge.80

As Eric Leed has shown, the very nature of travel – particularly ‘heroic’ travel – has long been thought of as an experience in which suffering, hardships, ordeals and danger are essential components, testing and

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refi ning the character of the traveller.81 In Australia, the romanticising of hardship and struggle in experiencing road travel has been particularly important and is associated with the enduring bush and pioneering ethos which has remained so powerful in Australian culture. Even on their modern road trips, travellers continually reworked national mythologies such as the bush and pioneer legends to suit evolving modes and conditions of travel. Following in the Footsteps of Explorers

In the 1930s and 1940s, Australians took great interest in the stories of 19th-century explorers and their journeys. 82 Explorers’ tracks were constructed as sacred routes that became the site of pilgrimage for later travellers to follow.83 Australian travellers’ desire to recall earlier exploratory journeys and link their own journeys with them persisted well into the later decades of the 20th century. In fact, it was in the mid- to late 20th century, when roads were improving, that motorists expressed particular interest in remembering and identifying with explorers. Retracing explorers’ journeys was a means by which travellers could connect with history, re-tell the stories of the original expeditions in their narratives and situate themselves within that tradition, even though the modern travellers’ experience was vastly different from that of their predecessors. Motorists usually paid homage to the explorers who blazed a trail for them to follow, and often contrasted their own relatively easy journey by motorised transport, on well-defi ned roads, with the hardships endured by the original explorers. Travelling around Australia in 1937, C. Price Conigrave recalled the exploratory journey of Edward John Eyre, as they passed through Fowler’s Bay, west of Ceduna in South Australia: We thought and talked much of Eyre as in speedy, modern cars fitted with radio and other comforts we compared our rapid progress with that of his tired, thirsty pack-horses … The wonder of Eyre’s journey impresses one as one crosses his line of country and realises that he penetrated those scrubs and crossed those weary sandhills on dry stages of 150 miles or more when his horses were compelled to go more than once from three to five days without a drink of water.84

In many cases, travellers themselves identified strongly with the explorers in whose footsteps they were following. Sometimes, the fact that the surrounding landscape had changed so little from the time of the original expeditions enabled travellers to feel as if they could literally be in the explorers’ shoes, seeing the land as they would have done. Leslie Rees wanted to ‘move over the old tracks of Alexander Forrest’, an explorer of the Kimberley region of Western Australia who had intrigued Rees since boyhood. When the truck in which Rees was hitchhiking broke down in a creek along the Fitzroy River, he contemplated:

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With time to spare … my thoughts threaded back once again to Alexander Forrest, whose steps must have taken him very close to this spot … Here, in the remote Kimberleys, one felt that for hundreds, even thousands, of square miles the scene since Forrest hadn’t changed at all. Marooned in the creek, one might actually be Alexander Forrest.85

Travellers, including Rees, also read the explorers’ journals before or during their trip, in order to relate more closely to their heroes. Tourism promoters also made connections between modern touring routes and the paths of explorers to attract travellers. Road travellers, in particular, could feel an immediate connection with journeys of the past. In the 1950s, the Shell Oil Company made a number of travelogue documentaries ‘retracing the steps of Australia’s early explorers’. In 1957 one of these fi lms recreated Hume and Hovell’s 1824 expedition between Sydney and Westernport, Victoria. Shell’s advertisement in the May 1957 edition of Walkabout magazine noted that, ‘Today, motorists following almost the same route along what is now known as the Hume Highway can accomplish the trip in a matter of hours’ (Figure 2.6).86

Figure 2.6 Motorists follow in the footsteps of explorers, Hume and Hovell on the Hume Highway Source: Walkabout, May 1957, p. 37. (State Library of NSW.)

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Everyone’s a Pioneer

For the earliest motorists, it was easy to identify as an explorer or pioneer; conditions in many parts of Australia often called for great resourcefulness and skill in blazing trails as there were few good roads. By the time motor vehicles were becoming more common and roads were improving, however, more and more travellers ventured into remote regions, making it harder to be the ‘first’ or ‘only’ pathfinders. Yet travellers continued to fi nd ways of recasting their own journeys as pioneering feats, enabling them to find a place within one of the more captivating Australian legends, and enabling the ‘frontier’ to be recreated continually. In Australia, pioneering terminology was applied to all forms of motoring endeavours. In 1910 the Australian Motorist referred to those testing early versions of motor vans and trucks as ‘the Trials of the Genuine Pioneer’. 87 Reporting on the fi rst car tour from Cairns to Melbourne by C. Brewster and J. Giffin, the magazine declared: ‘A magnifi cent stretch of almost unknown country – at least unknown to motorists – was pierced. … Their journey by car was a pioneering one.’88 An article celebrating Francis Birtles in 1928 hailed his ‘invincible belief in motoring transportation as the greatest aid to pioneering this age has known’.89 It was no coincidence that the first organised motor coach tours, which began in 1925, operated as ‘Pioneer Tours’. 90 When William Hatfield circuited Australia in a Hillman Minx in the early 1930s, the narrowness of his car – which did not fit the standard gauge of most vehicles – meant that ‘roads’ consisting of tracks made by other vehicles would be of little use to him. This enabled Hatfield to consider himself a true pioneer, as he wrote, ‘With one wheel, at any rate, I would have to blaze a trail’.91 A similar phenomenon occurred in America in the early 20th century as motorists began attempting transcontinental tours. In his study of some of the earliest coast-to-coast motor trips from 1899 to 1908, Curt McConnell places these ‘motoring pioneers’ in the company of ‘revered pioneers’, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, who were the first nonnatives to explore America’s West. McConnell celebrates the auto pioneers’ resourcefulness and determination and claims that they ‘changed America forever by courageously driving into the yawning maw of the unknown’.92 While the regions the motor tourists were traversing were not undiscovered or untouched by human occupation, they were new to motorists. Victor Eubank’s ‘Log of an Auto Prairie Schooner: Motor Pioneers on the “Trail to Sunset”’, published in Sunset Magazine in 1912, describes the party of 18 tourists in five cars travelling the central-southern route from New York to Los Angeles: ‘We were motorists as far west as Chicago. Then we became pioneers.’93 Good Roads Movement lobbyists defi ned motor touring as an extension of America’s heroic pioneer past. Automobile tourists were

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described, and identified themselves, as modern-day pioneers, braving rough, unmarked roads and unpredictable machines to escape the confi nes of urban-industrial society. At the same time, through the new technology of the automobile, they could ‘embrace the democracy and independence of the open road and reaffi rm their true American character’.94 By the mid-1930s, in Australia too, motor tourists were being venerated as defi ning the qualities of ‘real Australians’. An article in the Australian Motorist in December 1936, entitled ‘Australian Overlanders – What the Trails mean to the Future’, declared: Overlanders are characteristically Australian. Undeterred by the hazards of truly enormous distances, in unroaded, and frequently uncharted, country, the overlander combines with a broad sense of perspective the resourceful instinct of the pioneer. Where the early pioneers blazed the fi rst trails through the unknown land, overlanders have opened up great motorways which stretch from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific and link our southern coasts with the Timor Sea.95

The rhetoric linking modern overlanders with affirming qualities of the Australian character is similar to the American experience, although in Australia the emphasis was on the great economic potential to be reaped from enhanced communications, rather than furthering democratic ideals. The caravan represented another new phase in the evolution of motoring. By the late 1930s, this new way of travelling was being promoted by appealing to Australians’ love of freedom and the pioneering spirit. In March 1938 the Australian Motorist declared that cars had reached a plateau in evolution, with no great difference in models from year to year, so that motorists were becoming apathetic and looking for new horizons. The caravan was perfectly suited to meeting this need: At one time most motorists were pioneers, now most are mere followers, doers of the conventional. Now most caravanners are pioneers, getting all the thrill out of pioneering the new and delightful. … My glass is raised to the enthusiastic group of pioneers who are making history.96

Caravan enthusiasts were keen to make strong connections between caravanning and the Australian way of life and character. The Australian Motorist redefi ned the term ‘pioneering’ to suit this new means of travelling, with an emphasis on Australians’ nomadic spirit, rather than their resourcefulness in overcoming hardships in blazing new trails. In one of several regular features on caravanning, the magazine claimed that: In the veins of most of us is the blood of pioneers. And what is a pioneer? He is usually a restless fellow who thinks his life was given him by his Creator for some purpose more lively than squatting down in one place under a thirty-year mortgage and meeting his interest payments promptly.97

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Another article referred to the popularity of round-Australia motoring as evidence that Australians were ‘open, receptive to new ideas and things’, with ‘a spirit of freedom, mutual comradeship and understanding, requisite for progress’, confirming that ‘pioneering spirit [which] has shaped the nation’s history and character’.98 The next major wave of pioneering came with the introduction of four-wheel-drive vehicles. The Jeep originated during WWII and proved its effectiveness in traversing terrain unsuitable for ordinary cars. Vehicles such as the Land Rover were initially used by road builders in surveying and marking routes for new outback roads, many of which were constructed soon after the war. This activity itself was celebrated as another form of pioneering. While the Jeep became available to the general public after the war, it was not until the later 20th century that four-wheel-drive tourism became popular, offering adventurous motorists another option for exploring the country off the beaten track. Yet the defi nition of what was on or off the beaten track also changed over time – what was a bone-jarring dusty corrugated track, travelled by a hardy few in the 1950s, had likely evolved into a smooth, bituminised tourist route by the late 20th century. From Landscape to Roadscape

It was not only the nature of the road itself that was changing, but the roadside environment. With the growth of motor tourism in the later 20th century, facilities such as motels, roadhouses, service stations, auto-repair shops and food outlets catering to motorists’ needs proliferated, further distancing the roadside from the landscape and transforming it into a ‘roadscape’.99 From the 1960s and 1970s freeways and expressways extended beyond the major cities. Like their American counterparts, the interstate highways, they were designed to facilitate the fastest, safest and most economical travel. Gradually, sections of the old two-lane highways were replaced by wider multilane freeways, bypassing many of the towns situated on earlier alignments of the route. Increasingly, the freeway roadside environment has become a world of its own, completely self-contained with its homogenised ‘services’ dominated by oil companies and fast-food chains, so that the traveller has no need to deviate from the freeway into townships along the way. Anthropologist Marc Augé describes modern motorways as ‘non-places’, and notes that these roads remove travellers from direct contact with ‘real’ towns and landscapes, with place names and noteworthy features reduced to words on signboards, passed fleetingly.100 The experience of car travel also became increasingly self-contained, completely sealed off from the outside environment as cars began to resemble mobile lounge rooms, with air conditioning regulating the climate, as well as audio and, lately, visual entertainment systems. Today,

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DVD players are standard in many vehicles, so that passengers need not look out of the windows at all. By the late 20th century, while the modern roadside was becoming further removed from the natural environment, that unreal, inauthentic space itself came to defi ne ‘civilisation’ for some. After travelling through outback Australia in 1995, Sean Condon and his friend David approached Alice Springs, once considered the ‘back of beyond’. Condon observed: ‘Soon we’ll reach Alice Springs. Back from the desert. We’ll be looking out for some golden arches and spinning buckets of fried chicken – not to eat, just to confirm that we’re actually somewhere.’101 Returning to his home in Brisbane, Condon was also disillusioned with the crowded suburban motorway that signalled his journey’s end: The Sunshine Motorway … is full of signs, overpasses, concrete supports, street lights, big service stations and, most of all, other traffic. If feels as though our ‘bush adventure’ is truly over. We’re out of the wilds and back in the world. It’s depressing. … We’re in the suburbs now. There are fucking billboards everywhere. I miss the bush and the emptiness and the loneliness of those small towns – their isolation and dislocation, their strange otherness.102

On one hand, improved roads allowed access to regions that were previously inaccessible; on the other, they threatened to detract from travellers’ engagement with their surroundings. It is not surprising, then, that travellers increasingly sought engagement and adventure off the road altogether. Off the Road Again

Four-wheel-drives became the vehicle of choice for those seeking a travel experience that offered access to parts of Australia that remained ‘undiscovered’ by mass tourism in the later 20th century.103 Rex Ellis began conducting four-wheel-drive safari tours in the 1960s. One of his earliest safaris was across the Nullarbor in 1966. Ellis explained that when planning the trip he ‘wanted to fi nd a route from Twilight via the old Eyre repeater station to Madura Motel without using the Eyre Highway’.104 Doing things the hard way by avoiding the made highway or ‘beaten track’ was a priority. His tour company, ‘Transcontinental Safaris’ was the fi rst to complete a tourist crossing of the Simpson Desert from Oodnadatta to Birdsville by Land Rover in the mid-1970s. Ellis described his clients, mostly from Melbourne, as having various motivations for making the journey, but one thing they had in common was a desire ‘to travel across a region where no tourist had ever been before’.105 In the 1980s four-wheel-drive touring became increasingly popular. Guide books proliferated and choice in vehicle brands expanded as major car manufacturers catered to the growing market. The four-wheel-drive vehicle was particularly popular with the emerging sector of grey nomads.

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Many used the four-wheel-drive to tow their caravan on sealed roads; they then explored regions off-road in the car once they reached their base camps. The many narratives published by travellers reveal motivations that echo those of earlier generations in their desire to get off the beaten track. Photographer Bill Bachman and his wife, Sally, travelled around Australia in a Toyota LandCruiser in 1987. Bachman wrote in the introduction to his photo-diary, ‘Perhaps the real beauty of being on the road is the opportunity that automatically exists to get off ’.106 More recently, however, Tim Bowden’s narrative of his trip through central and north-western Australia in a Toyota LandCruiser – nicknamed ‘Penelope’, as it towed a camping trailer that his wife had christened ‘The Manor’107 – offers an alternative viewpoint to those who dismissed good bitumen roads as ‘boring’ and limiting their connection with the landscape. Bowden contrasted his trip along the Stuart Highway in 1999 with a previous journey he made in the 1970s. On the earlier trip it was impossible to admire the scenery as all attention was absorbed in keeping his eyes on the road ‘lest you disappear down a pothole. … Today a smooth, wide bitumen strip allows both driver and passenger to admire the beauty of the desert, and the interplay of that wonderful central Australian light on the vegetation’.108 Yet Bowden noted that the upgraded highway, ‘banked high above the surrounding red desert’, also made impromptu exits off the road more difficult; hence, the flexibility of having the LandCruiser.109 Bowden, like many other travellers in the era of mass tourism, sought a more personal and individualistic experience of ‘discovery’ and engagement. Bowden described his planned itinerary, noting: ‘It would be all new country for us. That, surely, was what our kind of travel was all about.’110 He was keen to avoid the herd mentality of some tourists and relished their first bush camp: ‘This is an aspect of outback travel that I regard as quintessentially Australian – the luxury of pulling off the road into the scrub, and just camping away from organised camping grounds or caravan parks, and other campers.’111 Similarly, Bill Bachman wrote, ‘Our trip had been conceived as a personal adventure’.112 The Bachmans also wanted to avoid recognised tourist destinations, preferring ‘the as-yet undiscovered’.113 Even as travellers sought to recapture the sense of adventure and discovery of earlier eras by venturing further off the road, by the late 1980s there is evidence that the novelty was wearing thin for some. In 1978 the Tamworth Four Wheel Drive Club placed a visitors’ log book at Poeppels Corner in the Simpson Desert, where the borders of Queensland, South Australia and the Northern Territory meet, for ‘those who love adventure’ to record their impressions of crossing the desert. Entries survive for the period to 1987 and reveal both a celebration of the technology that allowed the travellers to traverse the desert, as well as disappointment that

The Call of the Open Road 67

the experience was becoming all too easy or commonplace. Most travellers recorded the type of vehicle they drove and many entries expressed tribal loyalties to particular brands. For example, the Smith family wrote in September 1979: Land Rover. The truck that wins them all through Rocky mountain territory and drought and flooding plains. I love the way she moves. I love the way she’s built. She can out win every thing [sic] that is our Land Rover true Blue.114

Another entry by Geoff Stader of Eastwood, New South Wales in November 1980 read: ‘The Volvo would have to be the Rolls Royce of 4 × 4s. Eat your heart out Toyota owners.’115 In 1982 the Nissan Patrol Club of South Australia described their journey from their ‘tribal lands on the Adelaide Plains’ in terms of an Aboriginal songline, acknowledging that they were ‘travelling the route that many tribes before have travelled’. They declared the end of their journey ‘a sacred site’, accessible only to those who had earned it: ‘Let not those who have washed enter upon these grounds!’116 Others expressed frustration with the lack of adventure and challenge. P. Ackroyd wrote in August 1980: It seems that the west to east crossing is no longer much of a challenge, especially these days when there’s so many people out here already, either fi nding oil or making the crossing themselves. Anyway I’ve done it now, showing once again that the theoretical side of these ‘modern day adventures’ is often far more exciting and challenging than the real thing.117

Another party wrote in July 1987: ‘Please, bigger sandhills required. Too easy!! Not like the Sahara. … All in all. Too Easy. Think we might go back the other way for a little hardship.’118 Today, the Simpson Desert is one of the most popular destinations for four-wheel-drivers, with thousands of people crossing it every year. Nevertheless, as Lee Atkinson advised in a recent feature in the travel section of a Sydney newspaper, it is not a journey to be taken lightly. The risk of being bogged on sand dunes or breaking down is still very real, and travellers need to ensure that they have sufficient water and food to survive in case of emergencies. Echoing earlier motorists, Atkinson proudly asserts: ‘We also took the hard way, travelling east to west – the eastern dune faces are steeper due to the prevailing wind direction.’ It seems that doing things the hard way is an enduring trait in Australians’ attitude to travelling, on and off the road. And like so many travellers before, it is the impact of the landscape that is the reward for all the effort, as Atkinson writes: There might be 1100 dunes in the desert, each with more or less the same view, but each and every time I got to the top of one I found myself gasping in awe – in awe of the sheer immensity of space, in awe of the colours, of the emptiness, of the grandiosity of a landscape larger than life.119

68

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Ironically, as in much of the Western world, over the last decade roads in Australia’s cities and suburbs are becoming clogged with large fourwheel-drives and sports utility vehicles (SUVs), whose owners probably never venture far off-road. Advertising writer Jane Caro explained that, in marketing these vehicles, car makers are selling the dream of adventure, freedom and escape that may never come true, but which resonates powerfully with city dwellers trapped in the sometimes oppressive routine of hectic urban life and traffic jams.120 The Australian road trip has come full circle, from the earliest cyclists and motorists, for whom there were often no real roads to follow, to those who answered the ‘call of the open road’ as roads and cars improved and motor tourism grew in popularity, to the four-wheel-drive enthusiasts of the later 20th and early 21st centuries, who seek adventure and discovery off the road. Across the century, landscape has been central to the experience of the great Australian road trip. Changes in the physical condition of roads and modes of transport influenced the relationship between travellers, the road and landscape, and contributed to the way that travellers imagined, experienced and represented their road trips. While looking forward through the windscreen, embracing the modern technology of cars and improved roads, motor tourists also cast backward glances through the rear-view mirror. By continually reworking 19th-century frontier legends, modern motorists sought to recreate the romance, challenge and adventure of earlier eras, to identify with reassuring mythologies which celebrated heroic explorers and pioneers, and to experience a more direct, authentic connection to the country. Landscape is also a central concept in the construction of Australian identity. Road tourism was not only about pleasure-seeking, but was also closely related to the way travellers saw themselves and their journeys in relation to the nation and national identity, as will be explored further in the following chapter. Notes – Chapter 2: The Call of the Open Road (1)

(2) (3) (4)

Murif, J.J. (1897) From Ocean to Ocean, across a Continent on a Bicycle, an Account of a Solitary Ride from Adelaide to Port Darwin. Melbourne: George Robertson, p. 12. Murif, Ocean to Ocean, pp. 84–85. Adelaide Advertiser, 24 May 1897. Hardman, W. (ed.) (1975 [1865]) The Journals of John McDouall Stuart during the Years 1858, 1859, 1860, 1861 & 1862 (facsimile edn). Adelaide: Libraries Board of South Australia, p. 407. The symbolic significance of a transcontinental crossing was often marked by bathing in the sea at the start and end points of the journey. H.C. Allen compares John McDouall Stuart’s reaction when he reached the north coast with that of American explorers, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, when they reached the Pacific after making the fi rst east–west crossing of the continent in 1804: ‘that ocean, the object of all our labours, the reward of all our anxieties’. Transcontinental motor tourists crossing the United States, usually travelling from east to west, also ritually dipped their tyres in the waters of the Atlantic and Pacific to mark the start and fi nish of their journeys, symbolising their embrace of the

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nation. See Allen, H.C. (1959) Bush and Backwoods: A Comparison of the Frontier in Australia and the United States. Sydney: Angus & Robertson and Michigan State University Press, p. 122. Murif, Ocean to Ocean, p. 191. White, R. (1992) Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688–1980. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, p. x. See Kerr, R. (2013b) Through the rear view mirror: Landscapes, legends and literature on the Australian road. Studies in Travel Writing 17 (2), 1–20. See http:// dx.doi.org/10.1080/13645145.2013.783960. See, for example, Bishop, P. (1998) Driving around: The unsettling of Australia. Studies in Travel Writing 2, 147; Koshar, R. (2005) Cars and nations: AngloGerman perspectives on automobility between the world wars. In M. Featherstone, N. Thrift and J. Urry (eds) (2005) Automobilities. London: Sage Publications, pp. 121–139; Davis, T. (2008) The rise and decline of the American parkway. In C.  Mauch and T. Zeller (eds) The World Beyond the Windshield: Roads and Landscapes in the United States and Europe. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, pp. 36–37; Shaffer, M.A. (2001) See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880–1940. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, p. 37. Lay, M.G. (1984) History of Australian Roads. ARRB Special Report No. 29. Melbourne: Australian Road Research Board, p. 25. Fitzpatrick, J. (1980) The Bicycle and the Bush: Man and Machine in Rural Australia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 98–100. Lay, Australian Roads, p. 25. Lay, Australian Roads, p. 25. Walker, F. (1917) Wanderings awheel in New South Wales: An account of various cycling tours undertaken during the years 1896–1908. Typescript, ML MSS 3233, p. 23. Fitzpatrick, Bicycle and the Bush, p. 124. Australian Motorist, December 1934, p. 182. Birtles, T.G. (2018 [1979]) Birtles, Francis Edwin (1881–1941). Australian Dictionary of Biography. Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National University. See http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/birtles-francisedwin-5244/text8833 (accessed 2 May 2016). Lamond, H.G. (1965) They humped Bluey. Walkabout, October, pp. 28–29. Fitzpatrick, Bicycle and the Bush, pp. 154–155, 174–175, 191. Davis, P. (1987) Wheels Across Australia: Motoring from the 1890s to the 1980s. Hurstville, NSW: Marque, pp. 13, 14; Holmes, E.L. (1900) A Record of the Pioneer Trip of the Thomson Motor Car Driven by H. Thomson (the Inventor), Accompanied by E.L. Holmes. Melbourne: Thomson Motor Car Ltd. Holmes, Pioneer Trip of the Thomson Motor Car, p. 16. Australian Motorist, September 1908, p. 17. Australian Motorist, August 1928, pp. 715–718. Birtles, F. (1935) Battle Fronts of Outback. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, p. 74. Waterhouse, Vision, pp. 177–178. Davis, Wheels Across Australia, p. 210. For example, Burton, Across Australia in Seven Days; Gladys Sandford promoted the Essex car in her transcontinental tour in 1927 (Gladys Sandford Papers, ML MSS 4884); Muriel Dorney advertised the American Whippet in An Adventurous Honeymoon: The First Motor Honeymoon Around Australia (Brisbane: Read Press, 1928); Hector Macquarrie, in We and the Baby (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1929) proudly acclaimed the ‘Baby Austin’ that took him and his companion from Sydney to Cape York; and C. Price Conigrave travelled Around Australia in a Pontiac (Sydney: the author, 1937). Australian Motorist, September 1908, pp. 7, 9.

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Australian Motorist, September 1908, p. 5. Smith, E.C.T. (1908) Two Men in a Car: One Thousand Eight Hundred and Sixty Five Miles by Motor by One of The Two. Bound volume of newspaper clippings. ML: M 692.2/10. Smith, Two Men. Lee, R. (2010) Transport: An Australian History. Sydney: UNSW Press, pp. 235–236. Clarsen, G. (2008) Eat My Dust: Early Women Motorists. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, Chapter 7. Australian Motorist, January 1923, cover. Australian Motorist covers and features throughout the 1920s and 1930s often used the terms ‘the Call of the Open Road’ or ‘Freedom of the Open Road’; for example, February 1921, December 1925, December 1927, August 1931 and March 1932. Australian Motorist, December 1927, pp. 206–207. Australian Motorist, October 1925, p. 82; Australian Motorist, March 1926, p. 407. Australian Motorist, October 1929, p. 93. Australian Motorist, September 1939, p. 15. Australian Motorist, July 1934, p. 602. Maahs, A.M. (1952) Across the Never Never. Walkabout, July, p. 30. Sandford, ‘Typescript Account of Part of the Journey’, p. 8. In Sandford Papers. Australian Motorist, August 1935, p. 638. Hatfield, W. (1936) Australia through the Windscreen. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, pp. 213–214. Rees, C. and Rees, L. (1953) Spinifex Walkabout: Hitch-hiking in Remote North Australia. Sydney: Australasian Publishing Company in association with George G. Harrap, p. 72. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owners, Megan Wintle and Dymphna Peterson c/o Tim Curnow, Literary Agent & Consultant, Sydney. Broomham, R. (2001) Vital Connections: A History of NSW Roads from 1788. Alexandria: Hale & Iremonger, pp. 123–124. Calder, W. (1925) Report on His Investigation of Road Problems in Europe and America during 1924. Melbourne: Country Roads Board. Southern, R. (2007) Our Road to the Coast: Behind the Building of the Main Road from Melbourne to Geelong, and on to the West Coast, 1912–1932. Geelong: Geelong Historical Society, pp. 39–40; Davison, G. (2004) Car Wars. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, p. 171. Jakle, J.A. and Sculle, K.A. (2008) Motoring: The Highway Experience in America. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, pp. 137, 141. Davis, Rise and decline of the American parkway, p. 50. Access to parkways was limited to private through-traffic, as opposed to freight. Traffic joined the parkway only at certain access points, merging rather than intersecting. Jakle and Sculle, Motoring, p. 137; Southern, Our Road to the Coast, pp. 38–39. Australian Motorist, September 1935, p. 697. Marcuse, H. (1949) Bright across the Alps, Walkabout, November, p. 33. Davison, F.D. and Nicholls, B. (1935) Blue Coast Caravan. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, pp. 5, 160. Brady, E.J. (1911b) The King’s Caravan: Across Australia in a Wagon. London: Edward Arnold, p. 263. Fitzpatrick, Bicycle and the Bush, p. 192. Paterson, A.B. (1896) Mulga Bill’s bicycle. The Sydney Mail and New South Wales Advertiser, 25 July, p. 186. Fitzpatrick, Bicycle and the Bush, pp. 236–237. Schivelbusch, W. (1980) The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the Nineteenth Century (trans. A. Hollo). Oxford: Basil Blackwell, p. 16.

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‘Syd Swagman’ (1937) The wool teams. Walkabout, December, p. 55. Birtles, D. (1946) The Overlanders: The Book of the Film. London: World Film Publications, p. 3. Farwell, G. (1950) The road to the Gulf. Walkabout, April, p. 16. Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, p. 41. Hatfield, Australia through the Windscreen, p. 179. Hatfield, Australia through the Windscreen, p. 82. Hatfield, Australia through the Windscreen, pp. 121–122. Birtles, Overlanders, pp. 94–95. Clarsen, G. (2010) Automobiles and Australian modernisation: The Redex AroundAustralia Trials of the 1950s. Australian Historical Studies 41 (3), 353; Perrott, L.M. Jr. (1952) Australia needs motels. Walkabout, May, p. 10; Knott, J.W. (2000) The ‘conquering car’: Technology, symbolism and the motorisation of Australia before WWII. Australian Historical Studies 31 (114), 3–4. White, R. (2005) On Holidays: A History of Getting Away in Australia. North Melbourne: Pluto Press Australia, pp. 133–134, 141, 147. Tanner, A. (1995) The Long Road North. Richmond, SA: The author, pp. 153–154, 204; Woodburn, M.K. (1947) The bitumen. Walkabout, March, p. 16. Dorney, Adventurous Honeymoon, p. 188. Hatfield, Australia through the Windscreen, p. 44. Crake, E.M. (c.1998) The Highway of Haunting Hilarity. Perth, The author, pp. 24, 35. Turner, H.M. ‘A Round-Australia Journal: 30 Weeks and 25,000 Miles in 1972’. In H. Turner Papers, 1940–2003, ML MSS 7520, p. 147. Lockwood, D. (1964) Up the Track. Adelaide: Rigby, p. 14. Reproduced by permission of Kim Lockwood. Rees and Rees, Spinifex Walkabout, p. 14. S.C. Palmer, ‘Diary of a Round-Australia Journey 14 May–26 June 1965’, ML Doc 2581, p. 11. Broadbent, H.F. (1955) A trip through the North-West. Walkabout, March, pp. 13–14. Woodburn, The bitumen, pp. 16–17. Rees and Rees, Spinifex Walkabout, p. 189. Lockwood, Up the Track, pp. 54–55. Crake, Highway of Haunting Hilarity, p. 61. Leed, E.J. (1991) The Mind of the Traveller: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism. New York: Basic Books, pp. 5–6. Fetherstonhaugh, T.J. (2002) The journal, ‘Walkabout’ and Outback Australia 1930s–1950s: A romantic rapprochement with the landscape in the face of modernity. PhD thesis, Murdoch University, p. 317; White, R. (2009) Australian odysseys: Modern myths of travel. In A. Sarwal and R. Sarwal (eds) Reading Down Under: Australian Literary Studies Reader. New Delhi: SSS Publications, pp. 412–413. Fetherstonhaugh, ‘Walkabout’ and Outback Australia, pp. 180–181. Conigrave, Around Australia in a Pontiac, pp. 12–13. Rees and Rees, Spinifex Walkabout, p. 138. Walkabout, May 1957, p. 37. Australian Motorist, July 1910, p. 783. Australian Motorist, December 1924, pp. 222–223. Australian Motorist, August 1928, p. 718. Australian Motorist, February 1937, p. 303. Hatfield, Australia through the Windscreen, p. 5. McConnell, C. (2000) Coast to Coast by Automobile: The Pioneering Trips, 1899– 1908. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, p. 6. Lewis and Clark’s expedition, which Ronald Primeau describes as ‘the most famous American journey’, was

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(93)

(94) (95) (96) (97) (98) (99) (100) (101) (102) (103) (104) (105) (106) (107) (108) (109) (110) (111) (112) (113) (114) (115) (116) (117) (118) (119) (120)

commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson and undertaken between 1803 and 1806 to explore the region along the Missouri River to its source in the Rocky Mountains, then westwards towards the Pacific, with the objectives of expanding the American fur trade, advancing geographical knowledge of the continent, securing America’s claim to Oregon and enhancing its claim to lands above the 49th parallel. See Primeau, R. (1996) Romance of the Road: The Literature of the American Highway. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, p. 58. Bliss, C.S. (1972) Autos across America: A Bibliography of Transcontinental Automobile Travel: 1903–1940. Los Angeles, CA: Dawson’s Book Shop, pp. 8, 12–13. Shaffer, See America First, pp. 136–137, 142. Australian Motorist, December 1936, p. 212. Australian Motorist, March 1938, p. 404. Australian Motorist, December 1937, p. 222. Australian Motorist, September 1937, p. 35. Schlereth, T.J. (1997) Reading the Road: U.S. 40 and the American Landscape (revised edn). Indianapolis, IN: Indiana Historical Society, p. 3. Augé, M. (2008) Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity. London and New York: Verso, pp. 77–80. Condon, S. (1996) Sean & David’s Long Drive. Melbourne: Lonely Planet, p. 85. Reproduced with permission of the author. Condon, Sean & David’s Long Drive, p. 230. Davidson, J. and Spearritt, P. (2000) Holiday Business: Tourism in Australia since 1870. Carlton South, Vic: Melbourne University Press, pp. 170–171. Ellis, R. (1976) Bush Safari. Adelaide: Rigby, p. 15. Ellis, Bush Safari, pp. 81–82. Bachman, B. (1989) Off the Road Again. Melbourne: Lothian Publishing Company, p. 7. Reproduced with permission of the author. Referencing the popular UK television series ‘To the Manor Born’ (1979–1981), which starred Penelope Keith. Bowden, T. (2002) Penelope Bungles to Broome. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, p. 15. Reproduced with permission of the author. Bowden, Penelope, p. 15. Bowden, Penelope, pp. ix–x. Bowden, Penelope, pp. 14–15. Bachman, Off the Road Again, p. 6. Bachman, Off the Road Again, p. 4. Tamworth Four Wheel Drive Club, Visitors’ log, Poepples Corner, Simpson Desert, 1978–87, Entry 15, September 1979, NLA MS 9123. Tamworth Four Wheel Drive Club, Visitors’ log, 6 November 1980. Tamworth Four Wheel Drive Club, Visitors’ log, 25 May 1982. Tamworth Four Wheel Drive Club, Visitors’ log, 17 August 1980. Tamworth Four Wheel Drive Club, Visitors’ log, 16 July 1987. Atkinson, L. (2016) Taking the ultimate dry run. Sydney Morning Herald, 16 April, Traveller, p. 14. Reproduced with permission of the author. Davis, T. (2011) Wide Open Road: The Story of Cars in Australia. Sydney: ABC Books, Harper Collins, p. 274.

3 ‘Discovering’ Australia

Bill Bryson begins his satirical account of his travels around Australia, Down Under, with the assertion: This was my fi fth trip and this time, for the fi rst time, I was going to see the real Australia – the vast and baking interior, the boundless void that lies between the coasts. I have never entirely understood why, when people urge you to see their ‘real’ country, they send you to the empty parts where almost no sane person would choose to live, but there you are. You cannot say you have been to Australia until you have crossed the outback.1

From the 1920s, as motor touring became more popular in Australia, it was promoted as a patriotic duty – the ideal way to truly see, know and appreciate the country. Road travellers went in search of the so-called ‘real Australia’, attempting to find and identify with a uniquely Australian landscape and people. That ‘real Australia’ lay somewhere beyond the more familiar urban coastal fringe, in the ‘Bush’ or ‘Outback’ – a region that became romanticised in a similar way to the much-mythologised American ‘West’. The quest for the ‘real Australia’ coincided with concerns about definitions of national identity that arose as Australia transformed from a rural-pastoral economy to a modern urban industrial society. 2 Anxieties over Australians’ ability to possess and develop the entire continent to its full potential also motivated travellers to ‘discover the country’ by car during the interwar years and mid-20th century. Such anxieties reflected the peculiarities of Australian geography and settlement patterns, the impact of Federation and the ongoing legacy of colonialism. 3 Ideas of nation have always been constructed to a large extent through popular culture. A distinctly Australian road genre emerged during the mid-20th century in literature and fi lm, which mirrored the cultural obsession with the bush and outback in its settings and characters. Road tourism and its representations were further expressions of that cultural nationalism. By the late 20th and early 21st centuries, while many continued to search for a ‘real Australia’ on outback road trips, perceptions of that Australia were shifting to a more critical, less idealised view of the nation and its landscape. As society became more sophisticated and pluralistic, 73

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the pursuit of a singular national narrative was no longer as meaningful for travellers. By the later 20th century, visions of Australia were also mediated increasingly by the influence of American popular culture. Through this lens, travellers no longer saw a uniquely Australian landscape but one that could just as easily be American. In their search for Australia, some found America. Seeing Australia First

Australia’s linking of road tourism with patriotism and national identity had much in common with America. Between 1880 and 1940 tourism in America was promoted as a ritual of citizenship and a patriotic duty. A ‘See America First’ movement originated in the early 20th century as government and businesses joined forces to encourage Americans to tour their own country rather than Europe, which at the time held the greatest attraction for those with the means to travel. At a conference held in Utah in 1906 to launch the campaign, Governor John C. Cutler told delegates representing promoters, businessmen and politicians that ‘The movement that you strive for … will make better citizens of the tens of thousands of Americans who are now living in ignorance of their own land’. They were there to ‘preach the gospel of a better-known America’, to ‘educate ignorant easterners about the wonders and possibilities of the West’. Motor touring was hailed as the best way to see the country. Transcontinental routes such as the Lincoln Highway, which ran from New York to San Francisco, across the centre of the country, would bring tourists to the heart of America, revealing its natural beauty, wealth of resources, industries, history and traditions, as well as the life, ‘manners, hopes, dreams and ambitions’ of its people. Travel magazines, including the American Motorist, claimed that only through the fi rst-hand experience of automobile touring could one ‘come to truly understand America’. Compared to whirling across the country by railway, never feeling close to the states and cities, roads like the Lincoln Highway afforded citizens ‘an incomparable inspirational course in Americanism’.4 In Australia, a comparable movement began in the 1920s. The Australian Motorist employed similar rhetoric to its American counterpart to promote motor touring in Australia. From the mid-1920s articles appeared with titles such as ‘A 3000 Mile Tour – Seeing Australia First’, describing a five-week tour from Melbourne to Brisbane. 5 ‘See Your Own Country First – Journey of Five Months on Goodyear Tyres’ extolled the glorious scenery of the north coast of New South Wales. 6 In 1931 the Government Tourist Bureau commissioned R.G. Johnson to carry out extensive photographic tours, securing new pictures of potential tourist routes as part of the ‘See Australia First’ movement. Huge enlargements were made and used in displays and exhibitions to promote touring.7

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As in America, road travel was promoted as the best means of seeing the country, as competition between railways and road transport intensified. The Australian Motorist argued that motor vehicles enabled tourists to ‘penetrate’ further into the heart of regions to access magnificent scenery, whereas railways were infrequent and could not access all areas.8 A cartoon published in May 1928 illustrates the opposition between road and rail, beckoning travellers to ‘See Australia First’ and depicting ‘Two ways to see Australia – how you will SEE it by MOTOR’, with the happy motorists in an open car looking out across the countryside; versus ‘how you Won’t SEE it by train’, as passengers in a crowded compartment face inward, looking at each other rather than the scenery (Figure 3.1).9 In 1934 the magazine lectured: ‘Australians must realise that the road is considered overseas the correct media for seeing a country, and for the understanding of its inhabitants.’10 As motor touring became more popular during the 1920s and 1930s and as advances in motor vehicle technology and road improvements made greater speeds possible, touring promoters and travellers themselves expressed concerns that by travelling too fast motorists were in danger of not really seeing the countryside properly. The ‘true spirit of motoring’ did not mean rushing from place to place in the shortest possible time by the most direct route.11 Rather, motorists should take the time to ‘see new parts of the country, beauteous and impressive scenery, picturesque and interesting architecture’.12

Figure 3.1 ‘See Australia First’ – by road, not rail Source: Australian Motorist, May 1928, p. 511. (State Library of NSW.)

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Witnessing changes in the landscape as one travelled on long overland journeys was an important element in understanding the country and marking phases of the trip. Travelling by road allowed motorists to really appreciate Australia’s diversity by observing at ground level the changing flora and topography as they moved through different regions. Those travelling from south to north, particularly between Alice Springs and Darwin, observed more pronounced changes in climate and landscape as they crossed different latitudes and marked their progression from Central Australia to the tropical north. A Grand Tour

Both America and Australia shared a sense of inferiority based on their relatively short period of European history, as they lacked the grand historic sites and characters of Europe. Celebrating an awe-inspiring natural environment which was at least the equal of anything found in Europe was a way of demonstrating a sense of their nation’s exceptionalism.13 J.K. Warner, who is credited with completing the fi rst circuit of Australia by car in December 1925, wrote a road guide based on his trip from Perth to Brisbane in 1923, which he titled, in part, The Grand Tour. In his introduction, Warner invokes the language of 19th-century European Romanticism to declare that this is: The Tour on which you will fi nd awe, sublimity and grandeur, as well as beauty, peace and Nature’s symphnies [sic] … the Tour on which you will see beauty to equal Italy, Switzerland and Picardy, Africa, India and Arabia; on which the sublimity of Sahara will grip you.14

At this time, a tour around Australia was conceived of as part of a wellrounded education or rite of passage, bringing the same kind of cultural sophistication, transformation and enlightenment to travellers as the European grand tour of the 18th and 19th centuries, which was the ‘practice of any man of culture to commence his adult life’. According to the Australian Motorist, Australia’s enormous distances constituted ‘an unexplored treasury awaiting the discerning’, and would have enhanced those earlier grand tours if Australia had been known then.15 The Australian Motorist also appealed to readers’ sense of patriotism to promote caravanning, which first began to excite interest in Australia during the late 1920s and 1930s. By taking their ‘home’ with them, there was no longer any excuse for Australians not to see all the places in the country that it was their ‘duty’ to see, much as a grand tourist ticked off a list of ‘must-see’ cultural sites. The magazine sermonised: The aim of the keen caravanner is, ultimately, to have been everywhere and to have seen everything. … But … there are certain … places that you know you must see as soon as possible. To visit them becomes almost a duty, and you make a mental list of your obligations. It is realised, for

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example, that the Grampians demand exploration; that your education is far from complete until you have roved across the Australian Alps, and that the Great Ocean Road is a necessary experience.16 Finding the ‘Real’ Australia

Seeing and knowing a so-called ‘real Australia’ – defi ned by wellestablished images of the ‘Bush’ and ‘Outback’ in particular – became an important cultural preoccupation from the 1920s. Charles Bean eloquently expressed his defi nition of the ‘real Australia’ in On the Wool Track, which celebrated the rural workforce and the ‘way of life “out back”’: The truth is that there exists inside coastal Australia a second Australia – the larger of the two – of which most of our people know very little more than do the Londoners. … For out here you have reached the core of Australia, the real red Australia of the ages … a land which stretches away and away and away across the heart of Australia. … That is the real Australia. 17

Romanticising rural and outback Australia was partly a response to the nation’s increasing urbanisation and industrialisation. By the 1920s the orientation of economic and social life was well and truly shifting as large-scale factory production was established in cities, and more and more people moved from the country to the city in search of work and opportunity.18 This transformation challenged long-held beliefs about the national character and was often manifested in a nostalgic, romanticised vision of rural and, particularly, outback Australia, which was celebrated as an antithesis to the city. Again, this cultural response to urbanisation and modernisation was not unique to Australia. Russel Ward observed: ‘From ancient Rome men have been impelled to romanticise and identify with “outback” or “frontier” virtues, whenever they have begun to be herded into cities.’19 The development of ‘romantic nationalisms’ was a trend evident throughout the developed world, but particularly in the United States, Britain and Northern Europe. It involved a ‘process of defi ning, redefi ning, inventing and manipulating various aspects of their real or imagined heritage’, including ‘a renewed interest in folktales, ballads and “traditional” crafts’ to ‘counter social dislocation and uncertainties wrought by modernity and to strengthen the power and identity of the nation-state’. 20 As we saw in previous chapters, poets and writers celebrated the Australian bush and its folk traditions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in response to technological change which threatened those traditions. Nationalist writers, including Vance Palmer and Louis Esson, continued that romanticism in subsequent years as they sought to create a unique national ‘culture’ inspired by the folk traditions of the Australian ‘frontier’,

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including songs, ballads and stories. 21 These and other artists reacted against the perceived growing infiltration of American popular culture in Australia after WWI. They also reflected the antipathy towards urban and suburban life which many artists and intellectuals decried in the interwar years for contributing to Australia’s social and cultural stagnation.22 The search for the ‘real Australia’ and its romanticising continued into the mid-20th century and beyond. In the 1930s and 1940s Australia sought to redefi ne its identity and place in the world as it challenged its previous unquestioning allegiance to Britain. Travel writers became part of the quest to defi ne what was unique about Australia. 23 Descriptive travel writing was one of the most popular literary forms in Australia between the wars, and its popularity continued after WWII. Walkabout magazine, which was published by the Australian National Travel Association from 1934 to 1974, declared that its editorial policy was ‘an educational crusade’ to enable Australians and people of other lands to ‘learn more of the romantic Australia that exists beyond the cities’. 24 Educating Australians about their own country was an important part of instilling a sense of national pride. Many prominent Australian travel writers such as Frank Davison, Ion Idriess, Frank Clune and George Farwell used their road trip narratives to expound on the history, social and economic conditions, as well as describing the landscape, of the various regions through which they travelled. They aimed to educate readers and inspire them to travel further afield. It was not only established travel writers who took this approach. Muriel Dorney, who had no prior writing experience, also began her narrative by admitting that her honeymoon trip made her realise how little she knew of her own country and, in writing, one of her aims was to help other Australians ‘realise what a wonderful country it is’. 25 American travellers also linked their journeys of discovery with a larger search for national and cultural identity – looking for the ‘real America’ – which was usually found in the ‘West’. 26 The westward journey has long held particular and powerful significance in the American psyche. Its origins can be traced to the 19th century, as settlers migrated from the east coast towards the vast area of free land in the west. Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis ‘articulated the idea that the “West” embodied the process of becoming American – moving into wilderness, abandoning European traditions and developing new behaviours and institutions that defi ned the American character’. 27 The West, ‘with its sublime scenery, abundant resources and virtuous citizens’, represented the ‘true’ America. 28 The West was further mythologised in the 1920s as Americans experienced increasing anxiety towards the forces of industrialisation, incorporation and urbanisation that were transforming North America into a complex, modern nation. 29 The West was romanticised as the antithesis of the urban industrial core of the north-east. Ignoring the reality of the

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West’s increasingly urban, industrial character, Americans took to the road in search of open spaces and an imaginary, or fading, rural smalltown America. Tourists associated the West with democracy, freedom, friendliness and community; and with people living close to the land. 30 American travel writing across the 20th century reflects that quest. In their search for the soul of the nation, writers often celebrated the Midwest region as a place of rich and beautiful countryside, wholesome and friendly people. Dallas Lore Sharp’s The Better Country is based on his journey across America in the 1920s. He wrote of the Midwest: ‘Nowhere in the world have I felt a more perfect harmony between earth and man than among the farms of Iowa, nor more comfortable space and spiritual freedom between man and man.’31 As the characters in Jack Kerouac’s semi-autobiographical novel, On the Road, drive and hitchhike across the country from east to west and back, they seek physical, mental and spiritual rejuvenation through contact with a rural American landscape and people – an America of ‘workers, farmers, cowboys and tramps’. 32 In the later 20th century, Americans’ search for a lost, more authentic America continued, and was exemplified in travel literature by titles including J.R. Humphreys’ The Lost Towns and Roads of America (1962), John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley: In Search of America (1962) and William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways: A Journey into America (1982). ‘Blue Highways’ refer to back roads or secondary routes, marked in blue on road maps to differentiate them from the major highways and interstates. Along the crooked two-lane country roads, Least Heat Moon hoped to fi nd the America of small towns, ‘Mom and Pop’ restaurants serving home-style cooking and old fashioned hospitality, symbolic of an older America that was fast disappearing. 33 While for Americans the route of national discovery was most often an east–west crossing, from the known, urbanised east coast to the mythologised West, for Australians it could be an east–west or south– north crossing, or a circular journey. For both countries, the ‘real’ heart, soul and spirit of the nation was to be found in a romanticised region, far from the well-known cities – for Americans, it was the West; for Australians, the Centre or Outback. The ‘Spirit’ of Australia

Many Australian writers expressed a longing to capture the ‘essence’ of Australia or the ‘Australian spirit’. In the outback, Australian travellers often recorded feeling a kind of spirituality, inspired by the vast, ancient landscape. This differed from the more overtly religious romanticism that characterised 19th-century nationalistic efforts to explain America as a God-given, preordained nation, as represented in its unique natural landscapes. For Australians, it was a more secular romanticism; however, writers sometimes invoked the language of religion and pilgrimage. 34

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William Hatfield sought to ‘go below the surface to the Spirit of Australia’ in his road trip around the country in 1932. 35 Throughout the 1930s until the later 20th century there was a fascination and reverence for what journalist and author Ernestine Hill described as ‘the Great Australian Loneliness’ – its vastness and emptiness. Hill began the narrative of her journey around and across Australia by camel, truck and packhorse team, among other conveyances, ‘far from the rhythm of “the big machine” and the sameness of cities’. She described Australia as ‘a magnificent empty land’ of six-and-a-half million people, of whom six million, ‘set their lives and their watches to the clanging of the tram-bells and the train-whistles’, while the other half-a-million ‘share three-quarters of the Continent between them, and tell the time in months and years’.36 For Hill, ‘there is no dot on the map that holds more of the distilled essence of the real Australia’ than Fitzroy Crossing, in the remote Kimberley region of Western Australia. 37 Leslie and Coralie Rees, travelling in the same region in the 1950s, echoed Hill, stating, ‘It was always the remote lands that attracted us. There we would seek the distilled essence of that elusive thing, the Australian spirit’. 38 Travellers often felt their own mortality in the presence of ancient landscapes. Upon reaching Central Australia in 1940, Frank Hurley reflected on the MacDonnell Ranges, which were estimated by scientists to be millions of years old: ‘One cannot help but admire this scenery with something akin to reverence. Its awesome vastness makes one feel very humble and insignificant.’39 From the summit of Mount Gillen, 3500 feet above sea level, Hurley ‘was rewarded by the most impressive and soulstirring panorama in the Commonwealth’.40 Biologists H.F. Broadbent and his wife, who drove through the north-west of Western Australia in the mid-1950s, experienced ‘that feeling of awe and humility which affects man when gazing on scenes of natural grandeur. The feeling was enhanced by the silence and loneliness of the country we were in’.41 The sheer expansiveness of the Australian interior evoked a sense of spirituality for many. Sister Dora Burchill, a nurse who travelled with the mail truck to Innamincka in 1946, recorded that ‘The “everlasting sameness of the never-ending plain” does something to one’s soul’.42 In a Walkabout article, she referred to the ‘spell of the Inland’ that makes people want to return again and again ‘to this land of unbroken horizons and glorious sunsets’.43 Rex Ingamells wrote of fi nally realising his longheld desire to see Uluru as being akin to a religious experience. While he had ‘felt the impressive vastness and solitude of the distances between Port Augusta and Darwin, The Rock … still remained a shrine unattained.’44 His journey began long before he fi nally took to the road in 1952, as he imagined and anticipated it by reading all he could and talking to others who had seen ‘The Rock’. For Ingamells, ‘It was a pilgrimage which attained more hallowed prospects with the years’. It was also a pilgrimage to a defi ning image of Australia, as Ingamells saw Uluru as ‘a timeless symbol of the Timeless Land itself’.45

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More recently, a study by Narayanan and Macbeth, published in 2009, was based on interviews with 25 ‘expert’ or seasoned four-wheel-drive travellers who were repeat visitors to Australia’s desert regions. Strong spiritual themes emerged in respondents’ motivations for their travels and revealed that contact with the desert landscape was a sacred experience, which some described as ‘cleansing’, ‘purifying’ or ‘uplifting’. The authors concluded that the transformative feelings of joy, self-fulfi lment and accomplishment experienced by these travellers made their journeys reminiscent of a pilgrimage.46 Embracing the Nation

In romanticising the ‘real Australia’ of the remote outback and interior, a conflict existed between revering its unique, awe-inspiring emptiness and isolation on one hand, and the desire to traverse and occupy that space on the other. Australia’s size relative to its population, its unprotected borders and colonial past left a legacy of anxiety over white Australians’ ability and entitlement to possess and develop the nation fully. Anxiety over the implications of vast uninhabited regions remained pervasive for decades and the desire to embrace the nation by road took on different meanings over time. As will be discussed further in Chapter 5, Australians’ desire to circumnavigate the continent by motor vehicle began at a relatively early stage. Georgine Clarsen suggests that the burgeoning interest in around-Australia and transcontinental motoring from the 1920s was another means of linking disparate geographic regions and states into a unified coherent idea of ‘nation’ in the aftermath of Federation and WWI. When the Commonwealth of Australia was proclaimed on 1 January 1901 it united six previously independent colonies under a national government. While Federation unified the country politically, and WWI represented Australia’s metaphorical ‘coming of age’, for ordinary Australians, driving around the country was a way to experience more directly a sense of the nation as a whole. Clarsen and others view this as part of a process of recolonisation, inscribing white ownership and possession onto the entire continent.47 Pioneer Tours began operating their bus tours to the Northern Territory in 1925 and gradually organised more and more ambitious overlanding trips (Figure 3.2). By 1936 the company was planning a complete tour around the Australian mainland to depart in May 1937 from Melbourne, taking in Perth, then Darwin and all capital cities. The trip would take between 12 and 14 weeks, covering a distance of 10,000 miles – the longest overland road tour in the world. Mr Melrose, who was in charge of the tour, said: ‘“Know your own country” was a very desirable thing for every Australian, and in order to know it, one must see as much of it as possible.’48 As oil companies provided regular petrol supply depots on more and more routes in Australia in the 1930s, there was an increasing sense of the ‘entire Commonwealth’ being open to motor touring.

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Figure 3.2 Pioneer tourist coach in Victoria, 1920s Source: State Library of Victoria. Image H2013.43/1.

Caravanning was also linked to nationalistic sentiments of ‘possessing’ the nation. The freedom of mobility coupled with the comforts of home offered by the caravan enabled its owners to have the whole of Australia as their backyard. In the words of the Australian Motorist, ‘The whole continent becomes your estate with a moveable manor!’49 The modern technology of the motor vehicle, as well as the extension of the road network, made it possible to ‘occupy’ much more of the continent than ever before, even if only temporarily. Much travel writing aimed to disprove the idea that the outback was a ‘dead heart’. J.K. Warner, writing of his trip from Melbourne to Perth in the Australian Motorist in June 1923, declared: The so-called Western Australian desert is not to be found. In the place where you expect to see it you will fi nd lovely saltbush, blue bush, and native grass, wild carrots and other herbage. Tip top feed, lovely second class country, only waiting for some enterprising man to take it up. 50

Writing in the 1930s, William Hatfield stressed the need for Australians to ‘inhabit and exploit the vast North’ before others did. An important part of making the region habitable was to provide infrastructure, including roads. Hatfield saw the ‘road-less and rail-less state’ as forming an ‘insuperable barricade on the frontier’, favouring the invader and inhibiting its defence. 51 Thus, in the years leading up to WWII, concerns over Australia’s vulnerability to invasion and occupation by unspecified ‘others’ reveal underlying insecurities, at least partly informed by racial prejudices. During and after WWII, the need to populate Australia’s remote regions became more urgent. 52 The Japanese advance and bombing of

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Darwin in 1942 brought the prospect of foreign invasion closer to home than ever. Lloyd Jones, writing in Walkabout in 1954, expressed the sentiments of the period: The Northern Territory covers half a million square miles, and in it are only 15,000 whites. It is a case of populate or perish for Australia, for unless something is done to populate this vast area, Australia cannot expect to hold it. 53

The war also spurred development of strategic transcontinental roads which became more popular as tourist routes after the war. Drawing attention to Australia’s wide open spaces as potential regions for development became a major preoccupation of travel writers from the 1940s to the 1960s. In advocating the occupation and development of remote regions, writers rekindled earlier appeals to patriotism – the need to know and take pride in the country’s unique landscape. Driving across the Nullarbor on the Eyre Highway in the 1940s, author Ion Idriess realised for the fi rst time the great beauty and fertile farmlands of South Australia. In his narrative he discusses the importance of the highway, built during WWII, in linking eastern and western Australia, thus reducing the west’s isolation, and enabling interaction and exchange of knowledge between those on opposite ends of the continent. He believed that the road should be further improved, ‘and the nation should be made familiar with it. People could then take their holidays by motoring from the eastern States to the west and learn more about their own country than they’d otherwise learn in a lifetime’. 54 By the 1960s, the need for greater productive exploitation, development and population of outback regions was widely acknowledged, even if it was never going to be a viable reality. Evoking pride in a unique and fascinating Australian landscape, however, helped to foster the ever-growing popularity of drive tourism. Much effort was devoted to dispelling the idea that parts of Australia might be boring to traverse. Many writers were keen to point out that what might be perceived as monotonous terrain actually held much of interest, such as the mysterious ‘huge subterranean kingdoms’ of caves and blowholes that lay across the Nullarbor, very close to the road. 55 Richard Goff travelled through Central and northern Australia in the 1960s. Having reached Tennant Creek via the Barkly Tableland, he remarked: ‘It comes as a surprise, too, to find the country quite densely wooded. This is no “dead” centre by any means.’56 The search for the ‘real Australia’ and the reverential attitude of awe and wonder in describing the solitude, vastness and the timeless quality of the Australian outback remained evident in some travellers’ writings into the later 20th century, even as tourism made inroads into many areas. In 1967 Eric Mack undertook a survey to identify and map tourist attractions, accommodation and supply facilities in Central, northern and Western Australia. Reporting in Walkabout, he concluded that

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participants found ‘the spell of half a continent … the vivid mesmerism of the Australian outback’. On returning to the city he mused: We left this journey feeling that the real Australia is still out there in the outback. For there, even where the new frontier is bursting with imported juke boxes and foreign ‘know-how’, you can touch hands with Australian traditions – the ways of thought and speech that are spun deep into our make-up, though often we do not realise it. … For an Australian an outback journey can become something of a pilgrimage, in which he’ll fi nd what in his make-up makes him different from other peoples of the world. 57 Encountering ‘Real’ Australians

Travellers’ encounters with people they met or observed along the way were another important part of experiencing the ‘real Australia’. Most travellers were keen to be able to identify characters whose qualities defi ned particular regions, as well as an idealised Australian type. Australians looked to the ‘Outback’ for drovers, bushmen and pioneers. 58 The fascination with such Australian ‘legends’ intensified as these types were threatened with extinction in a modernising nation. C.A.S. Mansbridge, who caravanned across Australia with his wife in 1939, noted that in Queensland, ‘the people are different; their outlook is large and natural; they are sunburnt, healthy, and hard’. 59 Mansbridge’s description of Queenslanders is reminiscent of John Steinbeck’s characterisation of American Midwesterners, whom he also saw as being shaped by their environment. Steinbeck observed that, as the countryside is ‘rich and beautiful, generous and outgoing’, the people ‘take a cue from it’ and are more open and outgoing, exhibiting an ‘electrifying flow of energy’.60 Following their hitchhiking travels in north-western Australia in the 1950s, Leslie and Coralie Rees reflected: To share the experiences of the little knots of people spread over this vastness was emotionally enlarging. One could feel that there was a Northern way of life – unvarnished, unpretending, without romantic image of itself, tough, laconic, dryly casual, but quietly admirable in resource, pluck, endurance, and hard common sense.61

Their description mirrors the typical Australian of the bush legend. One of the most celebrated figures of the road was the outback mailman. From the 1930s trucks began to replace horses on outback mail routes, but travel writers still saw all the qualities of the traditional bushmen and pioneers in the motoring mailmen. Walkabout featured several articles referring to these inland mail drivers as: Colourful personalities, brave, pioneering men whose dominant intention is to ‘get the mail through’ whatever the hardships, which is sometimes a feat of great endurance, especially during the hot, scorching months of each year.62

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The best known of the outback mailmen was Tom Kruse, who drove the truck delivering mail and supplies to the isolated pastoral stations along the historic Birdsville Track stock route, between Marree in South Australia and Birdsville in Queensland in the 1940s and 1950s. George Farwell placed Kruse fi rmly within the tradition of the drovers and bushmen, as he wrote in Land of Mirage (1950): As a mechanic he was something of a genius. … His mechanical skill was legendary. They still talk of the time his exhaust booster broke. Two hundred miles from the nearest repair shop, he found some lead bearings in his tool box, melted them in a jam tin over the fire, made a casting in drift sand, then casually drove on. A less resourceful man would never run this mail … I doubt if there is a more exacting mail route anywhere. … [the mailmen] … must be not only game and resourceful, but bushmen experienced in unnatural hazards. The mailman, the drover and the stockman are the three crucial figures of this country. Without them it could not carry on.63

Tom Kruse was also immortalised in John Heyer’s ‘docu-drama’ fi lm, The Back of Beyond, released in 1954. The film follows Kruse on a typical journey along the Birdsville Track. The opening titles honour Kruse and his fellow outback mailmen as pioneers and nation builders, who maintain and extend lines of communication: ‘Beyond the last roads and railways, their tracks make the map of the inland, … become the roads of tomorrow and mark the growth of the nation.’64 As Australia modernised and experienced rapid industrialisation after WWII, more and more people moved from the country to the cities. The growing fascination with the outback and its inhabitants as representative of a more authentic Australia is evident in broader popular culture as well as among tourists and travel writers. A new wave of Australian cultural nationalism, which surfaced in the 1950s, saw the bush or outback as the chosen setting for several creative works – including Dick Diamond’s folk musical, ‘Reedy River’ (1953) and Ray Lawler’s play, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1955); as well as non-fiction, most notably Russel Ward’s Australian Legend (1958) – which sought to defi ne national character and reveal Australians to themselves.65 An Australian road genre in literature and fi lm also emerged in the 1950s. Just as the Western frontier tradition is generally regarded as a forerunner of the modern American road genre, so too were Australia’s earliest road novels and fi lms set on the ‘frontier’.66 The Back of Beyond has been described as possibly ‘Australia’s fi rst road movie’.67 While the Birdsville Track could hardly be called a ‘road’, Kruse’s journey provides a connecting thread throughout the narrative – a hallmark of the road genre that emerged in American popular culture from the 1950s onwards.68 D’Arcy Niland’s novel, The Shiralee (1955), was first made into a film in 1957. Despite being set well into the motoring era, it depicts a modern-day ‘swagman’ walking the roads of rural Australia, trying to escape the city

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and domestic ties – the motif of flight and escape being another defining element of the road genre. The difference between Macauley and other swagmen is that, as well as his swag, he carries an additional burden or ‘shiralee’ – his three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, ‘Buster’, whom he reluctantly took on the road with him after discovering his wife in bed with another man. He decided long ago that he must turn his back on the city, to go ‘where the world is wide’, where he wouldn’t ‘need a penny for the slot and a key for the door’.69 Echoing the city versus bush theme portrayed by earlier writers, here the city and the bush are defined, both spatially and morally, as diametrically opposed: the city confined, enclosed, claustrophobic and corrupt; the bush open, wide and free. Works like The Back of Beyond and The Shiralee were also a response to a sense of loss. They were made at a time when suburbia was spreading its reach further beyond the cities. In rural and outback Australia, as the era of drovers and horsemen was ending, it was left to characters like Tom Kruse to perpetuate their qualities. Even the Birdsville Track itself was about to be transformed into something resembling a ‘road’ to cope with the trucks and road trains that would replace the drovers. By the later 20th century, travellers had to look a bit harder to see ‘real Australians’ on their road trips. Driving the Stuart Highway in 1964, Keith Willey found that in the Northern Territory it was still possible ‘to see life in the raw, to meet real men’.70 By 1973, however, Willey was lamenting a loss of character in the Northern Territory that accompanied its increasing prosperity. He mused nostalgically: Progress is setting its heavy imprint on the Last Frontier. … Within a year … tourists will be driving on bitumen roads to the edge of the legendary Stone Country of Arnhem Land. … It is undeniable that something has been lost from the character of the area and its people. … There was once a recognisable ‘Top End’ kind of person. He tended to be leaner, browner and more laconic than other Australians. He was a stoic in adversity – and he had known plenty of that.71

By the time Willey was writing, the definition of the ‘real Australia’ and ‘real Australians’ was also beginning to shift. Revealing the Profile of a Nation

In the mid- to late 20th century, Australia’s major cities were becoming more closely linked to rural and remote areas by improved roads, particularly National ‘Highway 1’. Australia’s Highway 1, or National Route 1, follows the coastline around almost the entire perimeter of the continent for nearly 15,000 km. It is made up of existing highways joined together and improved as part of a national roads system which began in the mid-1950s.72 The route passes through every state and territory except the Australian Capital Territory (ACT). It incorporates the Princes,

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Pacific, Bruce and Northern Highways extending up the east coast of Australia; the Eyre Highway linking south-eastern and Western Australia; the Stuart Highway bisecting the continent from north to south through Central Australia; and the Brooker, Midland and Bass Highways connecting Hobart to Burnie in Tasmania.73 The old dichotomy in which the city was portrayed as tainted and corrupt in opposition to an idealised ‘Outback’ representing a traditional, more ‘real’ Australia, began to blur as industrialisation transformed Australia’s economy. The beginning of this transition is evident in George Farwell’s accounts of travelling ‘around Australia on Highway 1’ in the 1960s and 1970s. Farwell, who characteristically valorised outback traditions of droving and bushmanship in opposition to advancing mechanised technology, was willing to celebrate both tradition and modernity via the all-embracing highway that links Australia’s capital cities and urban industrial centres with more remote regions. According to Farwell, the past, present and future are encompassed in driving this road. Earlier incarnations of routes that were amalgamated to form Highway 1 included: explorers’ tracks, early stock routes, bullock dray paths, packhorse and Cobb & Co. runs. Yet, Farwell says, ‘those preoccupations are for the historian’, and then turns to celebrating Australia’s progress as a modern industrialised nation. Now, he writes: The affluent Australian prefers his images in terms of heavy industry, the wealth of minerals, manufacturing plants, oil, steel, motor cars and the export trade. Most of the nation’s achievement in these spheres is to be found somewhere along this coast-to-coast arterial highway.74

Farwell describes the route as revealing ‘the profi le of a nation’, taking the traveller ‘to the heart and mind of Australia’.75 He promises: ‘Travellers who take Australia’s premier highway will learn much of the national character from the endless contrasts they encounter.’ 76 Such language is reminiscent of the early boosters of America’s Lincoln Highway, who claimed it offered an ‘inspirational course in Americanism’.77 Travelling the country by road continued to be an exercise in discovery, knowledge and embrace of the nation, but that nation now encompassed more diverse images. The ‘real Australia’ could accommodate both tradition and modernity, coast as well as outback, but the transition had been a long time coming and was by no means complete. Searching for Australia in the Late 20th Century

The idea of a ‘real Australia’ predominantly defined by the ‘Outback’, or at least extending beyond the major capital cities, continues to be sold to and embraced by travellers. However, by the late 20th century, less romanticised, more critical visions of the ‘real Australia’ began to emerge.

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Glimpses of a much darker version of outback Australia appear in Kenneth Cook’s 1961 novel, Wake in Fright and its fi lm adaptation directed by Ted Kotcheff in 1971. Wake in Fright could be viewed within the road or, more accurately, ‘no road’ genre. Its main protagonist, John Grant, is the sole teacher at a one-room school in outback Tiboonda. For Grant, the outback is hell. The dull, flat, dry, dusty landscape, the heat and the boorish locals make it as claustrophobic for him as the city was for The Shiralee’s Macauley. In contrast to the stereotypical desire to escape from the city to the bush, Grant longs to escape to Sydney – to the coast and the beach, where he is heading for the long summer holidays. Wake in Fright presents a harshly critical view of Australian society and culture, revealing the underside of the bush legend. The aggressive masculinity, perverted ‘mateship’, sexism, binge drinking, mindless conformity and insularity of the outback society portrayed were too shocking for some. When the fi lm was released in 1971, Australian critics and audiences reacted negatively, rejecting it as unrealistic – although to others, it was perhaps too real.78 While Wake in Fright represented a drastic and darkly revisionist view of the outback and its inhabitants, it did not signify a permanent shift away from the typically romantic portrayal of the ‘real Australia’ and the Australian Legend. The legend revived, providing inspiration for fi lms produced during the ‘renaissance’ of the Australian film industry throughout the 1970s and 1980s, which saw increased federal government funding and renewed interest in promoting a distinctive Australian cinema and culture.79 Films such as Sunday Too Far Away (1975), The Man From Snowy River (1982) and Crocodile Dundee (1986), among many others, lovingly portrayed rural or outback Australia and its characters.80 Even as recently as 2008, Baz Luhrmann’s epic fi lm, ambitiously titled Australia, was an unapologetic reaffi rmation of the bush legend’s endurance and perceived representativeness. The hero, played by Hugh Jackman, is simply known as ‘The Drover’, although he is at home both on a horse and in a truck. Nevertheless, Wake in Fright reflected a changing cultural context in which challenges to the idealised image of the ‘real Australia’ were beginning to surface. Travellers’ narratives also reveal more cynical views. From the 1970s, for example, many travel writers demonstrated a greater awareness and willingness to acknowledge and more fully engage with Aboriginal peoples and their culture, often critiquing the impact of racist attitudes and government policies. This represented another challenge to traditional constructions of the ‘real Australia’, and will be explored more fully in Chapter 9. By the 1980s, the unquestioning reverence and admiration towards the Australian outback landscape that characterised earlier writings also began to be challenged. For some, the Australian interior had become the ‘dead heart’ that earlier generations of travel writers had desperately

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sought to dispel. American expatriate Tony Horwitz found the Australian outback landscape to be ‘the scenic equivalent of Valium’.81 He mused on the number of ‘strange words’ for the interior: ‘The bush. The scrub. The mulga. Outback. Woop Woop. Buggery. Out to Buggery. Back o’Bourke. Beyond the Black Stump’, and was not surprised ‘that Australians have so many names for the emptiness of their own bleak continent’.82 One of the main themes of Sean Condon’s mid-1990s narrative is the almost unendurable monotony of driving in the outback. Travelling through Central Australia on the Stuart Highway, his companion, David, remarks that the journey ‘is full of “pretty shockingly average countryside”’.83 The once venerated vastness of Australia had by this time become a burden. Condon describes travelling along the Stuart Highway: I had mistakenly thought all the horror driving was behind us. What a chump. In the Outback (about seven-eighths of the entire country) that sort of driving is never behind you. Australia is too big. ... Midday. Driving north on the Stuart Highway. Off again into the horror.84

Even iconic Uluru fails to move him: ‘Two whole days of nothingness relieved by a giant ant colony and a really big rock. Australia, I salute you.’85 In a reversal of the earlier opposition between the insulated, regimented cities and the true Australian spirit of the bush, in the later 20th century travellers sometimes portrayed the bush as backward in comparison to the more sophisticated urban environment. Writers mocked the bush for lacking those symbols of the city’s sophistication and cosmopolitanism – good food and coffee. Alastair Morrison recorded in his diary of a round-Australia trip in 1961 that ‘small Australian country towns are not, I am afraid, very cheerful places to spend a bleak morning hanging about in and the New Australian cafes and Espresso Bars have not yet reached that far’.86 Sean Condon noted sarcastically that in Coober Pedy, ‘You can get arrested for asking for espresso coffee’.87 The traditional city–bush antipathy is completely turned on its head in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994). The fi lm returns to the iconic Australian outback but explores that space in a way that reflects the changing face of late 20th century Australia. Two drag queens – Mitzi (Hugo Weaving) and Felicia (Guy Pearce) – and transsexual, Bernadette (Terence Stamp), journey to Central Australia to perform in Alice Springs. Away from their familiar and secure environment, the trio are soon confronted by intolerance, violence and vilification by rednecks, and also by the enormity of the great ‘nothingness’ that surrounds them. Any sense of conquering this landscape is short lived and, despite momentary victories over their tormentors and scenes of Felicia riding atop ‘Priscilla’ in full drag, triumphantly billowing across the desert like a giant mascot, they are ultimately lost. When they fi nally ascend Kings Canyon, they are at once awed and entranced by it. As the camera pans the horizon, Bernadette marvels, ‘It never ends, does it – all that space’.88

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They decide that they ‘want to go home’. The trip has convinced them that they don’t belong out there and that the city is ‘home’.89 Bernadette sums up the perceived divide: Much as we mindlessly slag off that vile stink-hole of a city, in some way it takes care of us. I don’t know if that big ugly wall of suburbia has been put there to keep them out or us in.90

The long-mythologised great escape from the city to the ‘real Australian’ outback does not ring true for this group. The fi lm inverts the Australian Legend – in place of ultra-masculine men, moulded by the bush, Priscilla presents three homosexual men, flaunting their femininity, for whom the city is the space which has shaped and nurtured their sense of identity, while the bush is an anathema. Discovering America?

Priscilla has been seen by critics as a very Australian film – part of an ongoing movement since the 1970s revival to produce a truly Australian cinema and culture, defi ned particularly against American cultural imperialism.91 While the setting and many of the characters are unmistakably Australian, this fi lm, like others in the road genre, illustrates a continued and inevitable dialogue with American cinematic and cultural traditions.92 As the trio are leaving Sydney, the soundtrack plays the Pet Shop Boys’ ‘Go West’, thus blending a British pop song that has become a gay anthem, with the catch-cry of the American frontier tradition, ancestor to both the Western and road genres, with the call to the Australian outback – literally ‘west’ of everywhere along the eastern seaboard. The scenes of desert and rocky escarpments equally recall John Ford’s classic western, The Searchers (1956), which also strongly influenced the later American road genre.93 Sociologist Stuart Hall refers to a world ‘dreaming itself to be American’.94 The relationship between American and Australian culture is long and complex.95 The blurring of distinctive ‘national’ cultures is part of the process of globalisation and modernisation in which America has played a dominant role. Forms or genres of popular culture are as significant as content in this process.96 The American road genre which became internationally recognised in the second half of the 20th century had a powerful influence globally. Richard Franklin, director of Roadgames (1981) – a thriller which features American lead actors, Stacy Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis, in the Australian setting of the Nullarbor – commented on the futility of cultural purity in fi lm, because Australia and America have a shared popular culture to a large extent. Franklin argued that ‘to assert the purely local and colloquial elements of our character [forsaking] the broad picture, which is that next to the pub there is a Colonel Sanders [KFC] or a

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McDonalds, is to promote an incorrect cultural impression of Australia’; and that ‘what you really have out in the Nullarbor is a number of bland Mobil, Esso and Shell brick-veneer roadhouses selling Coca-Cola’.97 From the 1950s, travel writers sometimes referred to the Australian outback as the ‘wild west’. Reminiscing on Walkabout’s role in ‘discovering Australia’, John Ewers noted that during the 1930s and 1940s the journal ran several articles on Australia’s north-west, which he described in his 1959 article as ‘that country which is the Australian equivalent of the American “wild west”’.98 Jeffrey Kemp, also writing in Walkabout in 1962 about the making of the fi lm, The Cattle Carters in north-west Western Australia, stated that ‘here Australian film producers have the perfect setting for Westerns’.99 By the late 20th century, travellers’ visions of the Australian landscape were filtered more often through the lens of American popular culture. Sean Condon, a self-confessed television-addicted member of Generation X, constantly sees America when looking at the Australian landscape. He describes driving through Victoria’s Otway Ranges: ‘The Otways is thin roads flanked by thick green forests of pine and fir and eerie, drifting fog. The road is wet and completely deserted. It’s like driving into the opening credits of “Twin Peaks”’.100 Between Port Fairy and Robe, the landscape, punctuated by small farming towns, reminds Condon of Holcomb in Kansas, ‘where the Clutter family was killed by Perry Smith and Dick Hickock back in 1958’, a case immortalised by Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.101 Situating himself within that narrative, Condon writes: ‘As we drive I try to imagine that me and David are two killers on the lam, outrunning and outgunning the law, living by our wits, laying low and trying to reach Mexico by nightfall.’102 He continues to see America from the passenger side window: ‘We’re driving through a field of light brown grass the size of Kansas. It’s amazing. Bush, then suddenly this … Another field. Idaho.’103 While Tony Horwitz is American and sees a resemblance to the ‘Big Sky’ country of Montana and Wyoming in the landscape around Dubbo, Condon is influenced by the music he is listening to, as he ponders: ‘This really is Big Sky Country. Or am I just thinking that because that’s the name of the Chris Whitely song on the tape player? I’m easily influenced.’104 By the time that Condon was writing, the American road-trip genre increasingly influenced Australians’ perceptions of the road. Condon’s narrative suggests that the consumption of American film, television and music created different expectations from the road trip. Instead of a nostalgic view of a ‘real Australia’, it has become a nostalgic American roadscape to be found ‘out there’. Condon writes: ‘I keep looking out for Burma Shave advertising billboards to amuse us as we drive. Then I remember that we’re not in America and it’s not the 1950s. It’s such a shame.’105 Burma Shave advertising billboards became an iconic feature of the American roadside from 1927 to 1963 (Figure 3.3). The advertisements for the brushless shaving cream consisted of six messages strategically placed 100 paces apart on

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Figure 3.3 Burma Shave signs on America’s Route 66 photographed by Ken Koehler Source: US Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, America’s Byways. See http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/byways/photos/62366 (accessed 7 July 2016).

straight sections of road across America, so that a car travelling at 35 mph would take approximately three seconds between signs. The rhyming verse and folk humour were addictive, capturing motorists’ attention to complete the verse, for example: He played A sax Had no B. O. But his whiskers scratched So she let him go. Burma Shave

Reading the signs aloud became part of family road trip rituals.106 Heading towards Uluru, so long regarded as a symbol of the unique Australian landscape, Condon imagines that he sees the actors from the 1969 fi lm, Easy Rider: ‘Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson motorcycling toward the Alice. We waved. They flipped us three birds. We probably look too Establishment Man.’107 Even the desert of the interior has succumbed to the influence of an ‘America’ soundtrack: ‘“In the desert, you can’t remember your name …” America, I salute you.’108 The trend towards seeing America in the Australian landscape, particularly in the later 20th century, indicates that the search for a unique Australian identity represented in an idealised outback landscape was becoming less relevant. Transmission of a ‘shared’ popular culture meant that Australians could easily intersperse American frontier imagery within their own roadtrip narratives in a way that would be readily understood by other readers and travellers. The American frontier itself was not an entirely unique space. Marguerite Shaffer argues that in postwar America, amid widespread prosperity and the emergence of a mass consumer culture, tourism ceased

‘Discovering’ Australia 93

to be regarded as a ‘ritual of citizenship’ and travellers no longer felt the need to connect with a national collective memory and tradition.109 In both America and Australia in the later 20th century, the road trip became a more individualistic pursuit of self-discovery, as will be explored in Chapter 6. Australians embraced the nation by road in larger numbers than ever from the 1970s and the idea of discovering the ‘real Australia’ remained a powerful incentive, but the defi nition of that ‘real Australia’ was changing. By the late 20th century, the romanticised ‘real Australia’ was under pressure to accommodate greater diversity and to admit that it was not necessarily always idyllic or unique. This was partly a reflection of an increasingly pluralistic, sophisticated and critical society as well as the impact of globalisation and mass tourism. After 1950, the coast began to rival the inland as a mythologised national space and tourism destination.110 As well as outback and aroundAustralia odysseys, a new ‘national ritual’ emerged – the annual summer holiday road trip up or down the coast. This will be explored in the following chapter. Notes – Chapter 3: ‘Discovering’ Australia (1) Bryson, B. (2000) Down Under. London: Doubleday, p. 11. (2) Waterhouse, R. (2005) The Vision Splendid: A Social and Cultural History of Rural Australia. Fremantle, WA: Curtin University Books, pp. 177–180; White, R. (1992) Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688–1980. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, p. x; Bonnin, M. (1980) A study of Australian descriptive travel writing, 1929–1945. PhD thesis, University of Queensland, p. 7; Fetherstonhaugh, T.J. (2002) The journal, ‘Walkabout’ and Outback Australia 1930s–1950s: A romantic rapprochement with the landscape in the face of modernity. PhD thesis, Murdoch University, pp. 43–44. (3) Clarsen, G. (2008) Eat My Dust: Early Women Motorists. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 120–139. (4) Shaffer, M.A. (2001) See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880–1940. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 26–27, 130–131. (5) Australian Motorist, February 1926, p. 319. (6) Australian Motorist, December 1926, p. 208. (7) Australian Motorist, August 1931, p. 545. (8) Australian Motorist, March 1928, p. 393. (9) Australian Motorist, May 1928, p. 511. (10) Australian Motorist, March 1934, p. 347. (11) Australian Motorist, February 1931, pp. 248–249. John Urry has pointed out that such emphasis on slowing down when motor touring – ‘to stop, to drive slowly, to take the longer route, to emphasise process rather than destination’ was a widespread attitude, also exemplifi ed in Edwardian England as ‘slow, meandering motoring’ became a popular middle class pursuit. See Urry, J. (2000) Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century. London: Routledge, pp. 60–61. (12) Australian Motorist, December 1928, pp. 190–191. (13) White, R. (2005) On Holidays: A History of Getting Away in Australia. North Melbourne: Pluto Press Australia, p. 76; Shaffer, See America First, pp. 12–13.

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Warner, J.K. (1923) Warner’s Road Guide Coolgardie – Pt. Augusta (Two Routes) Together with Information Relating to ‘The Grand Tour’ (Perth to Brisbane). Perth: W.A. Motorist Print, n.p. Australian Motorist, June 1932, p. 468. Australian Motorist, August 1938, p. 725. Bean, C.E.W. (1963 [1910]) On the Wool Track. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, p. viii. Waterhouse, Vision, pp. 177–180. Ward, R. (1978) The Australian legend re-visited. Historical Studies 18 (71), 190. Davis, T. (2008) The rise and decline of the American parkway. In C. Mauch and T. Zeller (eds) The World Beyond the Windshield: Roads and Landscapes in the United States and Europe. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, p. 50. Waterhouse, R. (1995) Private Pleasures, Public Leisure: A History of Australian Popular Culture Since 1788. South Melbourne: Longman Australia, p. 145. Walker, D. (1976) Dream and Disillusion: A Search for Australian Cultural Identity. Canberra: Australian National University Press, p. 148. Bonnin, Australian descriptive travel writing, p. 7; Fetherstonhaugh, ‘Walkabout’ and Outback Australia, pp. 43–44. Ewers, J.K. (1959) Discovering Australia through walkabout. Walkabout, November, p. 44. Dorney, M. (1928) An Adventurous Honeymoon: The First Motor Honeymoon Around Australia. Brisbane: Read Press, n.p. Shaffer, See America First, pp. 2, 4. Shaffer, See America First, p. 142. Shaffer, See America First, pp. 16–17, 37. Shaffer, See America First, p. 37. Shaffer, See America First, pp. 234–235. Primeau, R. (1996) Romance of the Road: The Literature of the American Highway. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, p. 67. Shaffer, See America First, pp. 2–3, 319–320. Primeau, Romance of the Road, pp. 27–28, 54. See Humphreys, J.R. (1967) The Lost Towns and Roads of America. New York: Harper & Row; Steinbeck, J. (1962) Travels with Charley: In Search of America. London: Heinemann; William Least Heat Moon (Trogdon) (1982) Blue Highways: A Journey into America. New York: Ballantine Books. Shaffer, See America First, p. 128; Fetherstonhaugh, ‘Walkabout’ and Outback Australia, pp. 143–144. Hatfield, W. (1936) Australia through the Windscreen. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, p. 65. Hill, E. (1991/2016 [1937]) The Great Australian Loneliness: A Classic Journey Around and Across Australia. North Ryde, NSW: Angus & Robertson; Sydney: ETT Imprint, p. 7. Reproduced with permission of Tom Thompson, publisher (ETT Imprint 2016). Hill, Great Australian Loneliness, p. 103. Rees, C. and Rees, L. (1953) Spinifex Walkabout: Hitch-hiking in Remote North Australia. Sydney: Australasian Publishing Company in association with George G. Harrap, n.p. Hurley, F. (1940) The Red Centre – sidelights on a motor tour from Adelaide to Alice Springs. Walkabout, October, p. 12. Hurley, The Red Centre, p. 12. Broadbent, H.F. (1955) A trip through the North-West. Walkabout, March, pp. 18–19. Burchill, Sister D. (1946) Innamincka. Walkabout, April, p. 11.

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(70) (71)

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Burchill, Innamincka, p. 11. Ingamells, R. (1953) Journey to the Rock. Walkabout, May, p. 20. Ingamells, Journey to the Rock, p. 20. Narayanan, Y. and Macbeth, J. (2009) Deep in the desert: Merging the desert and the spiritual through 4WD tourism. Tourism Geographies 11 (3), 369–389. Clarsen, Eat My Dust, pp. 120–121; Bishop, P. (1998) Driving around: The unsettling of Australia. Studies in Travel Writing 2, 144–163. Australian Motorist, November 1936, p. 123. Australian Motorist, May 1939, p. 545. Australian Motorist, June 1923, p. 542. Hatfield, Australia through the Windscreen, pp. 170–171, 195. Fetherstonhaugh, ‘Walkabout’ and Outback Australia, p. 149; Bonnin, Australian descriptive travel writing, p. 179. Jones, L. (1954) Northern Territory holiday. Walkabout, December, p. 30. Idriess, I. (1951) Across the Nullarbor: A Modern Argosy. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, p. 91. Reproduced courtesy Idriess Enterprises Pty Ltd. Nullarbor Notes (1940) Walkabout, March, p. 4. Goff, R. (1961) Walkabout on wheels. Walkabout, September, p. 39. Mack, E. (1967) Operation Capricorn. Walkabout, February, pp. 16–17. Timothy Fetherstonhaugh has identified ‘outback man’ as embodying many of the qualities of pioneers and bushmen of the 19th century, shaped by the frontier environment that produced him. See Fetherstonhaugh, ‘Walkabout’ and Outback Australia, p. 209. Mansbridge, C.A.S. (1939) Caravanning across Australia. Walkabout, September, p. 36. Steinbeck, Travels with Charley, cited in Primeau, Romance of the Road, pp. 63–64. Rees and Rees, Spinifex Walkabout, p. 282. Burchill, Innamincka, p. 10. Farwell, G. (1950) Land of Mirage: The Story of Men, Cattle and Camels on the Birdsville Track. Melbourne: Cassell, pp. 201–202. Now published by Orion Publishing Group, London. Attempts at contacting the copyright holder were unsuccessful. Heyer, J. (1954) The Back of Beyond. Shell Film Unit, Australia. Waterhouse, Private Pleasures, pp. 230–231. Carfrae, M. (1994) Roads to heaven: The American road genre in fi lm and literature 1945–1992. MPhil thesis, University of Sydney, pp. 9, 12–13. Carfrae traces the origins of the road genre to American frontier fiction, including the writings of James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. In these writers’ works protagonists seek freedom and escape from the ‘civilisation’ of the east by moving westward into the wilderness. Venkatasawmy, R., Simpson, C. and Visosevic, T. (2001) From sand to bitumen, from bushrangers to ‘bogans’, mapping the Australian road movie. Journal of Australian Studies 70, 79. See Carfrae, Roads to heaven, pp. 2, 100, 119–121, 139–140, 145; Barry, G. (1973) Defi ning a new genre: Part 1 – the road movie. Lumiere, October, 22; Laderman, D. (2002) Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, p. 1. Niland, D. (1974 [1955]) The Shiralee. London: White Lion, p. 115. Now published by Penguin Books, Australia. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner Kemalde Pty Ltd c/o Tim Curnow, Literary Agent & Consultant, Sydney. Willey, K. (1964) Up the bitumen. Walkabout, March, p. 17. Willey, K. (1973) Top end – the frontier is the future. Walkabout, January, p. 8.

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(72) Ozroads website at http://www.ozroads.com.au/NationalSystem/highway1.htm (accessed 19 June 2007); Wilson, R. (1991) Around Australia on Highway 1. Sydney: Weldon, p. 6. (73) Ozroads website; Broomham, R. (2001) Vital Connections: A History of NSW Roads from 1788. Alexandria: Hale & Iremonger, p. 164. Changes in the route numbering system since the mid-1970s resulted in alternative numbering on some routes. For example, parts of the Stuart Highway are now designated as National Route A87. (74) Farwell, G. (1965) Highway Number One. Walkabout, December, p. 32. (75) Farwell, G. (1978) Around Australia on Highway 1. Adelaide: Rigby, p. 8. (76) Farwell, Highway Number One, p. 29. (77) Shaffer, See America First, pp. 130–131. (78) Canadian director Ted Kotcheff and his team spent considerable time in Broken Hill, the setting for Bundanyabba and the inspiration for its fictional counterpart, mixing with locals and frequenting the pubs. Many of the minor characters in the fi lm were played by locals. See Caputo, R. (2009) Wake in Fright: An Interview with Ted Kotcheff. Senses of Cinema 51. See http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2009/51/ ted-kotcheff -interview/ (accessed 24 January 2011). (79) Robertson, P. (1997) Home and away: Friends of Dorothy on the road in Oz. In S. Cohan and I.R. Hark (eds) The Road Movie Book. London: Routledge, p. 273. (80) Waterhouse, Private Pleasures, p. 220; Waterhouse, Vision, pp. 261–263. (81) Horwitz, T. (1987) One for the Road: A Hitchhiker’s Outback. Sydney: Harper & Row (Australasia), p. 19. (82) Horwitz, One for the Road, p. 22. (83) Condon, S. (1996) Sean & David’s Long Drive. Melbourne: Lonely Planet, p. 32. (84) Condon, Sean & David’s Long Drive, pp. 94–95. (85) Condon, Sean & David’s Long Drive, p. 64. (86) Morrison, A. (1961) Matilda’s travels. Diary of Alastair Morrison, NLA MS 9680, p. 21. (87) Condon, Sean & David’s Long Drive, p. 60. (88) Elliott, S. (1994) The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Polygram Filmed Entertainment. (89) See also Biber, K. (2001) The threshold moment: Masculinity at home and on the road in Australian cinema. Limina 7, 42. (90) Elliott, Priscilla. (91) Robertson, Home and away, p. 273. (92) The Western genre is also referenced in other Australian road movies, including: The Cars that Ate Paris, Backroads and the Mad Max series. See Kerr, R. (2012) On ‘the road’: A cultural history – imagining, experiencing and representing ‘the road’ in Australia 1890–2011. PhD thesis, University of Sydney, p. 304. (93) Carfrae, Roads to heaven, p. 27. (94) Cited in Bell, P. and Bell, R. (1993) Implicated: The United States in Australia. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, p. viii. (95) See, for example, Waterhouse, Private Pleasures; Bell, P. and Bell, R. (1998) Americanisation and Australia. Sydney: UNSW Press; Bell and Bell, Implicated; Collins, D. (1987) Hollywood Down Under: Australians at the Movies 1896 to the Present Day. North Ryde, NSW: Angus & Robertson. (96) Bell and Bell, Implicated, pp. 203, 208. (97) Turner, G. (1993) The genres are American: Australian narrative, Australian fi lm, and the problem of genre. Literature Film Quarterly 21 (2), 106–107; Murray, S. and Ryan, T. (2008) Richard Franklin: Director/producer. Interview, Senses of Cinema 48 – online http://sensesofcinema.com/2008/dossier-on-australian-exploitation/ richard-franklin/ (accessed 5 February 2010). (98) Ewers, Discovering Australia through walkabout, p. 45.

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(99) Kemp, J.D. (1962) Road train to Meekatharra. Walkabout, April, p. 27. (100) Condon, Sean & David’s Long Drive, pp. 20–21. ‘Twin Peaks’ was an American television series, directed by David Lynch, which screened in 1990–1991. It followed the investigation into a murder in the small town of Twin Peaks in the woodlands of Washington State. (101) Condon, Sean & David’s Long Drive, p. 27. (102) Condon, Sean & David’s Long Drive, pp. 27–28. (103) Condon, Sean & David’s Long Drive, pp. 156–157. (104) Horwitz, One for the Road, p. 37; Condon, Sean & David’s Long Drive, p. 27. (105) Condon, Sean & David’s Long Drive, p. 106. (106) Rowsome, F. Jr. (1990) The Verse by the Side of the Road: The Story of the BurmaShave Signs and Jingles. New York: Penguin. (107) Condon, Sean & David’s Long Drive, p. 96. (108) Condon, Sean & David’s Long Drive, pp. 103–104. (109) Shaffer, See America First, pp. 319–320. (110) Drew, P. (1994) The Coast Dwellers: Australians Living on the Edge. Ringwood, Vic: Penguin, pp. 107, 120.

4 Travelling North

In a scene during Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, one of the characters, Curmudgeon, unfurls a booklet of postcards from Surfers Paradise. He tells Max, ‘This is where we’re going. Paradise! Two thousand miles from here. Fresh water. Plenty of sunshine. Nothing to do but breed!’ The fi lm ends with a convoy of Kombi vans carrying refugees from the post-apocalyptic wasteland making their way across the desert as the narrator’s voiceover says, ‘And so began the journey north to safety, to our place in the sun’.1 The idea of the beach as the ‘promised land’ seems a strange juxtaposition in a series of fi lms predominantly set in the outback or desert, yet it references a quintessential element of late 20th-century Australian culture – the road trip North or ‘going up-the-coast’. For all our obsession with searching for the ‘real Australia’ in the bush and outback, the reality is that most people in Australia live near the coast – at the edges of a continent ‘girt by sea’, in the archaic words of the national anthem. While Australians’ relationship to the beach changed over time, it has become as much a symbol of Australian identity and mythology as the outback. The rise of surfi ng and beach culture, the extension of paid annual leave and a boom in private car ownership after WWII made the beach holiday popular with more Australians. Going up or down the coast for a long weekend, annual summer holidays or a more permanent sea change became another national ritual. If the outback fulfilled travellers’ desire to embrace the pioneering spirit by doing things the hard way, or appealed to patriotic ideals of knowing and appreciating the country, the beach was purely about pleasure. The beach is Australia’s playground. It conjures images of hedonism: sun, surf, sand and sex; a place of dreams and desires; a place to escape from reality. With Australia’s largest and most populous cities, Sydney and Melbourne, lying on the eastern seaboard, the idea of heading north to the warmer climes of north-coast New South Wales and Queensland has a particularly powerful hold on the Australian imagination. From the 1970s, as well as being a major part of Australian tourism culture, the road trip ‘North’ became a journey through which writers and filmmakers explored themes of personal identity, gender and sexuality, relationships, freedom, escape and redemption. 98

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Learning to Swim

Australians did not immediately embrace the beach as a leisure destination. Following European trends, for much of the 19th century they viewed the coast with a mixture of fear and admiration. Bush balladeer Banjo Paterson lamented: We cannot love the restless sea That rolls and tosses to and fro Like some fierce creature in its glee, For human weal or human woe It has no touch of sympathy. 2

Yet people appreciated, with Romantic sensibility, the coast’s sublime and picturesque qualities, as well as the health-giving benefits of bracing sea air. From the 1840s, seaside ‘resorts’ emerged near capital cities. They mimicked those in Britain by name and by nature. Port Melbourne’s Pier Hotel was advertised as ‘Brighton on the beach’, while Manly became ‘the Brighton of Sydney’, with its North and South Steyne promenades also named after those at Britain’s most famous seaside resort. 3 In fact, there is a Brighton in almost every Australian state.4 Other resorts to develop in the mid- to late 19th century included: Sorrento and Lorne in Victoria; Sandgate, Cleveland and Southport near Brisbane; Robe and Glenelg in South Australia; and Cottesloe Beach near Perth in Western Australia. 5 Initially, most activities took place out of the water rather than in it. Piers and jetties, built to land the steamers and ships which brought visitors and supplies, also served as promenades, where people could stroll, to see and be seen, as well as taking in the air, sunshine and views, and enjoying amusements at a safe distance. At Byron Bay on the far north coast of New South Wales, a jetty was built in 1888. It became the lifeline for a town, which at that time was the heart of the Northern Rivers timber, farming and dairying district. A steamer service from Ballina, which offered excursion fares, also brought early tourists to Byron Bay.6 Bathing was not considered respectable as most people who swam did so nude; hence, from the 1830s authorities banned sea bathing during daylight hours. By the late 19th century, however, swimming became more popular – in calm and gender-segregated baths but also in the ocean. Increasingly, people flouted the rules as the sensuous pleasures of the surf became irresistible. In 1902 restrictions on surf bathing were lifted, fi rst at Manly, but authorities enforced strict guidelines on appropriate attire – namely, neck-to-knee costumes. Physical as well as moral dangers accompanied the growing popularity of surf bathing, and swimmers risked drowning in rough surf or strong currents. The surf lifesaving movement developed in the early 1900s, with organised groups of volunteers who were trained in life saving keeping order on the beaches and rescuing swimmers who got into difficulties. The first clubs were formed around 1907. Overall, though, going to the beach

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began to be embraced as a wonderfully healthy pastime, as the Sydney Morning Herald declared in September 1907: ‘Surf-bathing is helping to build up a race of fi ne young hardy Australians and everything should be done to encourage it.’ 7 While body surfi ng was also becoming popular, the fi rst surfboards appeared in Australia before WWI. Some were brought from Hawaii by touring surf club members. When Hawaiian Olympic swimming champion Duke Kahanamoku visited Sydney in late 1914 and early 1915, he also demonstrated his skilful surfboard riding on a heavy solid wood longboard, deftly manoeuvring it in difficult conditions. His visit helped to raise the profi le of surfi ng in Australia.8

The Bush Meets the Beach

While writers and artists were slower to embrace the beach than ordinary Australians, elements of bush mythology found expression and continuity on the beach before, during and after WWI. Imagery of strong, healthy, bronzed Australian manhood was equally at home in the bush or on the beach, as was the ideal of egalitarianism. As John Douglas Pringle, editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, wrote in the 1960s, ‘You cannot tell a man’s income in a pair of swimming trunks, and the Pacific surf is a mighty leveller’.9 Even amid the horrors of Gallipoli – the beach which many claim was the birthplace of Australian nationhood – Charles Bean, creator of the Anzac legend, described moments when the soldiers indulged in the simple pleasures of swimming and sunbaking. Many Australians who were accustomed to sun-bathing in their seaside resorts at home … quickly discarded their shirts, amusing themselves with an informal competition to become ‘the brownest man on the beach’. … When the struggle of the Landing had subsided, the Beach on summer days reminded many onlookers of an Australian coastal holidayplace … irresistibly recalled the Manly of New South Wales or the Victorian Sorrento.

As the campaign dragged on, these moments of respite became more precious and continued despite the ever-present danger of Turkish snipers.10 Between the wars, many of the qualities of bushmen and Anzacs, including courage, sacrifice, vigilance, heroism and mateship, became associated with surf lifesavers. They epitomised the image of the ‘bronzed Aussie’ in popular culture, and a suntan was regarded as a badge of masculinity.11 By the 1930s, surfi ng was the most popular participatory sport in Australia.12 The beach was becoming as much a symbol of Australia as the outback. A series of posters commissioned by the Australian National Travel Association to promote tourism featured images including a young

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Figure 4.1 Australian National Travel Association poster entitled, ‘Australia: Particulars at Shipping and Travel Agencies’, 1929 by Percy Trompf Source: National Library of Australia. Copyright Percy Trompf Artistic Trust, courtesy Josef Lebovic Gallery, Sydney.

woman enjoying the surf, and a woman riding a surfboard, with captions reading: ‘Australia for Sun and Surf’ and ‘Surfi ng Australia’. Percy Trompf’s famous 1929 poster, produced for the Association, depicts two elegantly dressed women and a male bather looking out onto a crowded Bondi Beach from the balcony of the pavilion. It is simply titled, ‘Australia’ (Figure 4.1).13 Getting There: The Road to Paradise

While trams and railways gave people easier access to beaches near the capital cities for day trips or short breaks, sea transport was the quickest and most comfortable way of travelling further up or down the coast between Sydney or Melbourne and the Queensland border, even in the early 20th century. Rugged terrain and wide rivers meant that rail and

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road routes were slow to develop near the coast. A north coast rail line opened between Casino and Murwillumbah in New South Wales in the 1890s, but it was not until the 1920s that Sydney was connected to northern rivers and coastal settlements by rail. Even then the railway only met the coast at a few places, with the main line running further inland, so that travellers had to complete the journey by bus or car. The Clarence River at Grafton remained an obstacle until a railway and road bridge was built in 1932.14 Southport, on what is now the Gold Coast, became Queensland’s premier seaside resort in the late 19th century. Wealthy Brisbane residents and graziers from the Darling Downs began building holiday homes there from the 1860s. Some adventurous visitors rowed across the Nerang River to the surf at Main Beach, now Surfers Paradise, and in the 1880s a vehicular ferry operated by German immigrant Johann Meyer made the crossing easier. Cobb & Co. coaches ran from Brisbane to Southport, and in 1884 the service extended south, over the New South Wales border to Tweed Heads and later to Murwillumbah. With no good road link, the coaches ran over the hard sand beaches most of the way to Coolangatta at the Queensland border. The opening of the railway line between Brisbane and Southport in 1889 made it a faster, more comfortable journey of just over two hours, which dramatically boosted the numbers of holiday visitors. The Queensland Railways Department introduced cheaper excursion fares, and sold 80,000 of these in 1911.15 When the fi rst motor vehicles made an appearance, holidaymakers in their Model Ts drove down a rough bush track from Brisbane to Southport, then via Meyer’s Ferry to the surf beach. Cars meant that places like Byron Bay came within reach of Brisbane. A Brisbane motoring magazine, the Steering Wheel, however, advised motorists to send their cars by train to Southport to avoid the often impassable road if they wanted to venture further south.16 It seems that many heeded that advice, or simply continued to drive along the beach, as the Cobb & Co. coaches did years earlier. In 1909 one Queensland motorist, Dr A.B. Brockway, transported his car to Tweed Heads by rail, and then drove to Sydney. At Byron Bay, he recorded: George and I went for a stroll on the grand beach, the sand of which is so fi rm that at low tide it is used by bicyclists, horsemen and buggy drivers as a road; indeed they journey by the sands to Southport in Queensland, having here and there to go inland where a point of land projects into the sea.17

The Queensland Main Roads Board, established in 1920, soon turned its attention to the Main South Coast Road, recognising its value as a tourist route. By 1929–1930, improvements including bitumen sealing, and bridges to replace ferry crossings were well under way, and the road was renamed the Pacific Highway.18

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The fi rst major project for New South Wales’ Main Roads Board, formed in 1925, was to construct a road link between Sydney and Newcastle, which was by then the state’s second most important city. Beyond Newcastle, at Hexham, two routes diverged, with the Great Northern Highway – now the New England Highway – running inland via Maitland, the Upper Hunter and New England region to the Queensland border. The alternative North Coast Highway passed through Raymond Terrace, Gloucester, Taree, Port Macquarie, Kempsey, Coffs Harbour, South Grafton, Ballina, Mullumbimby and Condong en route to Tweed Heads.19 In the early 1920s much of the main North Coast road consisted of earth formation only. Some sections were sealed with the help of Commonwealth funding, which prioritised northern and southern highways linking states to open up settlement, and as unemployment relief projects for returned servicemen. Much more work was needed, however, to bring the road up to an acceptable standard as an interstate highway. The timber industry was still a major part of the north coast economy, and the timber cutters’ heavy wagons cut up the road surface. This was particularly bad on the stretch from Taree to Port Macquarie and between the Bellinger River and Coff s Harbour. The NSW Main Roads Board began gradually improving the roads’ surfacing, alignment and grading, rerouting sections and bridging rivers. 20 By 1931 the entire route between Sydney and Brisbane was named the Pacific Highway. While it was considered to be the ‘height of modernity’ at the time, this was only the beginning of a seemingly never-ending process, as it soon struggled to keep up with the ever-increasing demands placed upon it. 21 Frank Dalby Davison commented on the narrowness of the road after Grafton, ‘sometimes resembling a country lane’. 22 This was the beginning of travellers’ love-hate relationship with the highway that became the premier tourist route between Sydney and the holiday destinations of the north coast and Queensland. Road guides published by the National Roads and Motorists’ Association (NRMA) and the NSW Government Tourist Bureau for both the Pacific and Princes Highways in the 1920s and 1930s reflected the growing popularity of ‘tourist resorts’ along the east coast and helped to promote the highways as tourist routes (Figures 4.2 and 4.3). The journey north from Sydney to Brisbane via the Pacific Highway could take four or five days, with suggested stops at Newcastle, Port Macquarie, Grafton and Byron Bay. The guide listed all the locations of good surfi ng beaches, including Terrigal, near Gosford, Swansea, Newcastle, Port Macquarie, Nambucca Heads, Urunga, Coffs Harbour, Woolgoolga, Yamba, Evans Head, Broadwater, Ballina, Byron Bay, Brunswick Heads, Tweed HeadsCoolangatta, Burleigh and Southport. Advertisements for hotels and guesthouses made much of their proximity to the beach, such as the Ocean View Hotel at Urunga, with its ‘front balcony facing the Ocean Beach’; or

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Figure 4.2 NRMA Pacific Highway Guide and map of Pacific and New England Highways, c.1937 Source: NRMA (National Roads and Motorists’ Association) (c.1937) The Pacific Highway Sydney to Brisbane via North Coast of N.S.W. Sydney: Australian Guide Book Co., p. 2. (State Library of NSW.) Reproduced courtesy of NRMA and Hardie Grant Publishing.

Yamba’s Craigmore Guest House, located ‘in a unique position on the edge of the surf’. Other attractions included fishing and oysters. 23 Going up or down the coast, of course, depends on where you start from. The Princes Highway is the main coastal route linking Melbourne and Sydney. Originally known as the South Coast Road, it was renamed in 1920 following the Royal Visit by Edward, Prince of Wales. 24 This highway also began to be improved in the 1920s. A trip from Melbourne to Sydney could be done in a leisurely four days, with overnight stops at Lakes Entrance, Eden and Bateman’s Bay. Lakes Entrance was one of the most popular holidaying places in Victoria by the 1930s, offering spectacular vistas where the Gippsland Lakes meet the Southern Ocean at Ninety Mile Beach. Eden, Merimbula and Narooma were becoming popular for surfi ng and fishing, while Ulladulla boasted camping grounds including Hartel’s Motor Park on the Princes Highway, near the surf beach and ocean baths. 25 The ‘Official Princes Highway Motor Guide’ of 1929 promoted the Illawarra region, south of Sydney, as an earthly paradise, the ‘garden of

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Figure 4.3 Princes Highway road guide and map, c.1937 Source: NRMA (NSW) & NSW Government Tourist Bureau (c.1937), Gregory’s Prince’s Highway Motorists’ Road Guide Melbourne to Sydney Coastal Route. Sydney: Australian Guide Book Co., p. 2. (State Library of NSW.) Reproduced courtesy of Hardie Grant Publishing.

New South Wales’, 26 perhaps hinting at a southern Garden of Eden. Arguably, the south coast has not attracted quite the same allure as the north. That may be due in part to its overshadowing by another, northern ‘paradise’, which was beginning to take shape in the 1930s. Surfers Paradise was originally known as Elston. In 1923 it had three houses and a post office; then, in 1926 a group of surfers formed a surf lifesaving club, meeting in Jim Cavill’s recently opened hotel. The Elston, with its tropical garden and zoo, also catered to visitors from Brisbane.27 When bridges replaced the last two vehicular ferries on Queensland’s section of the Pacific Highway in 1932, this area of the coast was just a few hours’ drive away. The name Surfers Paradise had caught on by then, and was officially gazetted in 1934.28 By 1937 there were about 500 holiday homes in Surfers as well as some blocks of holiday flats. The town was becoming more like a small resort and tourist-oriented businesses grew. A new Surfers Paradise Hotel opened that year, after the original burned down.29 The Queensland government advertised its state’s south-eastern beaches in Sydney and Melbourne, luring visitors from the southern states.

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The southern market grew as the Pacific Highway improved, and a bus link also brought tourists from the railway station at Murwillumbah to Surfers Paradise. Queensland’s temperate climate was a big attraction for tourists from south of the border, as were its more relaxed attitudes towards drinking, with Queensland pubs remaining open until 10 pm, long after those down south closed at six. During WWII, thousands of Australian and American servicemen stationed in and around Brisbane went to Surfers for R & R. 30 Its many temptations made Surfers one of the most popular and controversial tourist destinations in Australia after the war when the beach holiday’s heyday really began. The Long Hot Summer

As Australians recovered from the Depression and another world war, they certainly needed a holiday. In the years after WWII, a number of factors contributed to the rise of the extended beach holiday. First, the gradual reduction of working hours to the 40-hour week meant that by 1945 most workers enjoyed a full two-day weekend. Paid annual leave began with one week in the 1940s, and trade unions bargained for extensions in the following decades, so that by 1974 four weeks was the norm. Many workers took their leave in late December and January as businesses often closed down over the Christmas–New Year period. This also coincided with the long Christmas school holidays and the height of the Australian summer, making it an ideal time to escape the heat by heading to the beach. With the rise of private car ownership after the war, the long summer holiday road trip became a feature of Australian life. The NRMA reported a 400% increase in their car trip itinerary service in 1947, with up to 900 motorists a day receiving travel advice. According to Brisbane’s Courier Mail, over 100,000 holidaymakers headed to camping grounds at Queensland’s coastal resorts during the 1947 Christmas period. 31 While many people stayed with friends or relatives, camping and caravan holidays were most popular in the 1950s and 1960s (Figure 4.4). 32 Caravan parks based on American models began to appear in the 1950s. By 1965 there were over 2000 caravan parks and camping grounds in Australia. They contributed significantly to the economy of coastal towns. 33 The parks offered a communal, sociable environment as well as relatively cheap accommodation for longer stays, and generations of families often returned to the same location year after year. Motels began to develop in Australia from the mid-1950s, also following American trends and the rise of car ownership. They offered self-contained convenient accommodation. The fi rst motel in Surfers Paradise opened in 1954 at the southern end of town. Motels spread rapidly, especially near popular tourist spots – Port Macquarie had 11 by 1960, when there were a total of 272 in Australia. 34 The Rex group, with its chain of motels ‘strategically situated at the most popular stop-over

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Figure 4.4 Advertisement for the Cargill Caravanette in the NRMA’s Open Road magazine, September 1965 Source: State Library of NSW. Reproduced courtesy of NRMA.

towns on the Melbourne-Sydney-Brisbane highways’, announced that ‘three fabulous new motels’ would open in June 1960 at Taree, Coff s Harbour and Scone. 35 Those who could afford it built their own accommodation. Beach shacks and holiday houses sprang up along the coast as wartime building restrictions were lifted in the 1950s. They were usually simple affairs, often made of timber or fibro – an asbestos fibre-cement product, which became available after WWI and was cheaper and more durable than timber – so that even working-class families could often afford a weekender. The fibro beach shack became another iconic symbol of the Australian beach holiday of the 1950s–1970s. 36

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Surfers Paradise pioneered a new, more sophisticated style of accommodation in the 1950s and 1960s. Self-contained serviced apartments, fully furnished and featuring well-equipped kitchens, including refrigerators and pop-up toasters, provided greater comfort and flexibility than hotels and motels. Properties often also had swimming pools, tennis courts or gymnasiums. The ten-storey luxury motor-inn, ‘The Sands’, which opened on The Esplanade in December 1966, was the fi rst of its kind, with units being individually owned, yet all featuring standardised furnishings and fittings. It also signalled the beginning of the high-rise development that proliferated in Surfers over the coming decades. 37 While Surfers also developed a more exotic restaurant and entertainment scene, for most Australians the beach holiday meant simple, cheap, relaxed living. After the long drive up or down the coast, they could settle into their camp ground, motel, flat or beach shack and spend their days swimming, surfi ng, fishing, listening to the cricket on the radio and enjoying time with family and friends. Meals were usually home cooked, with an emphasis on simplicity – barbeques and the occasional takeaway fish and chips or hamburgers. 38 The postwar years not only ushered in a new era in tourism, but also a new generation of tourists. Craig McGregor wrote in Profile of Australia, published in 1966, ‘Beach, sun, sea, summer pleasure … these are the keystones of the new generation’. 39 McGregor was talking about those born during or just after WWII. By the mid-1960s they were teenagers or young adults, and their outlook and experiences were vastly different from those of their parents. They were at the vanguard of the surfi ng and counterculture generation. Everybody’s Gone Surfin’

The rise of the surfi ng craze in the USA from the mid-1950s also spread to Australia, and further popularised the cult of the beach and its associations with freedom and hedonism. American West Coast surf culture pervaded Australia in the 1960s, from the Californian sound of the Beach Boys’ music and Gidget movies to magazines, fi lm, television and fashion. The surfi ng subculture created its own language and a new dance craze – the stomp. Home-grown contributions included The Atlantics’ 1963 hit instrumental surf track ‘Bombora’, and Little Pattie’s debut single, ‘My Blonde Headed Stompy Wompy Real Gone Surfer Boy’, released in 1964.40 Malibu surfboards, introduced to Australia from California in 1956, were made of fibre-glass covered balsa wood, and were lighter and much easier to manoeuvre than the old-fashioned longboards, which surfers often had to leave buried in the sand at the beach as they were too heavy to transport.41 The Malibu boards, and the car, enabled surfers to travel further between beaches in search of the perfect wave. Another key

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element of the new surf culture – the ‘surf safari’ – was born. Young surfers took to the road, sometimes for a week or longer, with surfboards strapped to the roof or stowed in Kombis or panel-vans and safari wagons, travelling up and down the coast in search of good waves and remote, undiscovered surfi ng spots to escape the crowds of swimmers and ‘gremlins’ or ‘grommets’ – novice surfers – at the main city beaches.42 Groups of surfers shared petrol expenses, and while some took camping gear, most slept in their cars. They ate canned food or sometimes caught fish to cook on an open fire.43 The motor car gave this group a greater freedom of mobility than their parents had enjoyed, while the surfi ng scene provided an outlet for their ‘anti-authoritarianism and desire for a separate identity’ from their parents’ generation.44 In the early 1970s ‘soul surfi ng’ became fashionable as another subset of the broader surfi ng and counterculture movement. Soul surfers shared a love of nature, an interest in meditation, astrology, health-foods, psychedelic drugs and the quest for physical perfection. The surfi ng magazine, Tracks, began publication in October 1970 and reflected surfers’ anti-establishment ideology, portraying surfers as environmentally aware, rejecting consumerism and seeking a simpler, healthier way of life. The first issue described the migration of many surfers to small coastal towns such as Byron Bay, where ‘kombies loaded with surf Indians’ arrived, escaping from the ‘hang ups’ and ‘man-made pleasures’ of the cities in favour of a ‘simple, uncluttered sort of existence’.45 Surfer Nat Young said, ‘Surfers began dropping out and experimenting with communal living; everyone was trying to leave the city. I went to Byron Bay’.46 Tracks also featured articles on surfi ng safaris in Australia and America. It compared the ‘nomad surfer’ to the ‘Western cowboy’, who understood natural lore and ecology, carrying his ‘environment’ with him. The surfer required the cowboy’s simplicity in order to minimise costs and concentrate on surfi ng.47 In an interview for Tracks in March 1971, when asked why he surfed, Bernie Huddle replied: ‘It’s about the environment, getting away, experiencing natural, deserted places … It encompasses getting away from the group, from society as a whole.’48 The road played a significant role in making that escape possible. Where the surfers went, tourists often followed. Many places along the coast ‘discovered’ by surfers in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Bell’s Beach on Victoria’s Great Ocean Road, Crescent Head, Seal Rocks, Angourie, and Lennox Head on the New South Wales north coast, and Noosa, north of Brisbane on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, later became popular tourist destinations.49 By the mid-1970s Byron Bay became the ‘hippie’ capital of the north coast and retains its distinctive appeal for those keen to pursue an alternative lifestyle, alongside a growing number of celebrity residents. Today, Byron struggles with the pressures for change and development that come with increasing popularity with both local and international tourists. 50

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The freedom, independence and mobility which the car brought to surfi ng and beach culture also extended to a new sexual freedom. The beach has long been a sensual and sexualised space, and was often the location for fi rst sexual encounters. The car gave teenagers a degree of privacy to engage in sexual activity away from the prying gaze of parents. Panel-vans became synonymous with the surf scene in the late 1960s and 1970s. These station wagons – alternately known as ‘shaggin’ wagons’ – such as the iconic Holden Sandman, had an elongated boot, ideal for carrying surfboards and gear, and they could also accommodate a mattress. Some were painted with elaborate and erotic artwork on the exterior, and furnished with curtains on the windows for extra privacy. Stickers often adorned the rear, with messages reading ‘if this van’s a-rockin’ don’t bother knockin’. The chauvinistic – at times misogynistic – element of surf culture, in which women were objectified and subservient to male pleasure, was captured in the novel, Puberty Blues, which revealed the experiences of teenagers at Cronulla beach in Sydney during the 1970s. Sexual initiation in the back of their boyfriend’s panel-van was a prerequisite for being a ‘surfie chick’, able to hang out with the coolest gang on the beach. 51 Similarly, Christopher Fraser’s fi lm, Summer City (1977), is set in the 1960s, when four friends from Sydney go up the coast for a weekend of male bonding, surfi ng and sex as a fi nal fling for Sandy, who is soon to be married. ‘Chicks’ have no place on the road except as potential sexual conquests for the men, whose 1960s Chevrolet bears the acronym ‘NRNRH’ stencilled on its boot, standing for ‘No Rooting No Ride Home’. 52 Beaches, Bananas and Bikinis: The Road Trip North

By the mid-1970s the road trip up the coast was in full swing. Boxing Day signalled the start of a mass exodus from the cities, as families hit the road, heading to beaches up and down the coast, where they often stayed for most of January. Over the years, various landmarks and attractions along the way became as much a part of the holiday as the fi nal destination. After leaving Sydney, as motorists approached Wyoming on the Central Coast, they were greeted by the giant concrete grey-green figure of Dino (later Ploddy) the dinosaur, who stood near the Pacific Highway from 1963, attracting visitors to the Australian Reptile Park. A little further up the road, The Oak milk bar at Peats Ridge served milkshakes and ice creams in a huge range of flavours. The Oak became an institution on any road trip north from 1965 until 1986 when the Mooney Mooney Creek Freeway Bridge opened, diverting passing traffic. 53 By the late 1960s, Port Macquarie was one of the largest holiday destinations on the mid-north coast, with over half a million visitors in 1968.

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Themed attractions included Fantasy Glades, which opened in 1968 and featured Snow White’s cottage and the ‘dwarves’ church’ as well as displays of birds in aviaries and animals roaming the grounds. New developments planned at the time included a porpoise pool and oceanarium, Paradise Park and a snake farm. These manmade diversions augmented the area’s many natural attractions such as Ellensborough Falls, and the world’s largest blackbutt – The Birdtree – near Camden Haven. 54 The NRMA’s Open Road magazine in January 1970 described the ‘carnival atmosphere’ at Port Macquarie at holiday time as ‘hundreds of caravans converge on the town’, which by then had become a ‘holiday Mecca’. No road trip to Queensland would be complete without stopping at ‘The Big Banana’ at Coffs Harbour (Figure 4.5). John Landi built the ‘biggest banana in the world’ to attract passing motorists to stop at his roadside banana stall. It opened in December 1964 and expanded over the years to incorporate a café, souvenir shop and educational exhibit. Today it is part of a huge fun park including an ice skating rink, mini-golf course, rides, water park, nursery and ‘The World of Bananas’ multimedia theatre experience. Visitors can also tour the banana plantation and packing shed. 55 The Big Banana was the fi rst of Australia’s many ‘big’ roadside attractions, and later additions further north on the Pacific Highway included the Big Prawn at Ballina and the Big Pineapple at Nambour, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. Coffs Harbour also marks the beginnings of the sub-tropical zone, where the scenery begins to change. Forested areas give way to banana plantations on hillsides and sugar cane fields flanking the highway as travellers move further north.

Figure 4.5 The Big Banana, Coff s Harbour. Photograph by Brendan Bell 1997 Source: National Library of Australia.

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‘Tick gates’ signalled motorists’ arrival at the Queensland border, where vehicles had to stop to be inspected. No fruit or animals could be taken across the border in case they carried pests and diseases such as ticks and fruit fly. This sometimes required any bananas or other fruit brought from New South Wales to be eaten on the spot or surrendered to the inspectors. After crossing the border into Queensland, most tourists headed straight for Surfers Paradise. During the late 1950s and 1960s, Surfers became the most popular beach resort in Australia, attracting both local and international visitors, and its reputation for glamour, hedonism and excess continued into the next decades. ‘Playground’ was a term frequently used to describe north coast resorts, and Surfers was the ultimate ‘playground of the Pacific’. A 1960 guide declared, ‘everything on the Gold Coast is geared to pleasure’. 56 Although the Gold Coast encompassed the stretch of beaches south-east of Brisbane, it became synonymous with Surfers Paradise. Surfers’ risqué reputation also began early. When the fi rst bikinis appeared on beaches in the 1940s, inspectors patrolled with tape measures to ensure that they covered the woman’s navel and measured at least four inches at the sides. Surfers tolerated briefer bikinis much earlier than other beaches, and by the 1960s the bikini became a symbol of Surfers Paradise. Gold Coast Mayor, Alderman Bruce Small, said in 1968, Here we accept the human form in the same way as we accept it when shown in an art gallery. Anyone going to an art gallery and wolf whistling Venus de Milo would be classed an idiot. It’s the same idea on the Gold Coast. 57

Surfers became known for its Meter Maids, who, dressed in their gold lame bikinis and tiaras, patrolled the streets putting coins into expired parking meters, thereby saving visitors from fi nes (Figure 4.6). This goodwill gimmick, an initiative of the Surfers Paradise Progress Association, began in 1965, but soon the Meter Maids’ fame spread throughout Australia and became a centrepiece of Gold Coast tourism promotions both here and overseas. 58 Meter Maids still operate today, wearing gold lycra bikinis and Akubra hats. Meter Maids were the brainchild of local businessman Bernie Elsey, whose Beachcomber Hotel became infamous in the 1960s for its ‘pyjama parties’, where scantily clad guests drank and cavorted around the swimming pool at night. The all-night ‘orgies’ which outraged locals were frequently raided by police, who confiscated illicit alcohol from the unlicensed premises. 59 Just as the warmer southern Mediterranean climate in Europe became associated with more relaxed social mores for northern Europeans, so was the allure of the ‘North’ for Australians from the southern states. With its variety of sophisticated accommodation, restaurants, coff ee shops,

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Figure 4.6 Meter Maid, Surfers Paradise, September 1969 Source: Queensland State Archives Digital Image ID 796.

nightclubs, and shops that stayed open much later than elsewhere in Australia, Surfers Paradise drew comparisons with the French Riviera, Miami and Honolulu. Many apartments built during the high-rise boom in the late 1970s and 1980s had a Mediterranean look and exotic names such as St Tropez, Olympus, Biarritz, Copacabana, Acapulco, Monte Carlo, Mykonos and Las Palmas. Victorians flocked to the Gold Coast in even greater numbers than the New South Welsh, especially in winter.60 The Gold Coast remains one of Australia’s premier tourist attractions. In the year ended 30 June 2015 it hosted over 3.3 million domestic and 861,000 international visitors, staying an average of four to five nights.61 While Surfers Paradise and the Gold Coast attracted many, others derided it as a crass ‘model of beachfront excess’ and overdevelopment, to be avoided at all costs.62 Paradise Lost?

The Pacific Highway, stretching for almost 1000 km between Sydney and Brisbane, became the most important tourist route on the east coast

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of Australia. While the Commonwealth and New South Wales governments decided in 1974 that the New England Highway would be the principal highway between Sydney and Brisbane, elevating it to National Highway status, the Pacific Highway was the preferred route for many, because of the attractions of the northern coastline for tourism or a more permanent sea change. 63 The New South Wales Tourism Commission estimated that in 1983–1984 there were nearly five and a half million visits to local government areas through which the highway passes. Between 1974 and 1982, traffic between Hexham and Coffs Harbour increased by 70% and between Murwillumbah and Tweed Heads by 85–100%, carrying 4000–7000 vehicles of through traffic each day.64 Yet it was not always a road to paradise. The highway was not fully sealed until the late 1960s, with gravel sections, single-lane timber bridges, sharp bends and narrow shoulders adding to its inadequacies. Much of the Pacific Highway remained a narrow two-lane road until relatively recently, and motorists faced frustrating delays stuck behind slow caravans, trucks and all the other traffic joining the holiday pilgrimage. Les Murray’s poem, ‘The Bulahdelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle’, is an ironic commemoration of that stretch of the Pacific Highway which became a notorious bottleneck for many years. Murray describes the line of traffic as a ‘Long Narrow City’ as it ‘crossed the Myall’ and ‘entered the North Coast’. The road is ‘the booming tarred pipe of the holiday’ which ‘slows and spurts again’, with the ‘fumes of fun hanging above ferns … in the time of the holiday’.65 The holiday season ends in tragedy for many, and the Pacific Highway was also Australia’s most dangerous road. Between 1979 and 1985 there were 698 fatalities on the Pacific Highway compared to 199 on the New England – a difference of nearly 350%.66 The Pacific had more ‘black spots’ – locations where more than six crashes occur in a year – than any other highway in New South Wales. Among the worst black spots were O’Sullivan’s Gap, north of Bulahdelah, and a section of The Lakes Way between Bulahdelah and Woottan.67 Since the 1970s, calls for improvements to the highway met with painfully slow response from governments. Two separate head-on collisions involving tourist buses near Grafton and Kempsey occurred within two months of each other at the end of 1989, killing 56 people. They remain Australia’s worst road accidents. The tragic events focused national attention on rural highway safety, and galvanised efforts to address the Pacific Highway’s inadequacies, including plans to upgrade it to a four-lane dual carriageway throughout. The Clybucca bypass near Kempsey opened in May 2016, almost three decades later. The Road to Redemption

As an important element of Australian culture, it is not surprising that the coast and road trip north feature in several works of fi lm and

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literature, particularly since the 1970s. Writers and fi lmmakers depict journeys up the coast as quests for escape, a means of recovering or healing troubled relationships, the search for and realisation of self-identity, or nostalgic attempts to recapture the lost innocence of the past. The ‘North’ usually represents an idealised place that offers sexual fulfi lment, sanctuary and, perhaps, redemption. Even in the first Mad Max film, shot mainly near Broken Hill in outback New South Wales, it is easy to forget that Max and his family live near the beach. The scenes there with his wife and child provide a respite from the violence and anarchy he encounters on the roads of an interior wasteland. David Williamson’s play, Travelling North (1980), released as a film in 1987, captures the lure of the ‘North’, as 70-year-old Frank and his younger and relatively new partner, Frances, plan to move from Melbourne to Queensland and travel around the north of Australia in their camper van. Set in ‘North Queensland, Melbourne, an area near Tweed Heads and Sydney between 1969 and 1972’, it depicts a scenario that was becoming increasingly familiar in the 1980s as retirees embarked on a more permanent ‘holiday’ by travelling or moving to the coast.68 In the film, during his speech at Frank’s retirement celebration, a colleague explains, ‘Frank is doing what we’d all like to do – going up north’.69 In the play, Frank tells Frances: ‘It’s going to be wonderful, my dear. We’re going to lead the ideal life. We’ll read, fish, laze, love and lie in the sun.’ When Frances worries about getting bored staying in one place too long, he reassures her that they will keep travelling: ‘All over the North. We’ll use the cottage as a base … We’ll travel all over the North.’ ‘North’, with a capital N, reinforces the idea of this destination as a promised land. In fact, the further north the better, as Frank insists, ‘we should go right up into the tropics north of Townsville’.70 While very little action takes place on the road, it is an invisible thread separating and connecting ‘cold and wintry’ Melbourne and the tropical ‘North’.71 The North–South dichotomy is sharply drawn – whenever Frank returns to Melbourne he falls ill, and as he and Frances head south to Sydney he suffers his fi rst heart attack. Frank and Frances’ journeying ‘North’ is a quest for escape, freedom and independence: from the bleakness of Melbourne winters; from Frances’ demanding and disapproving family; from Frank’s former life, work and difficult relationships. Like other retirees, Frank is also trying to escape ageing, ill health and eventual death. The dream of escape and freedom begins to sour, however, as Frances is torn between loyalty to her family and her love for the much older Frank, whose declining health becomes ever more burdensome. In Ken Cameron’s film, Out of It, released in 1977, the road trip north is a means of escape and redemption as three young petty criminals, fleeing a warehouse robbery in Sydney, set out to drive to Coolangatta, where one of them has an uncle. For Larry, crossing the imposing old iron truss bridge over the Nambucca River at Macksville triggers nostalgic

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memories of childhood road trips up the Pacific Highway with his parents, and more innocent times. Nostalgia also plays a large part in Robert Drewe’s short story, The Bodysurfers (1983), which explores ideas of redefi ning self and relationships. David, who is separated from his wife, takes his three children and his new partner, Lydia, for a weekend away at his recently acquired fibro and weatherboard beach shack at Pearl Beach, on the New South Wales Central Coast. The road trip north from Sydney is fraught with the anticipation, excitement and anxiety of new beginnings, and also with the desperate desire to recapture a lost self. During the drive David thinks about his decision to buy the shack, which was partly a celebration of his new-found independence. It was also driven by nostalgia for a simpler, more carefree time, reminiscent of his own childhood in the 1950s, when ‘his happiness had been bound up in the ocean’.72 Missing ‘the irresistible nationalistic combination of bush and water’, he decided to buy the weekender, but he had a very clear vision of what he wanted: The spirit of the shack had to be right, its character set preferably somewhere in the 1950s. It would need a properly casual, even run-down, beach air … A glimpse at least of the Pacific through the trees was mandatory.73

The surf had been part of his life until recent years, when with work, travel and his unravelling marriage, ‘he’d lost the habit of those peculiarly satiating Australian days’. In the trip to the beach shack, he hopes to reclaim something of the ‘harmony and boundless optimism’ of those times.74 For the couple in Colin Eggleston’s film, Long Weekend (1977), going up the coast with their caravan to a remote beach for the weekend is an attempt to repair their damaged relationship, which ultimately fails. More recently, Charlie & Boots (2009) focuses on a father–son relationship. After the death of his mother, Boots persuades his father, Charlie, to fi nally fulfi l a childhood promise he made to Boots that one day they would ‘dangle a line from the northernmost tip of Australia’.75 Their road trip from rural Victoria to Cape York in Far North Queensland gives them plenty of time to talk and reminisce, and enables them to come to new understandings of each other. The many bridges they cross on their journey are obvious metaphors for the progressive bridging of gaps in their relationship. Barbara Wels’ novel, Finwood and Lisa (1993) explores a young Melbourne woman’s coming of age and pursuit of independence, mobility and self-discovery, through her quest to recover a lost relationship with her mother. After buying an early 1960s Valiant, christened ‘Finwood’, for her 18th birthday, Lisa decides to drive north to fi nd her mother, who left when she was a baby. Lisa’s infatuation with the 1960s culture, including

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cars, literature and fashion, seems to indicate that she was born in the wrong era. Lisa embarks on a figurative and literal journey into the past, as she fi nds her mother living the New Age hippie lifestyle as an artist in ‘The Valley’, a fictional town reminiscent of Byron Bay, Mullumbimby or Nimbin, on the far north coast of New South Wales. While at fi rst Lisa thinks that she truly belongs in the Valley, she later realises that it is not so simple to recover the past and a relationship with her mother, but also discovers a much stronger sense of self in the present.76 Ebsen Storm’s In Search of Anna (1979) represented a significant departure from earlier road movies such as Out of It and Summer City, which reinforced gender stereotypes as women were virtually absent, victims of violence or sexually objectified. Storm’s fi lm reflects the burgeoning impact of second-wave feminism in its portrayal of a strong female lead. Sam (Judy Morris) is fi rmly in the driver’s seat of her black 1938 Buick as she travels from Melbourne to Sydney, and then further north. She picks up a hitchhiker, Tony, who has recently been released from prison in Melbourne and seeks to reconnect with his former girlfriend, Anna, who is living in Queensland. On the road north, Sam fi nds the freedom and independence she lacks in Sydney, where she feels constrained by a marriage and lifestyle that no longer hold meaning for her. Through her mastery of the car and road, and as she journeys further away from the city, she realises a more authentic self.77 At the conclusion of Travelling North, there is hope that Frances will eventually realise her desire for independence and freedom. Anticipating his own death, Frank leaves a letter advising Frances to go back down south to her family after he is gone. When his doctor, Saul, asks whether she will do that, however, she replies, in the fi nal line of the play, ‘No, I think somehow that I’ll go travelling further north’.78 Sea Changes

The traditional Australian beach holiday road trip faced some challenges in the later 20th century. A spike in fuel prices during the oil crisis of the late 1970s led to a slump in caravan sales, although this revived again in the mid-1980s as petrol prices fell and lighter vans came onto the market.79 Around this time, Australian tourism destinations faced competition as cheaper airfares and package holidays meant that many Australians could afford to travel overseas to more exotic beaches in Asia and the Pacific Islands. Bali in Indonesia became particularly popular. A changing workplace environment, including increasing casualisation, globalisation and the 24-hour, seven-day-a-week economy in many sectors, also made it difficult for some workers to take an extended summer holiday break. Those who do go up the coast for their holidays today are likely to stay for a shorter period in far more luxurious accommodation, with resorts catering to a more affluent and sophisticated market. As Ian Hoskins

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notes, however, some new resorts, while epitomising comfort and luxury, are designed in a style and materials that recall the fibro and timber beach houses of the 1950s–1970s, in their use of flat surfaces, timber and corrugated metal. Properties such as the Mantra resort at Kingscliff, near Byron Bay, are specifically aimed at a clientele who grew up in that era, tapping into their nostalgia for childhood holidays and simpler times.80 The numbers of people relocating from cities to the coast surged in the 1980s, leading to the phenomenon being called a ‘sea change’. Between 1981 and 1986 more than 31,000 people moved from Sydney to the north coast permanently.81 Key motivations for the moves included the more relaxed lifestyle, better environment and amenities – including cheaper housing – in coastal regions.82 The trend shows no signs of abating, and even inspired the television series, SeaChange, which screened on the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) from 1998 to 2000. The sea changers bring new pressures to bear on coastal communities, as the affluent newcomers with their cars, boats and ever more elaborate beach houses demand new infrastructure and amenities. Such development often irrevocably alters the character of towns and villages, alienates locals and destroys the very qualities which made them attractive in the first place. Australians’ love of the beach has sometimes been criticised by intellectuals and outside observers as mindless hedonism – narcissistic, voyeuristic, and symptomatic of a perceived emptiness and lack of meaning at the core of Australian culture. D.H. Lawrence wrote his novel, Kangaroo, at Thirroul on the coast just south of Sydney, in 1922. One of the characters, Somers, associates the beach with a ‘sense of irresponsible freedom … And all utterly uninteresting … nothing. No inner life, no high command, no interest in anything fi nally’.83 In Finwood and Lisa, Lisa’s boyfriend Tom also hints at a lack of direction and purpose in their road trip, telling Lisa, ‘It would help if you were a bit less mystical about where we were going, though, apart from up-the-coast’.84 Going ‘up the coast’ continues to captivate the Australian imagination. The Pacific Highway remains Australia’s busiest inter-city highway.85 Every Boxing Day and Good Friday, images of long queues of holiday traffic snaking up the highway lead the evening television news bulletins, and motorists are warned to expect delays at the well known bottlenecks like Coffs Harbour. In January 1996 the New South Wales and Commonwealth governments announced joint funding of $2.2 billion for a ten-year programme of works including bypasses, diversions and duplications to remove ‘black spots’ and reduce travel time.86 The vision for a four-lane dual carriageway over the entire length of the Pacific Highway is still not complete, and the seemingly never-ending roadworks, and their associated disruptions and delays, are themselves a source of pain for holidaymakers. Indeed, they may often feel as if they are really going nowhere – another recurring theme in imagining the Australian road, as the following chapter will explore.

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Notes – Chapter 4: Travelling North (1) Miller, G. (1981) Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. Kennedy Miller Productions. (2) Huntsman, L. (2001) Sand in Our Souls: The Beach in Australian History. Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, p. 46. (3) Huntsman, Sand in Our Souls, pp. 37–38. (4) Davidson, J. and Spearritt, P. (2000) Holiday Business: Tourism in Australia since 1870. Carlton South, Vic: Melbourne University Press, pp. 127–128. (5) Wells, L. (1982) Sunny Memories: Australians at the Seaside. Richmond, Vic: Greenhouse Publications, pp. 127–130. (6) Ryan, M. and Smith, R. (2001) Time and Tide Again: A History of Byron Bay. Lismore, NSW: Northern Rivers Press, p. 54. (7) Sydney Morning Herald, 7 September 1907, cited in Curby, P. (2001) Seven Miles from Sydney: A History of Manly. Manly, NSW: Manly Council, pp. 142–143. (8) Ford, C. (2014) Sydney Beaches: A History. Sydney: NewSouth, pp. 196–197; The Referee, 30 December 1914, p. 16. (9) Pringle, J.D. (1965) Australian Accent. London: Chatto & Windus, p. 198. (10) Huntsman, Sand in Our Souls, pp. 195–197. (11) Huntsman, Sand in Our Souls, p. 199; Curby, Seven Miles, p. 144. (12) Davidson and Spearritt, Holiday Business, p. 139. (13) Huntsman, Sand in Our Souls, p. 138; Dutton, G. (1985) Sun, Sea, Surf and Sand – the Myth of the Beach. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, p. 47. (14) NSW DMR (NSW Department of Main Roads) (1952) Historical roads of New South Wales: The story of the Pacific Highway North of Newcastle. Main Roads 18 (2), pp. 41, 47. (15) McRobbie, A. (1982) The Surfers Paradise Story. Surfers Paradise: Pan News, pp. 21–32. (16) McRobbie, Surfers Paradise, p. 28; Cushing, N. (2002) The Pacific Highway and Australian modernity. In X. Pons (ed.) Departures: How Australia Reinvents Itself. Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, p. 45. (17) Ryan and Smith, Time and Tide, p. 110. (18) Cushing, Pacific Highway, p. 46. (19) Cushing, Pacific Highway, p. 48. (20) Broomham, R. (2001) Vital Connections: A History of NSW Roads from 1788. Alexandria: Hale & Iremonger, p. 116; Cushing, Pacific Highway, p. 48; NSW DMR, Pacific Highway North of Newcastle, pp. 47–48. (21) Cushing, Pacific Highway, p. 48. (22) Davison, F.D. and Nicholls, B. (1935) Blue Coast Caravan. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, p. 61. (23) NRMA (National Roads and Motorists’ Association) (c.1937) The Pacifi c Highway Sydney to Brisbane via North Coast of N.S.W. Sydney: Australian Guide Book Co., p. 12. (24) Broomham, Vital Connections, p. 110. (25) NRMA (NSW) & NSW Government Tourist Bureau (c.1937), Gregory’s Prince’s Highway Motorists’ Road Guide Melbourne to Sydney Coastal Route. Sydney: Australian Guide Book Co. (26) Metusela, C. and Waitt, G. (2012) Tourism and Australian Beach Cultures: Revealing Bodies. Bristol: Channel View Publications, pp. 79–81. (27) Wells, Sunny Memories, p. 133. (28) Davidson and Spearritt, Holiday Business, p. 141. (29) McRobbie, Surfers Paradise, pp. 48–49. (30) McRobbie, Surfers Paradise, pp. 31, 56–57. (31) White, R. (2005) On Holidays: A History of Getting Away in Australia, North Melbourne: Pluto Press Australia. pp. 120–124, 128. (32) White, On Holidays, p. 141.

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(33) (34) (35) (36)

Davidson and Spearritt, Holiday Business, pp. 177–178. Davidson and Spearritt, Holiday Business, p. 180. Open Road, June 1960, p. 18. Hoskins, I. (2013) Coast: A New History of the New South Wales Edge. Sydney: NewSouth, p. 347. McRobbie, Surfers Paradise, pp. 81–82, 194–195. White, On Holidays, p. 133. McGregor, C. (1966) Profile of Australia. London: Hodder & Stoughton, p. 285. Young, N. (1983) The Complete History of Surfi ng. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, pp. 82–83, 85–86. Ford, Sydney Beaches, p. 197. McGregor, C. (1964) Champion of the surf. Walkabout, January, p. 11. Australian Women’s Weekly, 17 February 1965, p. 61. Ellis, R. (1969) Are we playing the game? Walkabout, December, p. 34. Tracks, October 1970, pp. 3–4. Young, Complete History of Surfing, p. 110. Tracks, December 1970, p. 28. Tracks, December 1970, p. 24. Young, Complete History of Surfing, pp. 99–100. Hoskins, Coast, pp. 374–375. Carey, G. and Lette, K. (1979) Puberty Blues. Carlton, Vic: McPhee Gribble. Fraser, C. (1977) Summer City. Avalon Films. Cushing, N. (2007) The road behind us: The Pacific Highway Sydney to Brisbane as a Heritage Corridor. Historic Environment 20 (1), 24. Open Road, July 1969, p. 17. The Big Banana Fun Park, Coffs Harbour website at http://www.bigbanana.com/ park-info/history/ (accessed 16 September 2016). Open Road, June 1960, p. 11. Quoted in Wells, Sunny Memories, pp. 106–109. McRobbie, Surfers Paradise, pp. 172–173. McRobbie, Surfers Paradise, pp. 132–133. Davidson and Spearritt, Holiday Business, pp. 144–146; McRobbie, Surfers Paradise, pp. 240–241. Griffith Institute for Tourism Research (2015) Gold Coast Tourism Industry Report Year Ending 30 June 2015. Griffith, Qld: Griffith Institute for Tourism, Griffith University, pp. 20–21. See http://invest.moregoldcoast.com.au/wp-content/uploads/ sites/2/2015/09/Gold-Coast-Tourism-Industry-Report-June-2015.pdf (accessed 10 October 2016). Davidson and Spearritt, Holiday Business, p. 148. CEDA (Committee for Economic Development of Australia) and AHURI (Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute) (1998) Pacifi c Highway: The Future of the Nation – a Discussion Paper on the Current and Planned Improvements to the Pacifi c Highway. Information Paper No. 54. South Brisbane: CEDA, March, p. 11. Nehl, G. (1986) The Pacifi c Highway: Towards 2001. Coff s Harbour: The author, pp. 11, 30, 35. Murray, L. (2006) The Bulahdelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle. In L. Murray (ed.) Collected Poems. Melbourne: Black Inc. Reproduced by permission of the author, Margaret Connolly & Associates Pty Ltd., and Carcanet Press Limited (UK). In the USA, the poem appears in The Rabbiter’s Bounty by Les Murray. Copyright © 1992 by Les Murray. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Nehl, Pacifi c Highway: Towards 2001, p. 43.

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(67) NRMA (1991) Country or Coast: a Motorist’s Comparison of the Pacific and New England Highways. Sydney: NRMA, pp. 59, 64, 72. (68) Williamson, D. (1993) Travelling North. In D. Williamson Collected Plays Volume II. Sydney: Currency Press, p. 190. First published by Currency Press, 1980. Reproduced with permission. (69) Schultz, C. (1987) Travelling North. Australian Film Commission. (70) Williamson, Travelling North, pp. 192–193. (71) Williamson, Travelling North, p. 197. (72) Drewe, R. (2008) The bodysurfers. Extract from The Bodysurfers [1983] in D.  Falconer (ed.) Penguin Book of the Road. Camberwell, Vic: Viking (Penguin Group), p. 272. Copyright © Robert Drewe, 1983. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd. (73) Drewe, Bodysurfers, p. 267. (74) Drewe, Bodysurfers, p. 273. (75) Murphy, D. (2009) Charlie & Boots. Screen Australia. (76) Wels, B. (1993) Finwood & Lisa. St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, pp. 46, 59, 67. (77) Storm, E. (1979) In Search of Anna. Australian Film Commission. (78) Williamson, Travelling North, pp. 193, 249. (79) Open Road, December 1985, p. 3. (80) Hoskins, Coast, p. 369. (81) Hoskins, Coast, p. 365. (82) Burnley, I. and Murphy, P. (2004) Sea Change: Movement from Metropolitan to Arcadian Australia. Sydney: UNSW Press, pp. 152–157. (83) Huntsman, Sand in Our Souls, pp. 115–116. (84) Wels, Finwood & Lisa, p. 57. (85) CEDA & AHURI, Pacifi c Highway: Future of the Nation, p. 9. (86) CEDA & AHURI, Pacifi c Highway: Future of the Nation, p. 9.

5 ‘Going Around’: On the Road to Nowhere?

As Aljaz Cosini, the narrator in Richard Flanagan’s novel, Death of a River Guide (1994), lies drowning, trapped beneath a waterfall on Tasmania’s Franklin River, visions from his past flash before him. One of his earliest memories is of family drives with his father, Harry. ‘Harry’s drives were without purpose: more precisely, they were circular journeys which the path of the new main roads and highways seemed only to frustrate.’ Reflecting his Aboriginal ancestry, Harry’s way of travelling favoured meandering, diverging, and stopping frequently to tell stories about places and people, as features in the landscape triggered memories. His journeys, reminiscent of Aboriginal songlines, were totally at odds with modern utilitarian highways which, ‘as Harry put it, were simply straight lines to get you from A to B as quickly as possible, which was, he maintained, the way only fools travelled’. By contrast, ‘the old roads built along the routes of carriageways, that more often than not were cleared widenings of old Aboriginal pathways, were the roads Harry seemed to like best’.1 Like Harry’s drives, the novel’s narrative is non-linear and circuitous, jumping between the present and past, as it explores the nature of both personal and national heritage through the theme of journeying.2 As well as journeys towards the Centre or outback, and the ‘North’, the circular or around-Australia road trip has immense cultural significance. The idea of circling the nation by car captured Australians’ imagination from the earliest days of motoring. It continues today, as domestic and international tourists, from backpackers to grey nomads, do the ‘lap’ of the continent on National Highway 1, which skirts its perimeter. Circular journeys also play an important part in creative representations of the road. Roads and journeys that go around in circles or lead nowhere are recurring motifs in Australian literature and fi lm. Imagery of circular or dead-end journeys partly reflects the poor and physically ill-defi ned nature of many Australian roads, particularly in remote regions. Australia’s size and the great distances to be traversed can also give travellers the impression that they are going nowhere. There is also a deeper symbolism, however, reflecting underlying issues in Australian society and culture, including diff erences between Aboriginal and 122

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European conceptions of landscape and space, unresolved legacies of colonialism and an ongoing ambivalence towards modernity. As Delia Falconer notes, the Australian road as depicted in literature is a place which ‘in rushing forward, leads us strangely to the past’. 3 This chapter explores the broader significance of the circular road journey in Australian culture, and asks, ‘Is the Australian road really a road to nowhere?’ ‘A Nebulous Sense of Direction’

Images of ‘nowhere roads’ are evident in descriptions of European colonists’ often tenuous attempts to stamp their footprints on an alien land. One of the most harrowing narratives of early colonial exploration is Surveyor-General, Major Sir Thomas Mitchell’s account of the search for Richard Cunningham, a botanist who went missing in April 1835 during an expedition to explore the course of the Darling River in western New South Wales. Cunningham’s curiosity and passion for his work meant that he often strayed from the main group into the surrounding bush, and Mitchell ‘had repeatedly cautioned [him] about the danger of losing sight of the party in such a country’.4 Fears for Cunningham’s safety escalated as time passed, and the search grew increasingly desperate. Members of the expedition retraced their steps, while others searched in different directions radiating from and returning to the camp. The constant backtracking, circularity, false leads and frustration delayed their progress by several days. At times they saw Cunningham’s tracks, which also doubled back on themselves, only to be lost again. Mitchell feared that Cunningham had met with an accident in this country of soft surfaces and ‘yawning cracks’, or that he was killed by Aborigines, who occupy an unsettling and confounding presence throughout Mitchell’s narrative. He was dumbfounded that Aboriginal people could survive ‘in this parched country’, and he misconstrued the smoke he saw burning along ridges as evidence of camp sites, rather than the Aboriginal method of sustainable land management by fire-stick farming. Mitchell’s efforts to communicate with Aboriginal people in the vicinity were unsuccessful, and they could not ‘comprehend any thing [sic] [Mitchell] said about the white man lost in the bush’. While Mitchell’s interactions with Aboriginal people were uneventful, an undercurrent of unease is evident. Whenever he approached Aboriginal inhabitants directly, Mitchell carried a green tree branch as an emblem of peace, as he was aware that they might attack a stranger out of fear. Along a dry river bed, Cunningham’s footprints re-emerged, and ‘there appeared to be the print of a small, naked foot of some one, [sic] either accompanying or tracking Mr Cunningham’. Eventually Cunningham’s tracks disappeared near the remains of an Aboriginal camp near the Bogan River. Months later, another search party confirmed Mitchell’s worst fears, discovering from members of the Bogan tribe that Cunningham had camped and

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dined with them, but he frightened them by repeatedly getting up in the night, and so they killed him. 5 Although Mitchell described the explorers’ line as ‘a plain broad road’, well worn by their carts, and was surprised that Cunningham could not fi nd it again, his account reveals how easily their path, delineated only by impermanent tracks and marked trees, could be lost.6 The episode illustrates the early Europeans’ tentative hold on a country which they did not fully understand. As previous chapters have shown, ‘roads’ made by settlers often had a transient, ill-defi ned nature. A tourist visiting the Byron Bay region in 1871 described getting lost among the confusing maze of tracks made by cedar cutters. The correspondent writes of following a track leading into the scrub, thinking it The much betalked and somewhat dreaded ‘Three-mile Scrub’. Here we spent six hours exploring cedar tracks leading out of what we should not have got in – as none of these led out we failed to get out and had at last to drive through the scrub, steering for the sound of the sea.7

Labyrinthine ‘roads that lead nowhere’, which survive in many parts of Australia, inspired William Hay’s short story, ‘An Australian Rip Van Winkle’ (1921), which is set amid a maze of disused ‘tracks of white sand … threading the hills and flats’ around Encounter Bay in South Australia.8 Hay’s story, like the roads, has a labyrinth-like structure, weaving stories within stories. It concerns Jake, a stockman, who tells a group of children that one of the roads leads to an abandoned farmhouse which was once occupied by an eccentric woman, Biddy Laurence, who died years earlier. Finding the right road, however, is almost impossible as the web of ‘roads to nowhere’ branch off on deceptive tangents. Jake sometimes visits the house as he was a friend of Biddy’s, but on one occasion he hears noises and notices that objects have been moved, as if the house is occupied. During a storm, he is struck on the head by something or someone, and when he revives he sees Biddy’s ghost in the yard. Although he is missing for three weeks, he thinks he has only been away for one night, yet in this time the homestead has become a ruin. When he tells the children about these supernatural occurrences, one of the children tries to find the path ‘to the forgotten house’.9 The boy eventually succeeds in following the confusing intersecting and circuitous tracks, retracing Jake’s footsteps in a mysterious and haunted journey through space and time. This strange tale could be interpreted as a postcolonial allegory of the way in which ongoing angst over the colonial past continues to haunt the present. Falconer highlights the story’s central paradox of space which is empty yet occupied, as symbolic of the incomplete extinguishment of sacred (Aboriginal) presence.10 When the boy sets out to fi nd Jake’s tracks and hence the ‘road’ leading to Biddy’s house, the narrator notes that ‘there seemed something sacred in such an old road, and to ride upon it

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was like troubling something that was shyly dead’. The adjective ‘shyly’ suggests something that does not want to be disturbed. The story also hints at the transient or insubstantial nature of settler presence, represented by Biddy’s ruined homestead, and the ‘nowhere roads’, which shift and fade. The boy turns onto a long-abandoned road which ‘at first was hardly a road at all’ but seemed ‘so much a discarded human way’. The roads are described as leading where ‘there is nothing, and never was anything, of permanent consequence’.11 Representations of outback roads such as the Birdsville Track contribute to the image of a road to nowhere, even in the mid-20th century. The track is described by the narrator of the 1954 fi lm, The Back of Beyond, as ‘a bare dry rut disappearing into the mirage over the edge of the world’, accompanied by the image of the desert landscape marked only by two faint wheel ruts. This is an almost non-existent road, barely distinguished from its surrounds, stretching into infinity towards the horizon. Its ephemeral nature is illustrated when a sandstorm blows up, covering the ruts, so that the track has to be remade constantly and its exact route could change, depending on conditions. Tom Kruse, the truck-driving mailman of the Birdsville Track, imposes his mastery of motor vehicle technology onto the track, yet he too continues to make and remake the ‘road’ as he goes, laying metal sheets to provide traction for the wheels over sand hills. Kruse’s journey also has a circular and infi nite quality, being replayed continually over the 700-mile round trip from the railhead at Marree to Birdsville and back again – two weeks up, two weeks back. As the narrator says hypnotically, ‘Every fortnight … Seven hundred miles to Birdsville and back … Every fortnight the story begins’. So, while Kruse is the only link to the outside world for the people living on the isolated stations along the track, his story is one which is constantly revolving in a selfcontained world. George Farwell described Birdsville as ‘the end of a road to nowhere’.12 While the track itself may be little more than ‘a nebulous sense of direction’,13 to stray from the track was to be lost, perhaps forever. A fictional sub-narrative within the fi lm relates the legend of the ‘two lost children’, whose mother collapsed while their father was away mustering cattle. The two girls set off walking, with their pet dog and a billycart, in search of the Birdsville Track to get help. The girls trudge over sand hills, leaving faint footprints and wheel ruts, but the eldest girl realises that they are lost when they come across their own tracks, the intersection of their circular journey forming a double-rutted cross. Two days later, their father rode after them, following their tracks for 27 miles ‘until they disappeared into windblown sand’. The girls were never found. The story closes with an image of drift lines in the sand, emphasising the transitory nature of human tracks that soon become engulfed by the surrounding landscape. While this ‘legend’ was one of a number of vignettes included for dramatic effect, it echoes the familiar motif of the ‘lost child in the

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bush’ which recurs in Australian literature and fi lm. The story resonates as another reminder of the vulnerability, isolation and precarious nature of European habitation in this unforgiving environment. Alongside the story of Tom Kruse and his implied dominance over the environment through his ‘mechanical genius’ are reminders of the original owners and occupiers of the country. Travelling with Kruse is his Aboriginal co-driver, Henry, and an Aboriginal stockman, Malcolm, who has left the station on which he worked and is returning to the country where he grew up. As Malcolm surveys the landscape around the ruins of the Kopperamanna Lutheran mission, he declares, ‘This is my country’. Malcolm’s declaration betrays a truth which goes to the heart of settler colonial anxiety – that it was Aboriginal people who belonged and survived in this country long before European colonisation, and their attachment to the land is not completely extinguished. Despite the fact that Malcolm’s people were herded onto missions and are long gone, he obviously retains a close connection to that country. Perhaps it is Malcolm who is really going ‘somewhere’. As Henry Reynolds and others have shown, voices questioning the legitimacy of the colonisation process, the denial of Aboriginal land ownership and the subsequent dispossession and frontier violence, have always been present but have been drowned out by the dominant, more comforting narratives of progress and triumph over adversity. Yet ‘this whispering in our hearts’, as Reynolds calls it, persisted and has grown louder over the centuries. It is evident in representations of the Australian road, which reveal long-repressed anxieties and questions over occupation, belonging and the concept of ‘home’.14 The fi lm Walkabout (1971), for example, directed by English cinematographer Nicolas Roeg, explores the cultural divide between Aboriginal and white Australia through the story of two children – a teenage girl and her younger brother – who are lost in the outback. The children escape from their father who, overwhelmed by city life, drove them into the desert where he tried to kill them before shooting himself. The pair then wander aimlessly, not knowing which direction to take. They are totally out of place in the desert, still dressed in their school uniforms and blazers, with only a little lemonade to drink. The young boy sees through his sister’s pretence at being in control of the situation, and asks rhetorically: ‘We’re lost, aren’t we?’15 Their survival depends on a young Aboriginal man on ‘walkabout’, who accompanies them and helps them to fi nd water and food. The children gradually become more ‘indigenised’ into the outback, decorating their bodies with paint, and a bond forms between the three, although the white boy is able to communicate with the Aborigine more easily than his sister can. The sexual tension which develops between the girl and the Aboriginal youth ends tragically with his suicide, when the girl fails to understand his courtship ritual, reacting with fear, denial and rejection.

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The question, ‘Where are we going?’ runs through the fi lm, as does the stark contrast between the city and outback. Towards the end, when the children fi nd a road, the girl says excitedly, ‘I knew we were getting somewhere’. The film ends back in the city some years later with the young woman, now married, preparing dinner in her apartment. While her husband talks of his job, money and holidays on the Gold Coast, she is thinking, in flashbacks, of her time in the outback with the young Aboriginal man. While their city upbringing contributed to the children’s alienation and inability to fully connect with Aboriginal culture, contact with that culture left a deep and lasting impression, which unsettled the young woman and cast doubt on the concept – and direction – of ‘home’. Encircling Australia

The technology of roads and motor vehicles played an important role in making white Australians feel more ‘at home’ in this country. When motor touring began to capture the national imagination in the 1920s and 1930s, few Australians had travelled far beyond the cities where they lived. Epic transcontinental and around-Australia journeys inspired interest and admiration, while also helping to convince ordinary Australians that the outback held no insurmountable fears. Through mastery of the modern motor vehicle, they too could conquer distance, time and space, and assert a strong and inevitable European claim to that space. Unlike America, where the transcontinental east–west journey was so symbolic in recreating the mythical ‘frontier’, here the idea of driving around Australia, encircling the perimeter of the continent, became particularly significant.16 Historian Georgine Clarsen demonstrates the powerful impact of women’s around-Australia journeys in the 1920s in the process of ‘peacefully recolonising’ Australia by car. Between 1925 and 1927, three pairs of female motorists set out to make a circuit of the continent. The fi rst to succeed was Mrs Marion Bell, who travelled with her 11-year-old daughter, Marion. The Bells left Perth in October 1925, travelling in a northeasterly direction across the top of Australia, then to Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, where they arrived in April 1926. Closely following on varying routes in 1927 were Gladys Sandford and Stella Christie from New Zealand, and two young society women, Jean Robertson and Kathleen Howell, later that year. The press and public followed all the women’s progress with great interest and fanfare, turning out to see them off, welcoming them as they arrived in towns along the way and celebrating as they triumphantly returned home. The media emphasised the women’s femininity, while the motorists’ own accounts dispelled fears and warnings about the threats they faced. The women reported no great trouble in overcoming mechanical problems, traversing the landscape, or in their encounters with Aboriginal people. By encircling the continent, inscribing white presence in the form of tyre tracks around the border,

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they symbolically laid claim to all the land within. The message conveyed was that if women could do it, anyone could, making white ownership of the country seem natural and peacefully gained. That message was reinforced by depictions of Aboriginal people running from or bowing before the superior technology of the motor vehicle, as featured in advertisements for oil companies associated with Marion Bell’s trip.17 The women’s journeys had the desired effect, inspiring others such as the Hopkins family from Darwin, who completed a trip around Australia in December 1925. The Australian Motorist reported that ‘Mr Hopkins says touring around Australia is comparatively easy if the driver has a good knowledge of the bush’.18 In 1928 the Shell Oil Company was associated with an around-Australia expedition to ‘test the practicability of modern transport in outback areas and to promote the use of motor transport’ to develop territory and encourage settlement. A special representative from Shell accompanied the expedition with a view to establishing improved facilities for overland touring. Tellingly, the two trucks transporting the expedition members and ‘special wireless-sending apparatus’ were named ‘Burke’ and ‘Wills’, ‘after the famous explorers who set out to cross Australia’.19 Presumably, the organisers were confident that modern technology would ensure that their expedition was more successful than that of the vehicles’ ill-fated namesakes. Interest in around-Australia touring grew in the lead-up to the sesquicentenary in 1938. Among the events planned to celebrate the 150th anniversary of white settlement was a road race around Australia. The NRMA sponsored a preliminary survey of the route in 1937. A party of four, comprising journalist C. Price Conigrave, racing motorist Norman ‘Wizard’ Smith, motor engineer Charles Gordon and cameraman John Fletcher, drove the proposed route (although in the opposite – clockwise – direction). They travelled in two standard model Pontiac coupes, ‘on a 10,000 miles trip … from Sydney around the Continent and back again’ over six weeks in August and September 1937 (Figure 5.1). 20 Other touring motorists followed the route laid down for the sesquicentenary road race. In his published record of the trip, Around Australia in a Pontiac, Conigrave claims that as well as planning to celebrate the nation by embracing it physically by road, he was also motivated by a fascination with and desire to know more about the vast and ancient land of Australia. He wanted ‘to come face to face with a land that has a history and yet no history’. Conigrave implicitly dismisses thousands of years of Aboriginal occupation as ‘no history’. The only ‘history’ that matters presumably encompasses the relatively short period of European occupation. Conigrave continues: Every mile over which one travels on the open road in Australia suggests to one something of the mysterious question mark of the past. For that outstanding reason a journey around the whole Continent, by modern motor car for preference, becomes day by day a pilgrimage of high interest and speculation as to WHAT IS after WHAT HAS BEEN. 21

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Figure 5.1 Route map of sesquicentenary around-Australia road race, surveyed by C. Price Conigrave Source: Conigrave, C.P. (1937) Around Australia in a Pontiac. Sydney: The author, n.p. (State Library of NSW.)

There is no question that, for Conigrave, the conquering car and its (white) designers, makers and occupants are the present and future, their wheels overriding Aboriginal ownership of the land, which is relegated firmly, and safely, to the past. As discussed in Chapter 3, it was not only the colonial past but potential threats from beyond our borders that stirred anxiety about the certainty of white sovereignty over Australia. Early in 1945, during the final stages of WWII, Frank Clune made a circular tour of the Australian continent. He wanted to visit ‘Australia’s own frontier, along the “empty” Western and Northern coasts’. He explained: ‘I wanted to see for myself, and relate for my readers … something of the history and future prospects of our unpeopled frontier facing Asia.’22 Driving around the continent, building roads and enabling access and settlement was also a way of patrolling its boundaries, and ensuring that any ‘empty’ space was occupied by Australians rather than outsiders. Current debates over asylum seekers and government policies such as ‘Operation Sovereign Borders’ attest to Australia’s extreme and ongoing sensitivity towards border security. The Redex Around-Australia Reliability Trials of the 1950s attracted widespread interest, and further inspired around-Australia touring as more Australians owned cars. The Trials, held in 1953, 1954 and 1955, were sponsored by the British Redex company, makers of an engine-oil additive. The aim was to fi nd the most suitable car for Australian

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conditions. Each year, entrants, including many ordinary citizens as well as those known in the motor trade or car racing fields – such as the renowned ‘Gelignite Jack’ Murray – competed over increasingly arduous and longer circuits of the continent in various makes of car, including Australia’s ‘own’ locally produced Holden, launched in 1948. As Clarsen points out, the trials were another affirmation of modern technology conquering the landscape through speed and strength. 23 Around Australia on ‘Highway 1’

As outlined in Chapter 3, Australia’s national highway network encircles the perimeter and bisects the centre of the continent, connecting Australia’s capital cities. The amalgam of existing state and interstate highways was designated ‘Highway 1’ or ‘National Route 1’ in the mid1950s. Some sections of the route now carry different numbers due to changes in the route numbering system since the federally funded national road system was formally established in the mid-1970s. 24 During the leadup to Australia’s Bicentennial in 1988, Highway 1 and other major national routes were gradually improved and sealed, making it easier than ever before to drive around Australia (Figure 5.2). It is not surprising that, as Australia prepared to celebrate the 200th anniversary of European settlement, roads again featured prominently. When the fi nal 275-km section of gravel road between Halls Creek and Fitzroy Crossing in the remote Kimberley region of Western Australia was

Figure 5.2 Australia prepared to celebrate its Bicentennial in 1988 with a fully sealed national highway system encircling and bisecting the continent Source: Open Road, April 1986. (State Library of NSW.) Reproduced courtesy of NRMA.

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sealed in September 1986, motorists could drive around Australia without leaving the bitumen. The Federal Minister for Transport, Peter Morris, compared the event to ‘the circumnavigation of Australia by Bass and Flinders in their tiny boat’. Reprising the pioneering imagery, he continued: ‘From today ordinary people will be able to circumnavigate the country on a black-top road in the comfort of their family car.’25 Indeed, as Laina Hall notes, the blacktop effectively ‘tamed’ Australia, and transcontinental and around-Australia motor touring developed into a ‘narrative of national ritual’. 26 When local and international tourists say they are ‘going around’ Australia they declare their intention and desire to see as much of the country as possible, experiencing it in all its diversity. A new group of travellers – the so-called ‘grey nomads’ – were identified in the mid-1990s. These older Australians, usually retirees, with the time and fi nances to embark on extended road trips, constitute a large proportion of the selfdrive tourism market. Sales of caravans trebled in the 1990s as the ‘grey nomad’ phenomenon saw thousands of retirees driving around Australia in caravans and campervans. 27 This group is often, perhaps unfairly, criticised and satirised for their way of travelling, focusing on destinations rather than the journey itself. Bill Bachman, who travelled around Australia by four-wheel-drive with his wife in the late 1990s, criticised his fellow travellers’ attitude towards touring. Bachman noted that, when they followed ‘the beaten path’ to major sites such as Uluru and Kakadu, many of the other travellers rushed, often staying only overnight, bound for next place on their ‘must-see’ list. He lamented that: Unfortunately, the emphasis in modern bush tourism seems to be more on the hours spent in a vehicle than on the places actually visited, most of which end up being remembered principally by the window stickers and T-shirts purchased there. 28

Some Australians have treated ‘going around’ the country more like an endurance test, a competition to prove themselves against distance, space and time. Again, this reflects the European relationship to land as one of fighting, conquering and taming, rather than the Aboriginal sense of harmony and belonging. Pat Jacobs’ novel, Going Inland (1998) portrays a middle-aged couple, Tom and Zoe Drewe, who leave their orchard in south-west Western Australia for a three-month road trip around Australia. Visiting remote regions and Aboriginal communities, at times Tom and Zoe feel as if they are outsiders in a foreign country, unable to understand the language or fully relate to the landscape. Zoe experiences a revelation as to the difference between Aboriginal and European ways of seeing the country, through Aboriginal art. Looking at landscape paintings at a gallery in Alice Springs, she is confronted by ‘the complexity of mythology,

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spirituality and history in the landscape she and Tom had been travelling across’. 29 Frustrated, she feels that during their travels they were only ever skimming the surface superficially. Echoing Bachman’s observation, Zoe reflects that they became ‘caught in the imperative of reaching a destination. Distance absorbed them, the horizon, the point on the map’. 30 She realises that they can never relate to the landscape the way Indigenous peoples do because they will always be approaching it as outsiders. Tom and Zoe and their fellow travellers are fooling themselves thinking that they are penetrating the heart and soul of the country. So, even at the end of the 20th century, when driving around Australia was easier and the physical imprint of the black bitumen road more solid than ever, the question of where that road was leading remained uncertain. Anxieties over the colonial past and Australians’ relationship to this country continued to haunt the present, fi nding expression in travel and tourism practices and representations. In the Middle of Nowhere

Physically, the vast distances to be covered in driving around or across Australia contribute to travellers’ feelings of getting nowhere. Thousands of kilometres separate the capital cities, and long stretches of flat, outback country, with few towns to punctuate the journey, are common in many regions, especially in parts of Western Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory. Writers often make a feature of that imagery for comedic or satirical effect. Sean Condon’s road trip became a ‘road to nowhere’, lived minute by minute: ‘12.12 p.m. Nowhere. Still nothing to see except the nothingness itself … 1.01 p.m. Still nowhere.’31 In Bernard Cohen’s novel, Hardly Beach Weather (2002), as Jack and his ex-girlfriend Maria are driving from Sydney to Melbourne via the Hume Highway, Jack suddenly stops the car. When Maria asks ‘What’s up?’ he replies, ‘“Look where we are,” I say. “We’re nowhere. I want to stand in it.”’32 Cohen’s novel also comments on the nature of modern travel, in cars driving over sealed roads, which act as a barrier to real engagement with the land over which they are travelling. As Jack stands in the middle of nowhere, he reflects: City people … are supposed to come out here and feel either lost or free, overwhelmed by the scale or opened up by it. I feel neither. In a few minutes I know we will return to the car, continue to follow our selected, well-marked route … It’s as though we’re not on this land at all, that we’ve brought the city with us, never left it: it’s enacted in our relationship in the car, our bubble of urban life with these hills (‘Australia!’) like an arbitrary backdrop. 33

For Condon, however, the space induces a negative response: ‘Where we are now, a place literally with no name, you can look around and there is

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nothing in all 360 degrees. It makes me feel … awkward. … The bigness and desolation is overwhelming.’34 Ted Kotcheff ’s fi lm, Wake in Fright (1971), which was adapted from Kenneth Cook’s 1961 novel, offers a dark vision of Australian space as claustrophobic and imprisoning. The preface to the fi lm script sets the theme: This is a fi lm about prisons, for its characters are all imprisoned in immense space. The outback of Australia at Christmas time is a limitless oven. One cannot lift the blazing lid, or approach its ever-receding horizons. The exits are illusory. The slim lines of railroads and highways lead only to another part of the oven, exactly the same. 35

The motif of circularity recurs throughout both the novel and fi lm, reinforcing the idea of roads going nowhere. The opening scene of the fi lm establishes a sense of enclosure, as the camera pans 360 degrees, revealing all there is of the tiny outback outpost of Tiboonda – a school and a pub. The two buildings are separated by the railway line and a rough ‘road’ which, as the novel states, ‘was distinguishable from the paddocks only by the deep tyre tracks in the dust’. 36 All around, the fl at brown landscape stretches towards the horizon, but the camera’s circular movement foreshadows the teacher John Grant’s captivity (see Figure 5.3). 37 On the last day of the school year, Grant catches the train to Bundanyabba, a large mining town nearby, where he plans to stay overnight

Figure 5.3 The opening scene of the film, Wake in Fright, showing the railway line and ‘road’ in Tiboonda; as the camera pans 360 degrees, it establishes a sense of enclosure in outback Australia Source: A still from Ted Kotcheff ’s film, Wake in Fright. See Amelia Ghirardello website at http://www.ghiraa.com/film-blog/stills-series-wake-in-fright-dir-ted-kotcheff (accessed 26 October 2016).

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before connecting with a fl ight to Sydney, where he looks forward to spending his holiday at the beach. The novel explains that the train is: Tiboonda’s only transport connection with the outside world, represented by Bundanyabba, apart from the road, which could not be travelled when it rained because of the mud, nor when it was dry, because of the dust which would bog cars just as hopelessly as mud would. 38

The road’s physical condition, typical of so many outback roads, makes it clear from the outset that it will not be Grant’s means of escape. The fi lm and novel also draw attention to the difference between Aboriginal and European views of the landscape. On the train, sitting opposite Grant, an Aboriginal man is looking out the window, seemingly engaged by the country. Grant ignores the view completely, closing his eyes. The novel contrasts the two ways of seeing: The schoolteacher had seen the plains, and he had made the trip to Bundanyabba before, so he knew that, for the six-hour journey ahead, the countryside would change so little there would be almost nothing to indicate that the train had moved.

He is bemused by the Aboriginal stockman, who ‘stared constantly out of the window as though there might be something in the plains he had not seen before’. 39 Grant cannot connect to the landscape in any way and is not ‘at home’ here or indeed anywhere in Australia. His well-spoken accent, education, aloofness and under-indulgence in alcohol set him apart from the locals. He constantly wishes he was somewhere else, and later in the film, he tells Janette Hynes that he would ‘really like to get to England one day’. Grant’s thoughts of the future reinforce the repetitive cycle in which he feels trapped: ‘Next term’, six weeks away, another year in Tiboonda would begin again. Another year in this apology for a town, himself an outcast in a community of people who were at home in the bleak and frightening land that spread out around him now, hot, dry and careless of itself and the people who professed to own it.40

The passage recalls Tom Kruse’s revolving journey ‘up and back’ along the Birdsville Track, which began again ‘every fortnight’. Grant becomes stranded in Bundanyabba after gambling away all his money on a two-up game, in a desperate attempt to escape permanently.41 He is then captive to the ‘hospitality’ of locals – miners, Dick and Joe, and the enigmatic, alcoholic ‘Doc’ Tydon. Their idea of mateship and hospitality involves drinking to the point of oblivion. Following a drunken, violent, kangaroo hunt, and his implied rape by Tydon, Grant’s only option to escape the depravity is to try to hitchhike to Sydney. He succeeds in getting as far as Yelonda where, he is told, he might fi nd a truck going through to the coast once or twice a week. When he sees a semi-trailer

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with ‘Sydney’ painted on its cabin door, parked across from the hotel, he cannot believe his luck. He fi nds the truck driver, who is drinking at the hotel, and he grudgingly agrees to take Grant ‘right through … to the city’. After more enforced drinking, Grant climbs into the back of the truck and begins to relax, dreaming of what he will do when he fi nally reaches his longed-for destination – Sydney. He is woken sooner than expected as the driver announces that they have arrived. His horror is palpable when he emerges to fi nd himself back in the main street of Bundanyabba. In reply to Grant’s bleating that he thought he was headed for Sydney, the driver says, ‘I never said anything about Sydney. … You said you wanted to go through to the city – well, this is a city isn’t it, mate?’ The driver had not bothered to remove the ‘Sydney’ label when he bought the vehicle. Grant’s circular journey going nowhere is reiterated by the truck driver, who only runs ‘between ‘Londa and The Yabba’.42 This work represents another landmark in an Australian road genre, in which the representation of the physical road and its setting closely interacts with its metaphorical meanings. It reinforces the notion that the idea of destination, progress or ‘going somewhere’ is a state of mind as much as a physical reality. Moving Forward, Looking Back

Author Delia Falconer claims that ‘while the American road speeds forward, Australian tracks tend to wind back’.43 Chapter 2 revealed travellers’ responses to the tension and ambivalence generated as Australians grappled with the technological, social and cultural upheavals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Embracing modernity was often accompanied by nostalgia for the past and resistance to change, and this may be another reason why the Australian road often seems to go nowhere, or around in circles. Several works of the mid-20th century road genre, including The Back of Beyond, The Shiralee, The Sundowners and Wake in Fright, depict a predominantly primitive roadscape that almost entirely ignores the network of new and improved main roads, highways and motorways that were beginning to spread around the country. While Tom Kruse and his truck represent progress and the future, their tracks becoming the ‘roads of tomorrow’, his characterisation in the tradition of drovers and bushmen also places him in the past. The Sundowners and The Shiralee, set in the 1920s and 1940s, respectively, also look back to an earlier era through their portrayal of a swagmen and drover. The Sundowners (1960), produced by Hollywood’s Warner Bros., resembles a Western in style and features Americans Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr in the lead roles of Paddy and Ida Carmody. Yet the fi lm is unmistakably Australian, both in its title and in its opening scene in which a wagon winds its way along a rustic red dirt road through pastoral country.44

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The fundamental question that hangs over both The Shiralee’s Macauley and The Sundowners’ Carmody is ‘Where are you going?’. In answer to his daughter Buster’s question ‘Where are we going, dad?’, Macauley replies ‘Nowhere’.45 As he walks along the road, he thinks of the past and is unsure about the future, reinforcing the idea of going nowhere. All that matters is to keep moving. In The Sundowners, Ida asks Paddy where they are going after his work finishes at Cawndilla. When he says he doesn’t know, Ida is troubled; she feels that they should be ‘going somewhere’ in life, which for her and their son, Sean, means having a stable home, whereas Paddy, like Macauley, prefers the itinerant life. Both works explore themes of freedom and the search for ‘home’, which will be discussed more fully in Chapter 6. Images of roads which are dead ends, lead nowhere or go around in circles can also be symbolic of technology’s destructive potential and failure to deliver its promises. Judith Wright’s poem, ‘Brother and Sisters’ (c.1942), addresses the implications for a family when a promised road development near their rural property failed to materialise. The road turned out to be a cul-de-sac; Stopped like a lost intention at the gate And never crossed the mountains to the coast.

The dead-end road represents the thwarted hopes for future prosperity that were so closely tied to infrastructure for these and many other rural dwellers. The poem concludes with an image of nature gradually reclaiming its ground: … Years grew like grass and leaves Across the half-erased and dubious track.

Each day the bush moves ‘one step nearer’ to the house in which the brother’s and sisters’ life is ebbing away in forgotten isolation.46 Eventually, all memory of the road and the family will be erased. The extraordinarily brutal kangaroo hunt episode in Wake in Fright takes place on and off the ‘rudimentary road’. The road here is no symbol of ‘civilisation’ or ‘progress’, being barely distinguished from its surrounds. Manic driving adds to the anarchy, with the car ‘bouncing high on the ruts and slewing fiercely in the drifts of soft dust’. The supposedly sophisticated technology of cars and guns is juxtaposed with the barbarity of their handlers, as Grant and the miners, fuelled with alcohol, run down the kangaroos, blinding them in the car’s headlights, before shooting them and mutilating their bodies. The fi nal sequence of the hunting trip, as described in the novel, is telling: ‘Dick turned the car back, and weaving a little, drove to the road. It did not take long because they had been driving around in a circle most of the time.’47

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Technology’s destructive power reaches an apotheosis in the Mad Max films. By the third film in the series, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985), roads and cars – and all modern technology – have disappeared completely, annihilated in the fi nal conflagration of the oil wars, which spelled the end of the industrial world. All that remains is a post-apocalyptic space that has returned full circle to a ‘trackless desert’. The film opens with an aerial view of a desert wasteland through which Max appears, driving a camel-drawn wagon, its wheels stirring dust and forming ruts in the sand. This supposedly futuristic imagery takes us back to the beginnings of the Australian road genre, and is reminiscent of The Back of Beyond. The genre history referenced in the Mad Max series goes even further back, and includes: American classics such as The Wild One (1953) and The Searchers (1956); Roman gladiatorial films such as Ben Hur (1959) and Spartacus (1960); and the British epic, Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Echoes of Kerouac’s On the Road are also evident.48 As Katherine Biber has noted, the Mad Max films present an Australian landscape which is ancient and futurist49 and, thus, fittingly reflects a genre that looks both forward and back. Beyond Thunderdome reintroduces a familiar leitmotiv in the tribe of ‘lost children’, who see Max as a hero who will lead them ‘home’ to ‘Tomorrow-morrow Land’. Through a view-fi nder, they show Max pictures of pre-apocalyptic Sydney, with its Harbour Bridge and skyscrapers intact. In this fi lm the past is the future and the future is the past. No wonder Max is going nowhere. He is left behind as the children take off in a plane to ‘Tomorrow-morrow Land’. Max is condemned to wander the desert, like the lost explorers of Australian mythology with whom he is sometimes compared. 50 The preceding discussion suggests that if the Australian road is a ‘road to nowhere’ it is largely because of the fears and uncertainties about the past and the future which lie just beneath the seemingly solid bitumen roads that encircle and bisect the continent, threatening to render them ‘dubious tracks’, and making travellers literally and figuratively go around in circles. These doubts, which have been present since Europeans first set foot on Australian soil, continue to surface in Australian society and culture, revealing themselves, both consciously and unconsciously, in the way we travel and in the stories we tell about the road. At the end of Beyond Thunderdome, the children listen to an old gramophone record, which repeats the refrain, ‘Where are you going? I am going home’. 51 The quest for escape to a childhood homeland continues to drive the plot in the most recent Mad Max fi lm, Fury Road. 52 For an immigrant, colonial culture, questions of direction, ‘home’ and belonging are especially significant. As the following chapter explores, ideas of ‘freedom’ and ‘escape’ on the open road – central tropes in road tourism and the road genre – can become ambiguous in the Australian context, suggesting perpetual, aimless wandering, thus further troubling the notions of ‘home’ and belonging.

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Notes – Chapter 5: ‘Going Around’: On the Road to Nowhere? (1) Flanagan, R. (1994) Death of a River Guide. Ringwood, Vic: McPhee Gribble, pp. 91–92. Now published by Vintage. Copyright © Richard Flanagan, 1994. Reproduced by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Limited, the Random House Group Limited and Grove/Atlantic Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. (2) Flanagan, River Guide, back cover. (3) Falconer, D. (2009) ‘The poetry of the Earth is never dead’: Australia’s road writing. Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (Suppl. l), July, 4. See http://openjournals.library.usyd.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/article/view/10156/10054 (accessed 26 September 2016). (4) Mitchell, T. (2008) The Search for Mr Cunningham. In D. Falconer (ed.) Penguin Book of the Road. Camberwell, Vic: Viking, p. 72. (5) Mitchell, Search for Mr Cunningham, pp. 77, 85–86, 90; Goulburnian (1904) Footsteps of the explorers – fate of Richard Cunningham. The Argus, 18 June, p. 5; Parsons, V. (2016 [1966]) Cunningham, Richard (1793–1835). Australian Dictionary of Biography. Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National University. See http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/cunningham-richard-1943/ text2329 (accessed 13 October 2016). (6) Mitchell, Search for Mr Cunningham, p. 73. (7) Ryan, M. and Smith, R. (2001) Time and Tide Again: A History of Byron Bay. Lismore, NSW: Northern Rivers Press, p. 14. (8) Hay, W. (2008) An Australian Rip Van Winkle. In D. Falconer (ed.) Penguin Book of the Road. Camberwell, Vic: Viking, p. 137. (9) Hay, Rip Van Winkle, p. 144. (10) Falconer, Poetry of the Earth, p. 7. (11) Hay, Rip Van Winkle, pp. 137, 146. (12) Farwell, G. (1949) Traveller’s Tracks. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, p. 87. Reproduced with permission. (13) Ferber, H. (1995) Stagecoach to Birdsville. Kenthurst, NSW: Kangaroo Press, p. 29. (14) Reynolds, H. (1998) This Whispering in our Hearts. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, pp. xi, 245–246; Curthoys, A. (2007) The volatility of racism in Australia. In K. Gelber and A. Stone (eds) Hate Speech and Freedom of Speech in Australia. Sydney: Federation Press, p. 22. (15) Roeg, N. (1971) Walkabout. Si Litvinoff Film Production. (16) An exception to following the traditional east–west transcontinental route in America in favour of a circular journey is found in William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways (1982). Moon (Bill Trogdon), who is of Native American descent, explains his decision to ‘set out on a long circular trip over the back roads of the United States’ from Columbia, Missouri. ‘Following a circle would give a purpose – to come around again – where taking a straight line would not’. His way of thinking has more in common with Death of a River Guide’s Indigenous traveller, ‘Harry’. See William Least Heat Moon (Trogdon) (1982) Blue Highways: A Journey into America. New York: Ballantine Books, p. 3. (17) Clarsen, G. (2008) Eat My Dust: Early Women Motorists. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 120–139; Clarsen, G. (1999) Tracing the outline of nation: Circling Australia by car. Continuum 13 (3), 359–369. (18) Australian Motorist, January 1926, p. 272. (19) Australian Motorist, May 1928, p. 555. (20) Conigrave, C.P. (1937) Around Australia in a Pontiac. Sydney: The author, p. 7. (21) Conigrave, Around Australia in a Pontiac, p. 6. (22) Clune, F. (1947) Roaming around Australia. Melbourne: Hawthorn Press, n.p.

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(23) Clarsen, G. (2010) Automobiles and Australian modernisation: The Redex AroundAustralia Trials of the 1950s. Australian Historical Studies 41 (3), 352–368. (24) Ozroads website at http://www.ozroads.com.au/National System/highway1.htm (accessed 19 June 2007); Broomham, R. (2001) Vital Connections: A History of NSW Roads from 1788. Alexandria: Hale & Iremonger, p. 164. (25) Canberra Times, 8 September 1986, p. 13. (26) Hall, L. (2005) The long way home: A history of motor touring in Australia, 1925– 2004. PhD thesis, University of Sydney, pp. 10–11, 24, 182. (27) Yabsley, L. (2005) I still call a trailer home: A history of grey nomads. BA Hons thesis, University of Sydney; White, R. (2005) On Holidays: A History of Getting Away in Australia. North Melbourne: Pluto Press Australia, p. 76; Shaffer, M.A. (2001) See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880–1940. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute, p. 193. (28) Bachman, B. (1989) Off the Road Again. Melbourne: Lothian, p. 4. (29) Jacobs, P. (1998) Going Inland. South Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, p. 91. Reproduced with permission of the author and Fremantle Press. (30) Jacobs, Going Inland, p. 42. (31) Condon, S. (1996) Sean & David’s Long Drive. Melbourne: Lonely Planet, pp. 64–65. (32) Cohen, B. (2002) Hardly Beach Weather. Sydney: Harper Collins, p. 295. Reproduced with permission of the author. (33) Cohen, Hardly Beach Weather, p. 296. (34) Condon, Sean & David’s Long Drive, p. 54. (35) Preface to the script for Wake in Fright, reproduced in Jennings, K. (2009) Home truths: Revisiting Wake in Fright. The Monthly, July, p. 43. (36) Cook, K. (1961) Wake in Fright. London: Michael Joseph, p. 8. Extracts reproduced by arrangement with the Licensor, The Estate of Kenneth Cook, c/o Curtis Brown (Aust) Pty Ltd. (37) Marchant, H. (2010) Not quite 360-degree: Wake in Fright (Ted Kotcheff, 1971) and  Australia (Baz Luhrmann, 2008). Senses of Cinema 55. See http://www. sensesofcinema.com/2010/55/not-quite-360-degree-wake-in-fright-ted-kotcheff-1971and-australia-baz-luhrmann-2008/ (accessed January 2011); Kotcheff, T. (1971) Wake in Fright. NLT Productions. (38) Cook, Wake in Fright, p. 14. (39) Cook, Wake in Fright, p. 15. (40) Cook, Wake in Fright, p. 13. (41) Two-up is a game in which the ‘spinner’ tosses two coins in the air and people (usually men) bet on whether they will land with heads or tails facing upwards. It is sometimes called the ‘Australian national game’ and was played by Australian soldiers during wartime and continues to be part of Anzac Day celebrations, despite being illegal until the 1970s. See Davison, G., Hirst, J. and Macintyre, S. (eds) (2001) The Oxford Companion to Australian History (revised edn). South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, p. 659. (42) Cook, Wake in Fright, pp. 159, 168. (43) Falconer, D. (2008) Introduction. In D. Falconer (ed.) The Penguin Book of the Road. Camberwell, Vic: Viking, pp. xi–xxvi, xiv. (44) Zinneman, F. (1960) The Sundowners. Warner Bros. (45) Niland, D. (1974 [1955]) The Shiralee. London: White Lion, p. 11. (46) Wright, J. (1994) Brother and sisters. In J. Wright (ed.) Collected Poems 1942–1985. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, p. 18. Reproduced with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. (47) Cook, Wake in Fright, pp. 97, 125. (48) The scene in Mad Max in which the bikers ride into town, park, and then commence a mock dance sequence is a direct reference to a similar scene in The Wild One.

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(49)

Marlon Brando’s character in that fi lm is called ‘Johnny’, and is possibly referenced in the Mad Max character, ‘Johnny the Boy’. Max’s black leather uniform is also reminiscent of The Wild One’s leather-clad bikers. In the fi nal fi lm of the trilogy, Beyond Thunderdome, reference to Kerouac’s On the Road is evident when Aunt Entity (Tina Turner) often addresses Max as ‘raggedy man’. Kerouac’s character Dean Moriarty is described as a ‘ragged’, tramp-like figure, ever restless, searching for his long-lost father. Max is also haunted by the loss of his family – his wife and child, who were murdered in the fi rst fi lm of the series. He is often ragged, alone, and condemned to perpetual wandering. Biber, K. (2000) ‘A certain look in the eye’: Masculinity in Australian cinema from 1970. PhD thesis, University of Sydney, p. 24; Biber, K. (2001) The threshold moment: Masculinity at home and on the road in Australian cinema. Limina 7, 30. Murray, S. (1995) Australian Film 1978–1994: A Survey of Theatrical Features. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, p. 172; Gibson, R. (1992) South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, p. 164. Miller, G. and Ogilvie, G. (1985) Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. Kennedy Miller Productions. Miller, G. (2015) Mad Max: Fury Road. Kennedy Miller Productions.

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6 Freedom on the Wallaby?

In Dennis Hopper’s 1969 fi lm, Easy Rider, George Hanson (Jack Nicholson) tells Billy (Hopper), ‘What you represent to them is freedom’, to which Billy replies, ‘What the hell is wrong with freedom? That’s what it’s all about’.1 The opening scenes, in which the two young hippie bikers, Billy and Wyatt ‘Captain America’ (Peter Fonda) roar across the highways of America on their Harley-Davidson motorcycles with the wind in their hair, to the soundtrack of Steppenwolf’s ‘Born to be Wild’, conjure quintessential images of the freedom of the road. While the fi lm’s exploration of ‘freedom’ is ultimately more complex and darker than these images suggest, it became a classic of the American road movie genre. The road as a symbol of freedom and escape is a powerful metaphor that has been defi ned predominantly by American popular culture. As early as 1856, the renowned poet, Walt Whitman, captured America’s long-held obsession with mobility in ‘Song of the Open Road’, which begins: Afoot and lighthearted I take to the open road, Healthy, free, the world before me, The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose. 2

That obsession peaked in the automobile age, when the road promised freedom and escape from the constrictive mores of urban-industrial society. Jack Kerouac’s novel, On the Road, published in 1957, was a defi ning moment in the cultural history of the American road. The adventures of Kerouac’s alter ego, Sal Paradise, and his manic travelling companion, Dean Moriarty (based on Beat figure, Neal Cassady), as they criss-crossed the country, had a profound influence on both travellers and the road genre. Kerouac articulated the desires of an alienated youth, who wanted to escape mainstream society by taking to the road, where they could discover or reinvent themselves. Following Kerouac, the quest for freedom of the road became a much more personal and individualistic pursuit of self-discovery, rather than a search for connection with a collective national identity. 3 When travellers take to the road, they enter what travel historians and cultural theorists describe as a ‘liminal space’. The road is a place distinguished spatially and temporally from normal life and social conventions, offering the opportunity for escape and freedom from the routine and 141

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responsibilities of everyday life, and the possibility of transformation, albeit, for most, a transient experience. The liminality offered by travel and tourism assumes that the traveller will eventually return home and be reintegrated into their familial and social network.4 The idea of mobility and the freedom of the open road also resonates strongly in Australian culture. While similarities exist, the tropes of freedom and escape, which were so central to the American road genre, take on different meanings within the Australian context. Cultural representations reveal tensions and ambiguities between freedom, opportunity and escape, versus constraint, aimlessness and lack of belonging. The nomadic lifestyle of swagmen and sundowners was often romanticised in works celebrating the freedom and independence of the track and, in later years, promoters of motor touring and caravanning employed similar imagery. Yet, such wandering was only desirable as a temporary state, as long as one eventually returned home. Otherwise, the very notion of ‘home’ itself is uncertain and problematic. As an immigrant society, with doubts over the legitimacy of the colonial enterprise, the concept of ‘home’ is elusive and perhaps illusory. This chapter explores how the road has been promoted, experienced and represented as a place of freedom, escape, opportunity, self-discovery, healing and transformation, as well as experiences and representations of homecomings. Bushrangers and the Road Genre

As the opening chapter noted, Australia’s foundation as a penal colony produced an inherent conflict between freedom and constraint of movement although, as historian, Grace Karskens has shown, convicts had a higher degree of mobility than many imagined in this prison without walls. Nevertheless, the desire to escape was overwhelming, and a feat at which many succeeded. 5 Bushrangers are among the central figures of Australian folklore, and embody the conflict between freedom and constraint in their relationship with the road. By defi nition, bushrangers were escaped convicts or other criminals who sought refuge in the bush.6 They subsisted by robbery and violence, and often preyed upon road travellers. The road became a site of confrontation between the outlaw and opposing forces of authority. The bushranger’s survival depended, for the most part, on remaining off-road, away from the well-beaten tracks that might eventually bring capture, incarceration and, most likely, death. While bushranging was at its height in the 1820s and 1830s, it persisted throughout the 19th century, and continued to capture public imagination well into the 20th. Bushranging dramas dominated the Australian stage in the years before and after 1900, and inspired the later film genre.7 Films about bushrangers were the most popular and numerous of all feature films produced in Australia from 1906 until 1912, when the New South Wales

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Police Department banned them.8 Several, such as Charles MacMahon’s Robbery Under Arms (1907), were based on popular novels and stage plays, and most dramatised the life of well-known bushrangers, for example: The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906), The Life and Adventures of John Vane, the Notorious Australian Bushranger (1910), Thunderbolt (1910), Moonlite (1910), Ben Hall and His Gang (1911), Captain Midnight, the Bush King (1911), Frank Gardiner, the King of the Road (1911), Captain Starlight, or Gentleman of the Road (1911) and Dan Morgan (1911).9 Bushranging fi lms became established in Australia as a distinctive genre before the Hollywood Western spread throughout the world.10 While they are set predominantly off-road, the fi lms feature an alienated protagonist and the theme of flight or escape from social pressures or from authority. In this, they are comparable to both the Western and gangster genres, which are considered to be forerunners of the American road movie genre.11 The bushranger figure is typically cast as one on the margins of or completely outside mainstream society. Their outlawry is frequently celebrated, with the bushranger depicted as a heroic victim of an unjust system, while the police or other authority figures are the enemies.12 As Margaret Williams notes, however, such portrayal of the outlaw-hero also belongs to a much longer theatrical tradition going back to early 19th-century England.13 The road genre, therefore, has roots incorporating elements of English melodrama as well as American and Australian frontier fiction and drama. Bushranging fi lms also provided ample opportunity for thrilling pursuits through the bush and daring displays of horsemanship, foreshadowing car chase scenes in later road movies. E.J. Cole’s The Squatter’s Son (1911), for example, features a climactic horseback escape in which the hero is aided by an Aboriginal boy, who destroys a bridge to delay pursuers. In A Bushranger’s Ransom, or A Ride for Life (1911), also directed by Cole, Ben Hall raids the Keightley homestead near Bathurst but offers to spare Keightley’s life if his wife can bring a ransom payment of 500 pounds. She must ride to Bathurst to collect money from her father at the bank and get back within eight hours. She succeeds, and much of the action focuses on Mrs Keightley’s extraordinary ride at breakneck speed across rough bush terrain.14 ‘Bold and Roving Stock’

While convicts’ migration was enforced, the free settlers who joined and followed them saw the new colony as offering opportunities for wealth and status which they could not hope to achieve if they remained in Britain. Once emancipated, ex-convicts could also share in those opportunities, and many established new and successful lives in Australia. Mobility is said to defi ne a significant element of Australian character and culture. It is equated with a love of freedom and a restless, enquiring spirit

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essential for exploration, development and adaptability in a New World colony. The opening line of ‘Banjo’ Paterson’s poem, ‘Pioneers’ – ‘They came from bold and roving stock that would not fi xed abide’ – proclaims the proud ancestry of those ‘sons of field and flock’ who fi rst settled the continent.15 Their bravery in leaving Britain in the first place established them as an immigrant race well suited to carrying on the pioneering enterprise in a new land. The vast open spaces that characterise much of the Australian continent have inspired a great sense of freedom in many writings. E.J. Brady’s poems, ‘Far and Wide’ and ‘Comrades’, both published in 1911, evoke imagery of wanderlust, with the former entreating, ‘Gypsy come! the wide bush waits us’.16 ‘Comrades’ depicts the road as leading to freedom and opportunity. ‘With the roads, the roads before us’, the narrator assures readers that The Bushland wide and free, From Cape York unto the Leeuwin, Shall be ours to dare and do in, Shall belong to you and me.17

The image of Australians not being tied down to any one place conveys the impression of ownership over the entire continent. One of the more obvious ironies in the claim that Australians are essentially a nomadic race who embrace the spirit of wanderlust is that most representations exclude Aboriginal peoples from that ‘Australianness’. Yet it is they who could most truly lay claim to both a nomadic lifestyle and belonging to the country. Contrasts between imagery of Australian roads as representing boundless optimism and freedom, or else revealing a darker, troubling, even limiting space, may be another reflection of an inherent unease in Australians’ relationship to this country and the nature of ‘settlement’. The fact that all non-Indigenous Australians are immigrants also contributes to a sense of not being completely ‘at home’ here. Geoffrey Serle identified ‘the cry of the exile’ or ‘the second-hand European on alien soil’ as a literary tradition which began in the mid-19th century and continued well into the 20th, in opposition to the tradition of ‘radical optimism’, which embraced newness and freedom.18 The ‘cry’, however, seems louder in Australia than in America, another nation of immigrants. This may be related to Australia’s origins as a convict colony where, for many, emigration was involuntary and originally considered a temporary exile. By contrast, few American pioneers saw their venture as a temporary interval in which to make a fortune in order to return and re-establish themselves in their former country, and so they embraced the new with few backward glances.19 Many native-born Australians of Anglo-Celtic ancestry also regarded Britain as ‘home’ even in the 1960s and beyond. According to recent statistics, one in four Australians was born overseas, and almost

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half the population have at least one overseas-born parent. 20 Hence, it is not surprising that the immigrant experience has been and continues to be a significant influence in cultural expression. Mary Gilmore’s Hound of the Road (1922) is a collection of essays which contemplate the nature of roads, the wandering life and pioneering days. One of the predominant themes is journeying towards or away from home, and the impact of emigration. Recollecting bygone days, hearing the teamsters whistling on their return to town – ‘Those whose notes told of home-coming over soft bush-tracks and broken roads’ – Gilmore muses that the love of the itinerant lifestyle may be attributable to Australia’s roots as a nation of immigrants. She describes ‘the exile of Erin’ as ‘him who took the dancer’s feet with him wherever he went’. 21 Gilmore’s text is infused with melancholy as she ponders the Celtic diaspora, comparing those journeying and longing for their homeland to souls in the afterlife searching for the comfort of being reunited with family. 22 The ‘cry’ continues to echo in late 20th-century representations, through the characters of Tom and Zoe Drewe in Going Inland. Zoe’s grandmother was an Irish immigrant, who felt deeply the pain of separation, fi rst from her homeland, and then from her baby who died during the voyage, and later from her husband who deserted her. Ellen Madden ‘was pierced by loss. It was not home. It would never be home. Never, never again would she be home’. 23 As the Drewes journey around Australia, revelations about their own ancestry question the legitimacy of the ‘myth of settlement’ on which their identity and land ownership is based. Tom’s grandfather was a Polish seaman, Tomas Dubrovic, who deserted his ship in Australia and stole a dead Englishman’s mining license on the goldfields. Dubrovic used the identity of the dead miner, Thomas Drewe, to obtain the farm that Tom inherited, and where Tom and Zoe now live. Throughout the journey, Zoe carries an ever-growing sense that Australia is not truly ‘home’ for anyone other than the original inhabitants. She imagines the pain and loss of home experienced by many immigrants as a way of identifying with the suffering endured by Aboriginal peoples as a result of dispossession and removal from their land. 24 In this novel, the road represents a limiting force, defi ning the boundary within which Tom and Zoe’s journey, and others like them, will be confi ned. Despite the vastness of the country through which they travel, their vision is confi ned by the narrow line of the sealed road, which also physically and symbolically divides Aboriginal and European space: They drove further into the ranges on the well-made highway. It would be the limit of their journey into the interior. … It was part of who they were and how they travelled: the limitations. They could not venture far off the road. … At Glen Helen they were at the end of the line; Namatjira drive, the sealed road, ended here. Beyond it and around it, were the mountains – and the land was now Aboriginal land. … The journey they were making was prescribed for people like themselves. Timid travellers,

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for the most part, unwilling or unable to see. The truth is, we stick together because this country frightens us, [Zoe] thought. It frightened our ancestors and it frightens us. 25

The novelist Christina Stead also commented that in order to feel that Australia is a genuine homeland, Australians would have to come to terms not only with its unique landscape, flora and fauna, but with the dispossession of its original inhabitants. 26 Swagmen and Sundowners

Another iconic figure in Australian culture is the swagman, originating with the itinerant bush workers of the mid-19th century. This ‘nomad tribe’, as Russel Ward described them, has been immortalised in verse, fi lm and song – most famously in Banjo Paterson’s ‘Waltzing Matilda’, a song regarded as Australia’s unofficial national anthem. The swagman, and his less industrious counterpart, the sundowner, epitomised the idea of ‘freedom of the road’. As Henry Lawson’s poem, ‘Freedom on the Wallaby’, proclaimed: Australia’s a big country An’ Freedom’s humping bluey, An’ Freedom’s on the wallaby Oh! Don’t you hear ’er cooey?27

The poem was written as a political comment on the bitter shearers’ strikes of the 1880s and 1890s. It contrasts Australia as a land of freedom, represented by the shearers and other itinerants ‘on the wallaby’ track, with the tyranny, inequality and injustice of the old world, which their forebears left behind. The poem warns that tyranny was threatening that freedom once again, with the heavy-handed tactics being used by employers against pastoral workers. 28 As noted in Chapter 1, by the late 19th and early 20th centuries, traditional swagmen and sundowners were disappearing from the roads. In the wake of the shearers’ strikes, pastoralists turned to contract labourers; the rural depression of the 1890s forced thousands more men out of the cities and onto the ‘wallaby track’ in search of whatever work they could fi nd, adding a taint of pathos to their wanderings. ‘Swagmen’ made a dramatic reappearance in the Depression years of the 1930s. 29 Swagmen and sundowners were celebrated, often nostalgically, in hindsight. Writing in 1950, author Bernard Cronin made a distinction between sundowners and swagmen, noting that, while swagmen walked with purpose and some sense of urgency, eager to get to the next job, the sundowner had a measured gait, walking in no hurry, with no particular aim. The sundowner was named ‘because of his invariable sundown approach to a station homestead, on the calculated assumption’ that he would receive hospitality without having to work for it. While many

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viewed sundowners with disdain, Cronin romanticises their nomadic lifestyle. He explains the sundowners’ ‘solitary habits and roving philosophy’ as emanating from ‘an odd quirk of the spirit’. Forced onto the road by misfortune, or simply by a desire to escape from conventional life, the sundowners were driven by a restless spirit, never wanting to put down permanent roots, even to the extent of refusing to camp more than once in the same place. 30 Recalling his life ‘on the track’ between 1904 and 1914, ‘Duke’ Tritton confi rmed this view. He claimed that sundowners usually travelled alone, preferring ‘the freedom and independence of the track’ to a stable, stationary life (Figure 6.1). 31 Several literary representations cast doubt on whether the ‘freedom of the wallaby’ is really so free and romantic, or whether it may also embody a sense of alienation and want of belonging, or a place to call ‘home’. John Le Gay Brereton’s ‘Swags Up!’ (1928) portrays the mixed emotions of the swagman as he moves on from camp, at once eager for the hope and promise of ‘new tracks, new camps’, yet regretful at leaving the last: Dear dust wherein I found this night a home, Still for a memory’s sake I turn and cling, Then take the road for many a distant camp. 32

Figure 6.1 A Sundowner, by Ernest Gall, 1901 Source: State Library of South Australia PRG 631/2/1654.

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The poem suggests that, despite his need to keep moving, the swagman still longs for some sense of ‘home’. Other representations of the itinerant life emphasise misfortune or desperate circumstances – often caused by past mistakes – which compel the wanderers to take to the road for survival, or simply to forget. Henry Lawson’s poem, ‘Old Stone Chimney’ (c.1895) tells of a swagman who returns to his former home on the selection where he grew up. He is world weary, physically burdened with his swag, and emotionally burdened with guilt over a life gone astray bushranging, which brought shame upon his family. The home that he remembered so well and was longing to see again is completely altered with the ruin that time has wrought. After spending the night in the shelter of the stone chimney – the only part of the house still standing – the ‘pain in his heart’ is deadened and he fi nds renewed courage to ‘bear his load of sorrow’ and ‘wander back to the world again’. 33 Mary Gaunt’s short story, ‘Sweetbriar in the Desert’ (c.1916), depicts two swagmen ruminating on their lives. Andrew Latimer remembers that only a few years earlier he had arrived in Australia full of hope, aiming to make his fortune and then return to England. When his plans failed he went ‘on the wallaby’, fi nding work shearing, fencing or splitting timber, despite being well educated. He feels his fall deeply and asks his mate, ‘Wall-Eye Bill’, about his past. Bill replies, ‘No, I wasn’t always on the wallaby. Christ! That I should come to this!’ While Bill does not elaborate on what happened to him, his missing eye suggests that he has run away from a troubled past. He warns Latimer not to waste his life drifting, as the younger man watches Bill ‘plodding along in the scorching, pitiless sunshine, a weary, bent man dragging one ill-shod foot wearily after the other’. 34 ‘Freedom on the wallaby’ for Bill is more like a life sentence to relentless, aimless wandering. Novels and fi lms, including The Shiralee (1955 and 1957) and The Sundowners (1952 and 1960) continue these themes. The Shiralee moves closer to a true Australian ‘road genre’, as defi ned by later 20th-century fi lm and literature, including On the Road. The story explores concepts of mobility, freedom and ‘home’, through journeying motivated by ‘escape’, and triggered by a crisis moment. In the opening scene of the fi lm, Macauley, a ‘swagman’, is walking along a bush road with his back to the camera. It is clear that he is walking away from something. We learn that he left a disastrous marriage in Sydney six months earlier, taking his daughter, ‘Buster’, with him in revenge for her mother’s infidelity. While Macauley had always longed for the wandering life away from the city, he has no answer to the question, ‘where are you going?’ which surfaces repeatedly. He tells another swagman, Desmond, ‘All my life something’s been biting me – urging me on’. Macauley remembers meeting an old Aboriginal man, Tommy Goorianawa, who cautioned him that moving for movement’s sake, where everything looks sweeter somewhere

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else, does not bring happiness. Desmond’s philosophy, too, is that it is important to know where you are going. He explains, ‘A man is right to get away from evil, from trouble, and the things that are bad for him. But he can spend all his life running away from them’. He advises Macauley to choose something that is good for him, and try to achieve it. ‘Then he’s running towards something.’35 While The Sundowners offers a more romantic and lighter exploration of mobility and freedom than The Shiralee, in both works the themes of home and belonging are central. For Paddy Carmody, life on the road droving with his wife Ida and son Sean is preferable to ‘getting stuck’ in one place with a house and a mortgage. Ida and Sean, however, long for the stability, comfort and security of a settled home and look wistfully at a farmhouse across from their camp. Paddy sees agricultural farming as inferior to the itinerant lifestyle of the pastoral worker and is dismayed that his son would consider such a life. Englishman Rupert Venneker (Peter Ustinov) asks Sean to explain what a ‘Sundowner’ is, because he has been called that name and senses that it is derogatory. Sean responds, ‘It’s the same as saying someone who doesn’t have a home’. 36 In both these works, domestic ties are seen as antithetical to ‘freedom of the road’, which is defi ned as a predominantly masculine space. Macauley resents Buster, whom he thinks of as ‘his real swag’ and a ‘fishhook in his side’. 37 He spends most of his journey thinking of how he can escape from her and the ties she represents. Throughout The Sundowners, Rupert Venneker spends much of his time extricating himself from romantic entanglements before they become too serious. Keen to move on after his dalliance with Mrs Firth, the publican at Cawndilla, he remarks, ‘I recognise the hook when I see it’. At a shearing job, when Paddy refuses to go into town drinking with the other shearers on Saturday night, so that he can spend time with Ida, one of the other men remarks, ‘That’s how it is when a bloke’s married – can’t call his soul his own’. 38 The ambivalence and antagonism towards domesticity displayed in both The Shiralee and The Sundowners seems at odds with the prevailing social and cultural context of the postwar years, in which home ownership and the rise of suburbia flourished. However, both these works ultimately affi rm the values of positive family relationships. Aggressive masculinity is curbed and both Macauley and Carmody are redeemed through the influence of women and children. Buster knows that her father belongs on the road and that she belongs with him. When he tries to leave her with friends in Walgett, sneaking away without telling her, Buster catches up with him. She says she would fi nd him no matter where he goes: ‘I’ll walk along the road, and all the roads, and keep going on the roads ’cos I know you always walk on the roads and I’d fi nd you.’39 This represents a turning point in Macauley’s journey and the beginning of a transformation in his relationship with Buster. He begins to see her point of view, realising that she had a ‘home’ with him. From then on he

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is no longer trying to escape from her, but looking towards a future for both of them. The Sundowners’ Paddy and Ida also fi nally realise that ‘home’ for them means being together, whether it is on the road or in a house. Both undergo a change in attitude, but they remain united, continuing ‘on the road’. Both America and Australia romanticised nomadic figures such as gypsies, vagabonds, tramps, hoboes and swagmen in their promotion of motor touring. Yet, over time, similar conflicts and ambivalence in representations of ‘freedom’ and ‘home’ extended to road tourism, as motorists and caravanners moved onto and changed the dynamics of the road from the 1920s and 1930s onwards.

Motor Gypsies and Caravanning

Between 1910 and 1920, before car ownership became commonplace, motoring held an aura of unsurpassed novelty and adventure for Americans. Before the widespread development of dedicated tourist facilities, middle-class families toured the country, camping and sleeping in tents or in their cars and cooking over open campfi res. ‘Autocamping’ originally appealed to affluent individualists who delighted in their independence from restrictive railway timetables and hotels. They could travel off the beaten track, discover new perspectives, break away from work routines and bureaucratic institutions, camping and eating where and when they liked. As one autocamper stated, ‘Time and space are at your beck and call; your freedom is complete’.40 The autocampers identified as ‘motor gypsies’ and this imagery was taken up by motoring advocates. Several books and articles referred to motor touring as ‘motor gypsying’, ‘motor hoboing’, ‘nomadic motoring’, ‘autotramping’ or ‘motor-vagabonding’. Such imagery was associated with bohemianism, unconventionality, rejection of bourgeois values and a carefree, easy-going lifestyle. Autocampers’ connection to the road differentiated them from earlier itinerants such as woodsmen, hunters and trappers, who tended to stay in one place for longer, whereas the motorists covered more territory. They defied the more genteel forms of travel, living close to the land. Ironically, these travellers employed the modern motor vehicle as a way of connecting with a pre-industrial era – another expression of perpetuating the frontier. The important distinction between motoring gypsies and real gypsies, tramps or hoboes, however, was that for the motorists the wandering life was a temporary state, and they would eventually return to their home and work life, refreshed and reinvigorated to take their place in conventional society. While it was acceptable and natural to indulge one’s wanderlust and desire to commune closely with nature, to be a permanent wanderer was not desirable and implied a lack of purpose, laziness, even immorality.41

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In Australia, similar identification with gypsying occurred in the early days of motor touring, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s, and was probably heavily influenced by the American experience. An article in the Australian Motorist in September 1925 discussed the burgeoning camping movement in America, which it hoped Australians would follow: ‘This great spontaneous camping movement is born in each heart of a call to freedom, a longing to get away from conventions.’42 In another issue of the magazine, a picture of a car next to a camping tent in the bush was accompanied by a verse: I shall go on the gypsies’ road The road that has no ending. … No law shall dare my wandering stay, No man my acres measure: The world was made for gypsies’ feet, The winding road for pleasure.43

A motorist touring along the Princes Highway for a week, resolved to camp, ‘to be independent of porters and taxis, to throw overboard timetables, to scorn hotels’. To hear ‘the screams of a koala … or the scamper of a possum. … To roll over sleepily in your blankets with never a thought of the morrow’, were ‘some of the joys of the open road’ and fellow motorists were urged to ‘try the vagabond way next holiday!’44 In the imagery of the restless wanderer, sleeping ‘out’, close to nature, can be seen the reincarnation of the swagmen and sundowners of the 19th century. Caravanning began to gather momentum from the late 1920s and especially throughout the 1930s. Promoters exploited to the full both the caravan’s historical origins and its association with nomadic gypsies, and the modern appeal of the freedom of the road. Caravan brand names such as the ‘Romany Road’, or those christened by their owners as ‘The Wanderer’, ‘Wanderer’s Baby’ or ‘Wide Horizons’ reinforced those images.45 Caravans enabled motorists to travel and set up camp wherever they chose, with all the comforts of home and none of the responsibilities. G.C. Kaesler, of Nuriootpa, South Australia, recorded that he built his fi rst ‘caravan’ by fitting a ‘house effect’ onto the body of a 1924 Dodge tourer (Figure 6.2). The ‘Home from Home’, as his family called it, was ready by Easter 1929 for a trip to Moana Beach. The vehicle generated much attention, as he wrote, ‘People came from all directions wondering what sort of Gypsies we were’. After selling this vehicle, he recorded another trip in a caravan called simply, ‘The Cottage’.46 Caravan manufacturers and promoters made much of the caravan’s likeness to a home, appealing particularly to women, who could now experience, in the words of an advertisement for the Romany Road caravan, ‘The Joys of Camping plus the conveniences of a MODERN FLAT’.47 The caravan both appealed to and subverted traditional ideas about home ownership. Captain Mansbridge and his wife travelled extensively

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Figure 6.2 G.C. ‘Pop’ Kaesler’s home-built ‘caravan’ Source: Australian Motorist, March 1933, p. 385. (State Library of NSW.)

around Australia in their caravan, ‘The Wanderer’, and articles detailing their adventures appeared in both the Australian Motorist and Walkabout in the 1930s. Having been on the road for over 18 months, Mansbridge discussed his view of the caravan’s appeal: People, I believe, are beginning to discover that … their lives are becoming too complicated. They are looking for a simple method of living. After all, a house entails a lot of worry. Your home is a fi xed one, your life is an everlasting monotonous routine. … A caravan … can give you all the facilities of your modern home, although on a smaller scale. You have no callers, no nerve-shattering trams, and your meals are prepared when you feel hungry. Your appetite is not controlled by a clock. If you are tired of one place you simply drive on. All Australia is your garden and it is a garden of peace.48

The caravan movement originated in Depression-era America, where mobility became the new form of stability. The Great Depression challenged people’s faith in permanent employment, home ownership and a stable, stationary life tied to home, family and work in the same place and community. Rather than investing in permanent homes in places where there was no guarantee of continued employment, many people began to put any spare money into buying a car or caravan, enabling them to take their home and family to wherever work could be found, thus affording some security and protection against unstable economic and employment conditions.49 In America, dedicated caravanning publications such as Trailer Travel were in circulation in the 1930s and developments reported in the

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Australian Motorist referred to caravanning as revolutionising American life more than the automobile had done. The caravan broke the ‘shackles of permanent homes’ and enabled their owners to recover some sense of individualism that had been lost in the American industrial system, where workers who retained jobs were often part of large organisations and experienced a sense of loss of personal freedoms. Using the rhetoric of antimaterialist philosophy, caravanning promoters argued that possessions, including permanent homes, tied people down, limiting their ability to move about freely. Trailers, by contrast, offered the assurance of ‘a bed and roof’, yet still allowed ‘freedom of movement and self-determination’. 50 In Australia, similar rhetoric challenging the capitalist industrial system encouraged caravanners. An article in the Australian Motorist of December 1937, attempting to diagnose ‘caravan fever’, argued that some caravanners considered themselves nomads. While few were exactly that, it explained, ‘the desire to be free to move, when it is to our advantage to do so, is one of the strongest of human motives’. Capitalising on this desire, together with: the high rate of car ownership, the spread of highways around the continent and Australians’ curiosity to see their own country – as well as their disillusionment with city life and the cyclic nature of employment – the stage was set for the full development of the caravan industry in Australia. 51 It was estimated that by the end of 1937 approximately 10,000 caravans would be on the road in Australia, while in America at that time around 300,000 people were thought to be living in caravans.52 Class and Freedom on the Road

While caravan travel was supposed to break down class barriers, making ‘the great outdoors’ available to all, important distinctions between classes of travellers remained. As in America, the Depression led many Australians to opt for life in a caravan as a cheaper alternative to renting or owning a home. Yet, as both caravan touring and this style of semipermanent ‘caravan squatting’ became more popular, the more respectable class of tourists were keen to differentiate themselves from those in less desirable circumstances. The Australian Motorist warned against becoming a ‘caravan squatter’, who simply set up camp outside towns and stayed there, rather than at the special tourist caravan parks and camp grounds that were beginning to be established by the late 1930s. The growth of unregulated camping was a source of concern among many local councils and communities. According to the Motorist, the caravan squatter was ‘a public menace … an unwelcome intruder in decent society, and certainly the average Australian shuns his acquaintanceship’. Squatters were considered ‘a threat to the respectability of the community at large’, and legitimate tourists must aspire to more than a life amid an assembly of shacks ‘overcrowded with the lower types of humanity’. After previously espousing

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the virtues of caravanning as freeing travellers from the conformity of hotel stays, those opposed to permanent campers now asked, ‘Would any self-respecting man, with sufficient means, pass up a decent night’s lodging in a hotel with suitable companions to sleep in a barn with hoboes?’. People who did so to save money were ‘no more desirable socially than a land squatter – he is someone to be shunned, a cheap individual who reflects unfavourably on the community’. 53 Genuine caravan enthusiasts were now keen to distinguish the caravan as a touring vehicle from the caravan as a home. A case in England in 1938 determined that a caravan could be classed as a temporary building, and hence subject to council rates and charges, if it was no longer likely to be mobile. The Australian Motorist, which featured a substantial section on caravanning each month, was concerned that the term ‘caravan’ was being applied incorrectly to ‘any construction on or off wheels that [could] be made habitable’, whereas it should only refer to a ‘vehicle that is roadworthy and home-worthy in the eyes of any normal well-bred person’. The magazine’s concerns were twofold: first, tourist promoters worried that excessive regulations, which should really only apply to shack dwellers, might be imposed upon caravan owners; and secondly, caravan manufacturers were trying to steer people away from backyard-built vans. The article concluded: The Australian Motorist is now beginning a campaign for the correct use universally of the word ‘caravan’. I feel that if, to the general public, the word is to continue to suggest romance, freedom, mobility, and a clean and healthy way of living, then a big effort must be made to restrict its use to caravans proper. 54

A delicate balance existed between envy and fear of the itinerant life, as the destitute turned to semi-permanent gypsying as a way to deal with serious economic and social problems. It was this group who often constituted the majority of the population in American trailer parks. 55 In Australia, fear and suspicion also extended to other road users, not only caravan campers. As the Depression forced many people out of the cities, many took to the road or ‘wallaby track’, travelling on foot, hitchhiking or jumping on and off trains to go wherever they might fi nd work or the opportunity for a better life. These Depression-era itinerants were also referred to as ‘swagmen’, but by this time that term was being applied interchangeably with ‘sundowners’, ‘tramps’, ‘hoboes’ and ‘bums’. Leisure travellers often judged these figures of the road as aimless, lazy opportunistic freeloaders. Frank Davison travelled north from Sydney by car in the 1930s. After crossing the Hawkesbury River, his party passed a ‘swagman’ walking along the road. Davison commented: The swagman is fading from the Australian picture. Men don’t as a rule, in these days, tramp the roads in search of a job. Our wayfarer, with his bluey on his back and a billy dangling from one hand, was most likely just a derelict, living in the tradition of days that have gone. He lifted his face

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at the moment of our passing. It was a poor face, vacant and purposeless. We imagined that he was just tramping; marching with unhurried steps towards a destination that retreated as he advanced. 56

It is clear that middle-class travellers were troubled by the encroachment of less fortunate wanderers onto the road, which was becoming increasingly defi ned as a tourist space. William J. Jones emigrated from Wales in 1922 and spent the next 12 years in Australia, travelling around the country from Melbourne to Mackay. He lived as a swagman, hitchhiking, walking or riding trains and working at various seasonal jobs, including cane cutting and fruit picking, before returning to Wales in 1934. A recurring theme in his memoir is the contemptuous attitude towards ‘swagmen’ among those he encountered on his travels. At one restaurant the young woman working behind the counter looked at him doubtfully and told him that ‘they did not serve swaggies’. She laughed cynically when Jones said that he could pay for his meal in advance. He also found that he was judged constantly by his appearance as a ‘swaggy’, being treated with suspicion by bank staff when trying to withdraw his own money, and questioned by police when sleeping in a park in Brisbane.57 Joseph Murphy travelled by truck from Sydney to Darwin in search of mica in 1930, and saw many ‘swagmen’ on the road. While Murphy and his companion also camped along the roadside, his contempt and distrust towards this different class of road traveller is obvious. He recorded in his diary that as they slept in the vicinity of some ‘50 bagmen’ near a water hole, they kept their revolvers and dogs close at hand, as they ‘did not like the look of some of them’. 58 By the 1960s, caravanning had become a major part of mainstream road tourism. Yet caravanning and camping were associated frequently with the poorer or working classes as they were more affordable holiday options than those involving air travel or hotel accommodation. Huldah and Joe Turner, who travelled around Australia for six months in their Kombi van ‘home’ in the early 1970s, often stayed in caravan parks. Huldah’s diary reveals their preconceived, yet often mistaken, ideas about their fellow tenants: ‘We have found the people in caravan parks invariably agreeable and pleasant, and, on the whole, better types than such wandering hordes would promise to be.’59

Kerouac and Freedom on the Road

Jack Kerouac’s semi-autobiographical novel, On the Road, established a particular genre of road writing. Together with other works of literature and fi lm, such as The Wild One (1953) and Easy Rider, it helped defi ne conventions of the postwar road genre, including: the motif of fl ight, or escape; camaraderie (predominantly male); and opposition to conventional society, revolving around a road journey. The journey is

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often a metaphor for a spiritual or introspective quest as well as offering opportunities for critiquing modern urban industrial society.60 Implicit in Kerouac’s narrative is the desire for freedom and escape from domesticity, as the travellers engage in a series of fleeting encounters, trysts, marriages and adulteries with women who are never fully realised characters and are always subservient to the male protagonists’ need to be constantly on the move. 61 Yet, ultimately, On the Road is also about a quest for roots and belonging, reflected in the characters’ search for Dean Moriarty’s lost father, which haunts their perpetual roaming. Sal Paradise offers some explanation for Dean’s behaviour: Dean had never seen his mother’s face. Every new girl, every new wife, every new child was an addition to his bleak impoverishment. Where was his father? – old bum Dean Moriarty the Tinsmith, riding freights, working as a scullion in railroad cookshacks …62

At the conclusion of the novel, that quest remains unresolved. In the fi nal lines, Sal says that ‘in America when the sun goes down’, he looks westward and, ‘I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found … ’. Sal’s last vision was of ‘Dean, ragged in a motheaten overcoat’, disappearing into the freezing New York night, bent to the road on which he seemed destined to remain a wanderer.63 It was perhaps a logical progression that, in a novel which is regarded as a defi ning work about freedom of the road in the automobile age, a central protagonist should be characterised as a tramp, and descended from a Depression-era tramp. Dean Moriarty was ‘born on the road, as his parents passed through Salt Lake City in 1926, in a jalopy on their way to Los Angeles’.64 On the Road built on the legacy of escape established by the Dustbowl migrants portrayed in John Steinbeck’s novel, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), who were forced off their drought-stricken midwestern farms during the Great Depression and travelled along Highway 66 – ‘the mother road, the road of flight’ – hoping to build a new life in California.65 As Marguerite Shaffer points out, the Dustbowl refugees of Depression-era America transgressed the once middle-class space of the road as a tourist landscape. For the ‘Okies’, roadside camping was a necessity, not an amusement. For them, the road became a place of escape from a failed American dream.66 Critic Jason Spangler also sees a strong continuity between The Grapes of Wrath and On the Road. He sees the Depression-era tramp or hobo as the ultimate Beat figure, being on the margins of society and a symbol of the failure or rejection of the capitalist system, turning his back on the city and suburbia and taking to the road by choice or necessity.67 As Sal and Dean leave New York and take off for California again, Sal says, ‘we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move’.68 On the Road thus critiques modern urban-industrial society as much as celebrating the ‘freedom of the road’.69

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Self-discovery, Healing and Transformation on the Road

According to Shaffer, the publication of On the Road marked the end of a phase in which the American road trip was undertaken chiefly as part of a ritual of national tourism, and the beginning of an era in which there was much greater emphasis on the search for individualism, personal freedom, self-discovery and escape from the mainstream. Through contact with a more authentic rural, preindustrial or ‘frontier’ American landscape and people, Kerouac also sought an intensely personal experience. His journey was triggered by crises – his marriage breakdown, and a serious illness. For Kerouac, and the Beat generation, the road – indeed, travel generally – offered a space where the self could be temporarily reimagined, and where there was opportunity for physical, mental and spiritual reinvigoration, transformation and enlightenment.70 Kerouac’s writings, with their vision of ‘eternal freedoms’, directly inspired a new generation of travellers, particularly in America, giving rise to the ‘rucksack revolution’ envisaged by Japhy Ryder, the protagonist in Kerouac’s 1959 novel, The Dharma Bums.71 Tony Horwitz, who describes himself as ‘a road-stricken Yankee’, explains the origins of his wanderlust and his love for the spontaneity of hitchhiking as a teenager in 1970s America. When a friend in high school returned after a summer spent hitchhiking across America, Horwitz thought he looked different – ‘like he’d seen something vast and important out there’. Horwitz spent the following year preparing for his own journey: ‘I studied the pages of the Rand McNally Road Atlas of America. I read and reread Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and pinned a poster from Easy Rider over my bed.’ The next summer he hitchhiked from Washington, DC to California: ‘Hitchhiking was a rite of passage, and a way to slum it across America like so many generations before. Go West, Young Man. Seek your fortune on the road. Get your kicks on Route 66.’ 72 Horwitz’s Australian hitchhiking adventure, some 10 years later in the mid-1980s, was a chance for him to experience some of those sensations again in a brief interlude of ‘escape’ before he settled down to marriage, a mortgage and all the responsibilities of adult life. It was also extremely important that he did it on his own, without his fiancée; otherwise it would be less spontaneous, with no ‘unplanned adventures’. As Horwitz explains, ‘This thing I had for hitchhiking was an extramarital affair – premarital, rather. I wanted to meet up with it alone’.73 In Australia, Kerouac’s influence on mainstream, as opposed to literary, culture is less directly identifiable, and while Australia had no comparably influential text in the genre of road writing, the Beat and later counterculture movement reverberated here, as did American popular culture generally. Elements of Beatnik and counterculture philosophy were evident in the surfing subculture of the 1960s and 1970s, with its emphasis on individualism and freedom of expression. The soul surfers on safari,

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discussed in Chapter 4, escaped the cities and suburbs, rejecting materialism and traditional domesticity for a simpler, more natural way of life. During the same period, in both America and Australia, motorcycling also came to epitomise a lifestyle that revolved around the pursuit of freedom on the road and was associated strongly with an individualistic, antiestablishment attitude. Bikers often came from working-class backgrounds, and included counterculture enthusiasts keen to experience an alternative lifestyle and reject mainstream society. According to Jonathan Goldstein, motorcyclists were free-willed individualists who shared a love of adventure and a ‘universal recognition of the freedom of the road’.74 The movie Easy Rider, which achieved cult status and represented many aspects of 1960s counterculture in America, is also credited with affi rming the Harley-Davidson motorcycle as an iconic symbol in popular culture.75 In 1970, Harley-Davidson’s advertising campaign in America marketed the bikes as ‘The Great American Freedom Machine’.76 Kerouac’s influence on the road genre can be seen in later 20th-century Australian travel narratives, which also reflect a much more introspective, individual quest for self-discovery. The road trip itself was frequently inspired by some kind of personal crisis which propelled the traveller onto the road in search of healing or transformation, either physically or emotionally. Some of the drivers who gave hitchhiker Tony Horwitz a ride provided insights into their own reasons for taking to the road. A driver heading out of Queensland for the Northern Territory identified with the Slim Dusty song playing on the car’s tape deck, with its lyrics about ‘the black sheep of the family’ being the ‘biggest disappointment’. The driver says, ‘This song describes me exactly’, telling Horwitz that he ran away from home, got into trouble with the law for breaking and entering, let down his parole officer ‘and fi nally just split to try his luck on the open road’. As he flipped the tape, he let another of Slim Dusty’s songs express what life on the road meant to him: It’s freedom that I feel sitting here behind the wheel, Rolling, rolling, rolling down the long highway.77

Sean Condon was inspired to go on a road trip with his friend David, as Condon was disenchanted with his job in advertising and dissatisfied with life in general. The trip was also a quest for self-discovery; as he told David, ‘My life is really fucked. … So how about we drive at reasonable speeds around Australia. We’ll find ourselves’.78 The title of his narrative, Sean and David’s Long Drive, suggests the importance of the travellers’ own identity by this time, as opposed to earlier accounts that emphasised the type or brand of vehicle, the destinations visited or the search for ‘Australia’. The narrative is also punctuated by frequent references to Generation X’s self-absorbed attitude, showing little interest in scenery or looking for representative national types.

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In Bypass (2005), Michael McGirr’s bicycle journey down the Hume Highway is one in which the road provides a space for contemplation and reflection. McGirr’s life is going through a transition as he comes to terms with his recent decision to leave the priesthood and begin a long-term romantic relationship. Just as Native American William Least Heat Moon found the highway to be ‘a sacred space, where time and place were suspended, where motion became therapeutic, and in which inquiry was possible’,79 so McGirr describes the Hume Highway as ‘sacred space … If people ever fi nd stillness there, it is the kind of deep stillness in which they are changed’.80 McGirr’s narrative observes, contemplates and philosophises on the nature of the road, the history of the Hume Highway and its various meanings for those who travel or live along it. His journey enables him to offer insights into aspects of Australian history, as well as his own personal experiences and philosophies, as he journeys towards a greater understanding of self and relationships. Interviews with experienced four-wheel-drive travellers and those taking extended tours of at least 12 months in campervans or motorhomes through the outback provide broader evidence that long-distance road trips can be transformative. Respondents in Narayanan and Macbeth’s study likened the drive to and through desert regions to meditation, allowing four-wheel-drivers to contemplate life, while inner transformation was at the heart of their desert experience.81 Naomi White and Peter White interviewed travellers aged from their late 30s to early 50s about their motivations for travelling long-term in outback Australia in the early 2000s. Prompted to travel by endings or changes in relationship, family or work situations, many saw the outback and their journey as a space in which to discover or renegotiate a sense of their own identity and perhaps experience a revitalised self as they transitioned between old ways of life and new possibilities. White and White suggest that these travellers may also be searching for ways of feeling more ‘at home’ both in the external environment and with themselves.82 Homecomings

For some, physical or spiritual transformation was a temporary state, lasting only as long as they were on the road, while others experienced more lasting changes. One of Ion Idriess’s motivations in accompanying his boss on a road trip across Australia was to improve his physical health. Having suffered from recurring bouts of malaria over the previous two years, Idriess was persuaded by ‘the Super’ of the healing powers of the road: ‘We go straight west, west for three thousand miles. Every mile into a different climate – every mile you’ll leave the malaria behind – you’ll return a different man.’ While travelling, Idriess did enjoy respite from his illness, but as they neared home the malaria returned, prompting ‘the Super’ to lament, ‘I’m ashamed of you, Inky… . Because I take you nine

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thousand miles and cure your malaria and you go and pick it up again when we’re almost back to Sydney’.83 At the conclusion of their hitchhiking adventure through north-western Australia in the 1950s, Leslie and Coralie Rees felt that they had been personally enriched by their contact with places and people. Rees explained: It had been a vital and liberating experience from beginning to end. We had travelled as Southern city-bred folk. … It did seem to us that we had acquired new dimensions of outlook – increased breadth from our selfmergence with the spreading horizons of the lands we passed through, and greater depth from our appreciation of the free, untrammelled character of many of the people we met.84

The Reeses felt that they had merged with the Australia landscape and its people and so enhanced their own self-image. Liberated from their former urban-confi ned selves, they became more well-rounded beings. For the Turners, the excitement and anticipation they felt at nearing their ‘HOME’ in Newcastle made them appreciate it even more than they had done before leaving. Despite having experienced a quasi-spiritual awakening inspired by the ancient landscape of Central Australia, the Kimberleys and the Flinders Ranges, as they drove along the coast road south of Sydney, Huldah noted, ‘We decided that this was as beautiful as any we had seen anywhere in Australia’. They detoured through the Royal National Park, ‘and drove the seven miles of the Lady Carrington Drive, seeing with new sight the beauty of the place’.85 The fact that the Turners were of an age when it was unlikely that they would ever have the chance to repeat their round-Australia journey may have influenced their reaction. Seeing a new beauty in the landscape closer to home perhaps makes the return to ordinary life more bearable. For others, the thought of returning home was less appealing. As Sidney Palmer and his wife neared the end of their circumnavigation of Australia in 1965, he wrote: Tomorrow we plan to do a ‘cannonball’ back to Denfield. And by Tuesday morning, life will start crowding back in on both of us. … One thing is certain. Neither of us is quite the same person who drove out of Denfield exactly six weeks ago to-day.86

When Frank Newlyn and his wife completed their 17-month caravan tour around Australia in 1968, they wondered whether they could ever return to ‘normal’ life again. The answer was ‘No’, as Newlyn explained: ‘We could not settle down to the suburban life, for our existence seemed to lack purpose. So we sold our home, bought a larger caravan and a more reliable car and, at 43 years of age, I and my wife are off again.’87 Yet ambivalence towards the nomadic life remained evident even in the later 20th century. In March 1970 the Australian Women’s Weekly featured the story of ‘Granny’ Emily Cole who, at the age of 96, was

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‘gipsying’ [sic] a ‘17,000-odd mile marathon around Australia’ with her family before settling in Queensland. ‘Granny’ said that she would be glad to settle, as she was ‘getting tired of being a nomad’. The article reported that ‘secretly, she thinks this rolling-stone life is not quite respectable’. She continued, ‘It is a bit embarrassing when someone asks, “Yes, but where is your home?” “Nowhere” seems an unsatisfactory answer somehow’.88 In both America and Australia, where mobility is a defi ning cultural trait, the road has long been associated with freedom and escape. Yet alongside the ostensibly romantic imagery, cultural representations reveal underlying uncertainties which suggest that the desire for constant movement may betray a lack of belonging and sense of ‘home’, so that the ‘freedom of the road’ could also be a sentence to a life of perpetual aimless wandering; once again, going ‘nowhere’. As the preceding chapter also showed, lingering doubts over the legitimacy of settlement and Australia’s history as a penal colony and immigrant society partly explain some of these ambiguities. Both here and in America, economic and social factors, especially the Great Depression of the 1930s, made an itinerant lifestyle a necessity rather than a choice for many. This blurred the distinction between the road a place of enforced migration and desperation versus the road as a space for tourism. In this context, tourists were keen to differentiate themselves from less fortunate long-term wanderers, whom they often judged and maligned. In Australia, conflict between mobility and stability continues. Australians are among the most prolific travellers in the world despite the tyranny of distance, yet home ownership defi nes the ‘great Australian dream’. While Kerouac’s On the Road is hailed as marking a new phase in both travel and the road genre, in many ways it was a legacy of the Depression era, revealing both the romance and pathos of ‘the freedom of the road’ through its representation of itinerant figures including tramps and hoboes. The Beat and counterculture movements ushered in new approaches to travel which emphasised the pursuit of individual freedom and self-discovery, and a new, more self-conscious style of road writing. As travellers entered the ‘liminal’ space of the road, a space where they escaped from the reality and routine of ‘normal’ life, they formed new communities and engaged in new rituals, conventions and behaviours. The following chapter will explore some of these unique aspects of life ‘on the road’. Notes – Chapter 6: Freedom on the Wallaby? (1) (2) (3)

Hopper, D. (1969) Easy Rider. Columbia Pictures. Whitman, W. (1977) Song of the open road. In W. Whitman, The Portable Walt Whitman. Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 156. Shaffer, M.A. (2001) See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880–1940. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 319–320.

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(4) Cultural anthropologist Victor Turner employed the concept of ‘liminality’ to describe ‘a temporary breach of structure … an interlude wherein conventional social, economic and political life may be transcended’. St John, G. (2008) Victor Turner and contemporary cultural performance: An introduction. In G. St John (ed.) Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 4–5. John Urry explains the term ‘liminality’ in discussing Turner’s three stages of pilgrimage, namely: (i) ‘separation’ from normal space and social relations; (ii) ‘liminality’, a suspended or in-between state of being; and (iii) ‘reintegration’ on return. See Urry, J. (2002) The Tourist Gaze (2nd edn). London: Sage, p. 11. Several authors discuss the concept of liminality in relation to road travel. See, for example, Shaffer, See America First, pp. 2–3; Primeau, R. (1996) Romance of the Road: The Literature of the American Highway. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, pp. 142–143; Jakle, J.A. and Sculle, K.A. (2008) Motoring: The Highway Experience in America. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, pp. 2–3. (5) Karskens, G. (2005) ‘This spirit of emigration’: The nature and meanings of escape in early New South Wales. Journal of Australian Colonial History 7, 1–34. (6) Wilson, J. (2015) Bushrangers in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, 14 April. Obituaries Australia. Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National University. See http://adb.anu.edu.au/essay/12/text31129 (accessed 9 November 2016). (7) Williams, M. (1983) Australia on the Popular Stage 1829–1929: An Historical Entertainment in Six Acts. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, pp. 188, 195. (8) Pike, A. and Cooper, R. (1998) Australian Film 1900–1977. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, p. 3. (9) Pike and Cooper, Australian Film 1900–1977, pp. 8–20. (10) Pike and Cooper, Australian Film 1900–1977, p. 2. (11) Carfrae, M. (1994) Roads to heaven: The American road genre in fi lm and literature 1945–1992. MPhil thesis, University of Sydney, pp. 4–5. (12) Pike and Cooper, Australian Film 1900–1977, pp. 8–20. (13) Williams notes that ‘the brigand’, particularly the brigand who had turned to crime out of a burning sense of injustice, was a favourite protagonist of romantic drama, representing the oppressed victims of society’s privileged in his struggle against the law. Popular heroes such as Newgate escapee Jack Sheppard and highwayman Paul Clifford began to appear in popular melodramas in England in the fi rst half of the 19th century. See Williams, Australia on the Popular Stage, p. 4. (14) Pike and Cooper, Australian Film 1900–1977, pp. 16–17. (15) Paterson, A.B. (1917a) Pioneers. In A.B. Paterson (ed.) Saltbush Bill, J. P. and Other Verses. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, p. 59. (16) Brady, E.J. (1911a) Far and wide. In Brady, E.J. (1911a) Bells and Hobbles. Melbourne: George Robinson, p. 114. (17) Brady, E.J. (1911a) Comrades. In Brady, Bells and Hobbles, p. 166. (18) Serle, G. (1987) The Creative Spirit in Australia: A Cultural History. Richmond, Vic: William Heinemann Australia, p. 32. (19) Meyer, R. (1971) The Outback and the West: Australian and American frontier fiction. Western American Literature 6, 6–7. (20) Based on 2011 Census figures. See Australian Bureau of Statistics website at http:// abs.gov.au/websitedbs/censushome.nsf/home/CO-59 (accessed 14 November 2016). (21) Gilmore, M. (1922) Hound of the Road. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, pp. 25, 28. (22) Gilmore, Hound of the Road, p. 52. (23) Jacobs, P. (1998) Going Inland. South Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, p. 51. (24) Jacobs, Going Inland, pp. 30, 141, 51.

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(25) Jacobs, Going Inland, pp. 99, 106–107. (26) Huntsman, L. (2001) Sand in Our Souls: The Beach in Australian History. Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, p. 211. (27) Lawson, H. (1891) ‘Freedom on the wallaby’, Worker, 16 May, p. 8. See https://trove. nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/70863379 (accessed August 2010 and 8 November 2016). (28) Waterhouse, R. (2005) The Vision Splendid: A Social and Cultural History of Rural Australia. Fremantle, WA: Curtin University Books, pp. 107–110. (29) Waterhouse, Vision, pp. 103–104, 118. (30) Cronin, B. (1950) When the sundowner hit the trail – saga of a vanished walkabout. Walkabout, October, pp. 18–19. (31) Tritton, D. (1960) Once a jolly swagman. Walkabout, December, pp. 22, 24. (32) Brereton, J. (1928) Swags Up! In J. Brereton, Swags Up! London: J.M. Dent, p. 73. (33) Lawson, H. (1900) Old stone chimney. In H. Lawson (ed.) Verses Popular and Humorous. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, p. 34. (34) Gaunt, M. (1916) Sweetbriar in the desert. In M. Gaunt, Ends of the Earth: Stories. London: T. Werner Laurie, pp. 101, 103. (35) Niland, D. (1974 [1955]) The Shiralee. London: White Lion, p. 206. (36) Zimmerman, F. (1960) The Sundowners. Warner Bros. (37) Niland, Shiralee, p. 28. (38) Sundowners. (39) Niland, Shiralee, p. 184. (40) Belasco, W.J. (1981) Americans on the Road from Autocamp to Motel, 1910–1945. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. viii–ix, 3, 7–8. (41) Belasco, Americans on the Road, pp. 11–13, 15. (42) Australian Motorist, September 1925, p. 19. (43) Sigerson Shorter, D. cited in Australian Motorist, November 1926, p. 185. (44) Australian Motorist, January 1928, pp. 313–314. (45) Australian Motorist, July 1937, p. 648; Mansbridge, Capt. C.A.S (1939) Caravanning across Australia. Walkabout, September, p. 34; Mansbridge, Capt. C.A.S. (1940) By caravan to ‘the centre’. Walkabout, April, p. 33; Australian Motorist, November 1938, p. 168. (46) Kaesler, G.C. (c.1929) The Beginning of Motor Caravanning in Australia. Nuriootpa, SA: G.C. Kaesler, pp. 1, 4. (47) Australian Motorist, May 1938, p. 538. (48) Australian Motorist, June 1937, p. 588. (49) Australian Motorist, September 1937, pp. 49–50. (50) Australian Motorist, November 1938, p. 177. (51) Australian Motorist, December 1937, p. 222. (52) Australian Motorist, May 1937, pp. 519–520. (53) Australian Motorist, June 1939, p. 617. (54) Australian Motorist, February 1938, p. 345. (55) Belasco, Americans on the Road, pp. 109–110. (56) Davison, F.D. and Nicholls, B. (1935) Blue Coast Caravan. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, p. 7. (57) Jones, W.J. (c.1977) Memoirs. NLA MS 7590, p. 27. (58) Murphy, J.A., ‘Diary Record of an Overland Journey Sydney to Darwin in Search of Mica 1930’. NLA MS 3912, p. 7. (59) Turner, H.M. ‘A Round-Australia Journal: 30 Weeks and 25,000 Miles in 1972’. In H. Turner Papers, 1940–2003, ML MSS 7520, p. 14. (60) Carfrae, Roads to heaven, pp. 2, 100; Barry, G. (1973) Defi ning a new genre: Part 1 – the road movie. Lumiere, October, p. 22; Laderman, D. (2002) Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, p. 1.

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(61) Carolyn Cassady (Neal Cassady’s wife) provides a very diff erent perspective to Kerouac’s narrative in her autobiography: Cassady, C., Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady Kerouac, & Ginsberg, fi rst published by William Morrow & Co. Inc. in 1990. This work offers an insight into some of the difficulties of life at home, struggling to bringing up three children while Neal was ‘on the road’ with Kerouac and their friends. (62) Kerouac, J. (1972 [1957]) On the Road. London: Penguin, p. 132. (63) Kerouac, On the Road, pp. 309–310. (64) Kerouac, On the Road, p. 3. (65) Steinbeck, J. (1980 [1939]). The Grapes of Wrath. New York, Penguin, p. 128. (66) Shaffer, See America First, pp. 317–318. (67) Spangler, J. (2008) We’re on a road to nowhere: Steinbeck, Kerouac and the legacy of the Great Depression. Studies in the Novel 40 (3), Fall, 310, 327. (68) Kerouac, On the Road, p. 133. (69) Spangler, Road to Nowhere, p. 310. (70) Shaffer, See America First, pp. 2–3, 319–320. (71) Kerouac, J. (1959) The Dharma Bums. London: Andre Deutsch, pp. 97–98. (72) Horwitz, T. (1987) One for the Road: A Hitchhiker’s Outback. Sydney: Harper & Row (Australasia), pp. 16–17. (73) Horwitz, One for the Road, p. 7. (74) Goldstein, J. (2006) What can Marx and Hegel tell us about social divisions among bikers? In B.E. Rollin et al. (eds) Harley-Davidson and Philosophy: Full Throttle Aristotle. Chicago, IL: Open Court, pp. 53–54, 57. (75) Auxier, R.E. (2006) Christ in a sidecar: An ontology of suicide machines. In Rollin et al. (eds) Harley-Davidson and Philosophy, p. 22. (76) Feldman, F. (2006) Harleys as freedom machines: Myth or fantasy? In Rollin et al. (eds) Harley-Davidson and Philosophy, p. 89. (77) Horwitz, One for the Road, p. 54. (78) Condon, S. (1996) Sean & David’s Long Drive. Melbourne: Lonely Planet, p. 10. (79) Primeau, Romance of the Road, p. 70; Least Heat Moon [Trogdon], W. (1982) Blue Highways: A Journey into America. New York: Ballantine Books. (80) McGirr, M. (2005) Bypass: The Story of a Road. Sydney: Picador, p. 15. Reproduced by arrangement with the Licensor, Michael McGirr c/o Curtis Brown (Aust) Pty Ltd. (81) Narayanan, Y. and Macbeth, J. (2009) Deep in the desert: Merging the desert and the spiritual through 4WD tourism. Tourism Geographies 11 (3), 369–389. (82) White, N.R. and White, P.B. (2004) Travel as transition: Identity and place. Annals of Tourism Research 31 (1), 217. (83) Idriess, I. (1951) Across the Nullarbor: A Modern Argosy. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, pp. 4, 244. (84) Rees, C. and Rees, L. (1953) Spinifex Walkabout: Hitch-hiking in Remote North Australia. Sydney: Australasian Publishing Company in association with George G. Harrap, p. 282. (85) Turner, Round-Australia journal, p. 273. (86) Palmer, S.C. ‘Diary of a Round-Australia Journey 14 May–26 June 1965’, ML Doc 2581, p. 50. (87) Royalauto Journal, March 1968, p. 7. (88) Granny on tour again! Australian Women’s Weekly, 11 March 1970, p. 75.

7 What Goes on Tour… .: Communities and Rituals of the Road

As father and son Charlie & Boots (2009) set off in their Holden Kingswood to drive over 3000 km from rural Victoria to Cape York, Boots recites limericks, recalled from childhood holiday road trips, when his dad made up silly rhymes and games to help relieve the boredom on long drives. The film captures many other quintessential features of the Australian road trip: bacon and egg breakfasts placed on trays outside motel rooms; Boots’ impulse buy of ‘family size’ punnets of fresh strawberries at a country roadside stall, which he is forced to eat all at once to avoid surrendering them at the state border quarantine station; and the lure of roadside attractions such as the Holden Museum in Echuca, the ‘Giant Koala’ and ‘Big Golden Guitar’. Forced to spend hours together in the car, away from their familiar surroundings and routines, Charlie and Boots form a closer bond during their time on the road, and eventually heal their broken relationship. The idea of the road as a distinct space, with its own set of behaviours, rituals, unwritten laws and conventions, and sense of community, recurs in representations of Australian road travel, from the days of swagmen and sundowners to grey nomads, bikers and truckies. This chapter explores how communities and rituals of the road – including forms of hospitality and entertainment – developed and changed over a century. Waltzing Matilda

Swagmen and sundowners represented an early community of the road and much of their characterisation derives from their particular relationship to the road, or the ‘wallaby track’ as they called it. The swagmen created their own language and terminology to describe their way of life: ‘waltzing matilda’, ‘humping bluey’, ‘carrying the curse’, ‘pushing the knot’, ‘skating’ or just ‘swagging’.1 Henry Lawson added ‘humping your drum’, ‘jabbing trotters’ and ‘tea-and-sugar burglaring’, but resolved that most itinerant shearers ‘called themselves trav’lers, and say simply “on the track,” or “carrying swag”’. 2 165

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‘Duke’ Tritton commented on the particular mateship among his fellow travellers, who shared what little they had among themselves. As discussed in Chapter 6, hardship, misfortune or tragedy sometimes drove swagmen onto the road. Tritton also stressed that a code existed among the swagmen: ‘A strict rule of the track is never to probe into any man’s past.’3 Historian Richard Waterhouse identifies a ‘cult of Bush hospitality’, which originated in the 19th century throughout rural Australia. Due to the lack of inns, travellers and itinerant workers expected to be accommodated and fed at stations along the way. Squatters often provided huts on their properties and supplied rations of tea, sugar, flour, bread and meat to swagmen and sundowners, both to secure a labour supply and to guard against retaliatory theft or destruction. By the 1890s, the once taken-for-granted rural hospitality began to wear thin due to the financial strain of drought and depression, and as city-dwellers competed with traditional swagmen for scarce work. The bitter shearers’ strikes also soured relations between pastoralists and workers.4 Nevertheless, the ‘cult of hospitality’ established a tradition which extended, to some degree, into the 20th century, as motorists took to the road. Community and Camaraderie on the Road

Throughout Jerome Murif’s transcontinental cycling tour from Adelaide to Darwin in 1897, he was indebted to the help and hospitality offered by those he encountered along the ‘road’. At Beltana, a fellow ‘wheelman’ gave him advice on an excellent stretch of road up to Hergott Springs, and accompanied him a few miles along the track. That evening, he enjoyed a meal at a railway workmen’s cottage. Following the path of the Overland Telegraph Line, Murif often obtained food and accommodation, as well as directions and advice on the best route, from workers at the many telegraph repeater stations. On another occasion, he followed fresh horse tracks to where two drovers and their Aboriginal assistants were camped. They offered hospitality immediately. Murif apologised for his ravenous appetite, and explained that he had eaten nothing for three days. His narrative records: ‘But there is no need to apologise on the Overland.’5 Murif clearly saw ‘the Overland’ as a space set apart, physically and imaginatively, where normal social conventions were suspended in favour of the special understanding that existed among those who travelled this remote route. Cultural anthropologist Victor Turner used the term ‘communitas’ to describe the sense of solidarity and community that can develop among a diverse group of individuals due to the shared feelings and experiences, and the inversion of social norms and behaviours, as they occupy unfamiliar spatial and temporal zones while travelling.6 While the phenomenon is observed in various groups of travellers, it is a theme which recurs in road

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narratives across the century. For road travellers, a sense of ‘community’ is defi ned by the space of the road itself, and their mode of transport. When William Saunderson and a party of male friends embarked on their ‘off the beaten track’ tour, walking and horse riding in the Kosciusko region in the summer of 1924–1925, they arrived and left by car separately, but their tour together was clearly distinguished as a special time and place that bonded the group, reflecting the ethos that ‘what goes on tour, stays on tour’. Saunderson wrote a daily bulletin, entitled ‘The Open Road or Dingo Track’, as a light-hearted record of some of the ‘happenings on the track’ to be shared among the party. Every member of the group had a nickname and the bulletin included poems and in-jokes satirising the various participants’ habits. While Saunderson’s was not a conventional road trip, his sense of ‘a spirit of brotherhood and co-operation’ on ‘the track’ is one that resonated with many road travellers.7 Promoters of caravanning in the 1930s wrote of the particular sociability among fellow caravanners, who did not ‘stand on ceremony or the usual conventions’ and were ‘recruited from nature-loving folk, delighting in freedom’. The Australian Motorist declared: ‘Caravanning has a freemasonry of its own; it fi res us with a kindred spirit.’8 Before overlanding became commonplace, there was a sense of a special bond between motorists, particularly on long difficult routes such as the Nullarbor crossing. Ion Idriess, who was travelling in the 1940s, mentioned becoming a member of Guerneys’ ‘Overlanders’ Club’. Any vehicle that crossed the Nullarbor by road could become a member by displaying a sticker on their windscreen, provided by the Guerney family of Eucla Station.9 Many travellers wrote of the ‘camaraderie of the road’, whereby people would stop to chat with fellow motorists while having a break, sharing a ‘cuppa’ and passing on intelligence about the road conditions or offering advice as to the best route and recommendations for good places to eat or stay. There was also the ‘unwritten law of the road’, under which it was commonplace to stop when another motorist was stopped in case they were in trouble or needed assistance. When Edith Crake and her family crossed the Nullarbor in the 1950s, they became well known to other motorists making the crossing. One car would alert others to look out for a family in an Austin A40 Countryman to make sure they were safe. Crake was amazed by the ‘free honest friendship’ among travellers, and mused: ‘Pity it isn’t more so in the normal existence of everyday … Guess we’re all too busy back there to care.’10 The fellowship of the road existed beyond ‘normal’ space and time. There was a nostalgic element, too, in behaviour which evoked a past era and a way of life that was disappearing. Keith Willey remarked that on the Stuart Highway, even in the 1960s, ‘you discover the mateship of the road, which is like a breath of the old bush itself’.11

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Such camaraderie continued in the later 20th century, although, as more and more travellers were on the road, the habits were not as universal. Huldah Turner, however, made frequent references to the sense of community among those they met at caravan parks around the country in the early 1970s: We’ll not be alone on our travels – today I thought how like ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ camaraderie was this fellowship of the road, though, of course, the reason for all this journeying is far different from the reason of those sorry times.12

It was common for those travelling around Australia to meet up with the same people at various points, as Turner again noted: All along the way we are seeing people on the road, or encountering them again in Parks, having met them previously somewhere along the road to or from the West. There should be two or three from this Park heading for the Ord and Kununurra tomorrow. There’s something rather special about this camaraderie of the road – it gives a warm feeling of kinship.13

Turner and her husband, Joe, were retirees, early representatives of the grey nomads who emerged more prominently in the 1990s. ‘Hello-Goodbye’: The Ritual of the (Country) Wave

A well-known ritual of the road was the practice of waving to fellow motorists, particularly when driving in remote areas. As the volume of traffic increased, or as they neared ‘civilisation’, many observed that this signal of camaraderie disappeared. Huldah Turner expressed well the meaning of the friendly wave along the road and the disappointment when it was no longer given: We are a little sad that the friendly road sign is becoming more and more a forgotten courtesy. Ever since we left the beaten track in Brisbane, the code of the road seems to dictate a friendly wave – since we arrived in Ceduna, this has cut out … the fellowship of the traveller-on-the-road is over. It was a most heart-warming feeling to know that there behind another wheel was someone like yourself, who understood what you were about.14

As Sidney Palmer and his family approached the end of their road trip around Australia in 1965, he commented in his diary: We had noticed over the last 100 miles how the motorists were now too pre-occupied to wave. … Even in Roma, the easy-going country atmosphere had started to go and makes us dread the return to what most people regard as normalcy.15

The wave, or lack thereof, was another signal that travellers were within or outside the zone of the ‘real’ Australia beyond the cities and large urban centres.

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Sean Condon strongly resented the lack of reciprocation shown by many drivers towards the raised hand of friendship as they travelled the outback in the mid-1990s: Out here, you really have to wave at oncoming cars. It’s good manners and country-driving etiquette. We are good at it, lifting a whole hand (usually the right) and often smiling at our fellow travellers in quite a charming, if self-consciously boyish, way. But sometimes the oncomers don’t wave back, or they merely cock their little fi nger as it sits on the steering wheel, and that just doesn’t qualify. … Nobody’s asking anybody to become pen-pals or anything – just a simple flick of the hand. That’s all. Hello-Goodbye in a plain, painless gesture. It’s really not too much to ask.16

Condon’s experience may reflect a general weakening and increasing fragmentation of the ‘community of the road’ by the late 20th century. Sub-communities of the Road

Divisions between travellers have long existed, based on class or motivations for journeys – from swagmen versus sundowners; caravanners and motor gypsies versus tramps and hoboes; to motorists versus motorcyclists or truck drivers. Towards the later 20th century, however, the communities of the road became increasingly fragmented. As the road trip became another form of mass tourism, groups such as grey nomads, backpackers, four-wheel-drivers, bikers and truckies emerged as sub-communities of the road, each representing a niche market for advertisers and tourism promoters, and each seeking differentiation from other travellers in the search for a more authentic experience on the road. Bikers

Since the motorcycle’s fi rst appearance in the early 20th century, its riders were distinguished from other motorists. The motorcycle was described in 1909 as ‘the poor man’s motor’ and it was often implied that motorcyclists came from the lower classes. The pastime was also associated with an antisocial hooligan element. An English commentator, quoted in the Australian Motorist in April 1909, stated that: While looking forward to every possible encouragement for the motor cyclist, it must not be forgotten that he is an individual very low down in the esteem of the community generally, and is answerable for much of the unstinted abuse which is showered upon the whole motoring fraternity.

Motorcycle ‘hooligans’ were accused of shattering the peace by making their machines as noisy as possible, riding with open exhaust, speeding, recklessly endangering pedestrians and other road users, and general ‘rowdiness’ and ‘rough’ behaviour.17

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Motorcycling became more popular immediately after WWII. After reaching a peak in 1950, sales declined sharply until a revival in the late 1960s, culminating in another peak in the mid-1970s when sales of registered bikes in Australia neared 100,000 annually.18 As noted in Chapter 6, motorcycling became even more strongly associated with a rebellious, anti-establishment attitude in this period. Bikers included WWII and Vietnam War veterans, who had ridden bikes during the war and often found the transition back into civilian life diffi cult.19 Paradoxically, the individualist ethos of the motorcycle rider and the desire to escape the mainstream majority led to the development of a sub-community or ‘brotherhood of the road’. Motorcyclists often greeted each other on the road with a clenched fi st symbolising solidarity among the ‘brotherhood’. 20 As motorcycling became more popular in the 1970s, Japanese manufacturers introduced mass-produced machines onto the market, which led to divisions among bikers based on the type of motorcycles they rode. Harley-Davidson traditionalists, for example, looked with contempt upon those who rode less ‘culturally correct’ brands, or those who lacked the authenticity of true enthusiasts, but simply wanted to buy into the motorcycling subculture via the clothing and other peripheral merchandise that was becoming widely available. The emergence of outlaw motorcycle gangs, or ‘one-percenters’, in the 1960s and 1970s took rebellion and escape from conformity to another level, and further differentiated this group from the majority of law-abiding motorcyclists. 21 Truckies

Truck drivers formed another sub-community of the road. As trucks became more commonly used for transporting interstate freight after WWII, they aroused fascination, and sometimes fear, among other road travellers. An article in the Australian Motorist in November 1949 observed, under a subheading, ‘The spirit of the road’: There exists among drivers a camaraderie akin to that experienced in service life. Their favourite pastime is to ‘swap notes’ about anything from fan belts to brake drums. Every driver considers his vehicle the best, but is always willing to learn about new trucks, routes and loads. Meeting places are cafes or hotels in which drivers have a quick ‘bite’ before continuing their journey. 22

By the 1960s roadhouses and truck stops catered for truckers, with dining areas segregated from the rest of the travelling public, where drivers shared meals, stories and news of the road among their own community. The truck driver’s image carried an element of mystique akin to that of drovers in earlier times because of the truckers’ nomadic lifestyle, free from conventional ties to home and work routines. Yet truckers were also

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viewed with suspicion by other motorists. They gained a reputation as a group associated with reckless behaviour on the roads in a similar way to bikers, and this also reflected class divisions between the usually workingclass truck drivers and middle-class motorists. 23 In the late 1960s several articles in the Australian Motorist and Walkabout discussed the negative perception of truckers, who were blamed most often for the rising road toll, accidents and damage to the roads. 24 Huge trucks – and road trains in particular, which appeared in Northern Australia in the late 1940s to transport livestock – were intimidating to ordinary motorists, taking up more space, towering over the road and forcing all other vehicles off the road to let them pass. This often led to resentment and confl ict over control and dominance of the road. Huldah Turner adopted a respectful and cautious approach to road trains: The road trains are everywhere most of them trailing four to five trucks – great long things, they are, and all road-users treat them with infi nite respect. They do not leave the bitumen, and as they are very wide, it means that we (and every other vehicle on the road) do. 25

In both America and Australia, from the 1970s, there was a flourishing fascination with trucking as a subculture, influenced by country and western music and films glamorising the lifestyle and its associations with rebellion and recklessness. 26 The popular song ‘Convoy’ (1976) by C.W. McCall inspired a fi lm of the same name, released in 1978. These and other such representations revealed to the general public aspects of the trucking culture with its own rules, conventions and even language, and helped to confi rm truck drivers as a unique sub-community of the road. This was furthered by the publication of dedicated periodicals such as the Australian magazine, Truckin’ Life, which began in 1976 and claimed to be ‘the voice of the Australian Truckie’. 27 Grey nomads

One of the fastest growing sub-communities of the road in recent years are the so-called ‘grey nomads’. While they have not been defi ned officially, this group is generally described as ‘retired or semi-retired individuals, over 50 years old, who tour within Australia for a minimum of three months in caravans, campervans, motor-homes and the like’. 28 Although they were identified as a niche market in the 1990s, they were on the road earlier than this, as exemplified by the Turners, who travelled around Australia in their campervan for over six months in 1972. An article in the NRMA’s Open Road magazine in December 1985 noted that the market for pop-up caravans had grown substantially in the few preceding years, appealing particularly to those who were newly retired and wanted to tour Australia.29 A National Visitors Survey of caravanning and

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camping in 2000 reported that retired Australians take 200,000 caravanning trips of six weeks or longer annually, with an estimated 70,000– 80,000 caravans touring the country at any one time. 30 A survey of over 400 grey nomads by Onyx and Leonard, published in 2005, found that the majority were married couples of Anglo-Australian background. Freed from the constraints of work and children, fi nancially stable, healthy and active, they were taking the opportunity to fulfi l a dream of travelling around Australia. Their motivations for travel included a desire for adventure, exploring new places and meeting new people. Learning more about the culture, history and geography of their own country was also important. Most were vehemently opposed to staying in any kind of organised resort, preferring a mixture of bush camping and caravan parks, relishing the freedom to move at their own pace. 31 The survey revealed a fairly strong sense of community among grey nomads themselves. One of the most valued aspects of their travels was the network of friendships they formed, many of which were long-lasting. In interviews, many mentioned that ‘it is compulsory to wave to all oncoming caravans/motor-homes’. 32 Word of mouth remained the most important source of information about the best places to stay. Today, with mobile phones and internet access, grey nomads can communicate while travelling, even when they do not necessarily meet in the same campsites. Yet there is evidence of divisions appearing within this community too. A newspaper article in 2013 reported that self-titled ‘geriatric gypsies’ distinguished themselves from other grey nomads. John and Elaine Tickner saw themselves as the ‘real adventurers’ because they truly ‘go bush’, while many ‘don’t get off-road’. It seems that time spent travelling also contributes to status among grey nomads. Tickner explained that when they started nine years earlier they would have called themselves ‘grey nomads’, but after circling Australia twice, and criss-crossing it dozens of times for up to 11 months, they consider themselves part of a more elite ‘splinter group’. 33 Hospitality: Eating and Sleeping on the Road

When motorists fi rst began to venture into outback and regional Australia, they often encountered the fabled hospitality of the bush, a legacy of the days of swagmen and sundowners, where station owners welcomed weary travellers with food and lodging. At Nicholson Station, a large cattle run near the Northern Territory and Western Australian Border, the manager’s wife insisted on cooking a meal for William Hatfield and his party as they drove through the region in the 1930s. Hatfield wrote: ‘Those people on the back-tracks are like that. A traveller must eat, or they would never rest easy in their minds after he had passed.’34 By the 1940s, as motor tourists in outback regions became more common and less of a novelty, they began to wear out their welcome. An

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article in Walkabout in March 1940 warned that the people of the Nullarbor were becoming wary of travellers, who came through in ‘all sorts of mechanical monstrosities’ and expected to be rescued, and then hosted, if their car broke down. It could take six weeks for spare parts to arrive, and the visitors rarely made good the cost of their accommodation and meals. Such behaviour forced the usually hospitable locals to be ‘hard as nails to everybody’. 35 When Douglas Lockwood wrote Up the Track in the 1960s, he also cautioned potential tourists that the traditional ‘northern hospitality’ was founded in the ‘horse-and-buggy era’ when visitors were infrequent. Motorists should not think of the privately owned stations and homesteads along the Stuart Highway as ‘tourist resorts’ and expect to just ‘drop in’ and be ‘overwhelmed with hospitality’. By that time, hundreds of visitors were passing through each year. 36 From camping to glamping

Before the development of formal camping grounds, caravan parks and motels, most motor tourists simply camped wherever they chose, pulling off the road whenever they felt tired or hungry or if a picturesque location caught their eye. Many relished the novelty and freedom of sleeping and cooking outdoors, imagining themselves as swaggies or bushmen. When Muriel Dorney and her husband, Jack, embarked on their ‘adventurous honeymoon’ in the 1920s, they modified their American Overland Whippet, adding a hinged ‘deck’ between the front and rear seats to make a storage space which could also be converted into a bed. Mostly, however, they intended to camp outdoors. Their routine was to stop for tea before dark, and then drive on until they were too tired to go further. Muriel commented that Jack ‘has the true bushman’s love for a cup of tea’. 37 The excitement they felt at their first campsite waned somewhat as their journey progressed, and they were besieged by fl ies and mosquitoes. Upon reaching Port Augusta, Dorney remarked, with some relief, that from there until they reached home in Brisbane, they would not have to camp out, as hotels would be found at more frequent intervals. 38 As Frank Dalby Davison and his party planned their road trip from Sydney to North Queensland in the 1930s, they dreamed of ‘camps under tall trees; of bird-song in the dawn; of morning bacon sizzling over a fire of fragrant gum sticks’. The reality was not always so inviting, as they soon discovered when heavy rain flooded their campsite at Tea Gardens on the Central Coast of NSW. The discomfort of a soggy evening meal was eased by the good company of neighbouring campers, who shared stories around the fire, while sheltering in a nearby shed. 39 For many, camping was not only a novelty but an economic necessity. Feeling hungry towards the end of their first day of travelling from Perth across the Nullarbor, Edith Crake and her family persuaded her husband to stop at a restaurant. While they thoroughly enjoyed their fi rst dinner of

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fried steak, onions, chips and tomatoes, it made a big hole in their budget. They determined that ‘from now on it was camp meals or none’. Crake thought camping life was ‘luxurious’, feeling secure in their ‘little world of canvas’, waking each morning to bushland noises and breathing in the ‘sweet, clean air’. Breakfast was the best time, as the whole day lay ahead, with no hurry, unlike the evenings, when they were tired and ‘racing against the setting sun’.40 Life on the road could involve temporary suspension of normal habits, or the reversal of traditionally gendered domestic roles. Crake remarked: ‘The unorthodox eating around the open fire led to a downfall in our table manners that took some concentrating upon on returning home again.’41 Huldah and Joe Turner travelled in a campervan equipped with cooking facilities, but the further they went, the more Joe embraced the outdoor life. Huldah wrote: ‘Joe is revelling in camp life – he insists on building fi res instead of using gas, billy-cans instead of saucepans; so I have retreated from the kitchen altogether.’42 In the 1930s, dedicated camping grounds began to emerge in coastal towns that had become popular tourist spots, such as Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula and in Queensland at Coolangatta, Surfers Paradise, Caloundra and Mooloolaba, on what is now the Sunshine Coast.43 The Great Ocean Road’s completion in the 1930s also coincided with the growth of caravanning. In late 1937 a company, Caravan Camping Parks of Australia Pty Ltd., trading as ‘Car-A-Van Camps’ and later ‘Karavan Kamp’, was formed to set up caravan park facilities at Lorne and Torquay as forerunners in a chain of camps to be established around Australia. Planned facilities included hot and cold water, a laundry, children’s playgrounds, electric lighting, a general store, recreation halls for dancing, a septic tank system, putting green and tennis court, bathing boxes and showers. Introducing an early version of ‘chain’ operations, which would eventually dominate the tourist landscape, the camps were to be uniform in appearance, equipment, facilities and service, all featuring ‘an artistic entrance arch … exactly alike in every case’.44 It is unclear whether or not Karavan Kamp realised its vision, as the name has disappeared without trace. Nevertheless, by the 1950s camping and caravan park facilities boomed and improved, offering almost all the comforts of home. Caravans and motor-homes also became more comfortable over the years, and by the 1980s even some smaller models featured en-suite toilets, showers and microwave ovens.45 The number of camping and caravan sites in Australia peaked in 1993 at over 288,000.46 In recent years, ‘glamping’ or luxury camping has redefi ned the camping holiday, offering the appeal of being close to nature without the effort of pitching tents or sacrificing creature comforts. Popular in coastal regions and some national parks, sites are equipped with existing ‘tents’ on platforms above ground level, with proper beds, en-suite bathrooms, kitchen appliances and in-house entertainment options.47

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Hotels, motels and roadhouses

Formal facilities for road travellers originated in the early 19th century, as bush inns were established along routes traversed by horse and bullock-teams, to provide food, water and a place to rest after a day’s travel. Later, more substantial hostelries serviced coach traffic, while the advent of the railways was a catalyst for hotel development. Guesthouses also emerged in the 1880s in popular tourist spots near the coast or in the mountains. They offered a more homely environment than hotels and did not serve alcohol. Guesthouses were aimed at a market between the country pub and grand hotel, and whole families could stay for a week or longer.48 Infrastructure failed to keep pace with the growth of motor touring after WWII, especially in areas where tourism was less well established. In the 1940s, Ion Idriess described the ‘wretched feeling’ of arriving in a township after seven o’clock in the evening after a long, hard day’s drive. There would be no chance of a meal as any restaurant would likely be closed, and little hope of a bed unless one had booked well in advance.49 Even if hotel accommodation was available, the experience was not always pleasant. Proprietors could be tyrannical, refusing to serve guests if they were not on time for meals, and insisting on strict dress codes, including jackets and ties for men, no matter how hot the weather. Conditions remained primitive even into the 1960s, with iron beds, newspaper lining wardrobes, dim lighting, no heating or cooling, and only a shared bathroom down the corridor. 50 Motels revolutionised road-trip accommodation. Hotels and guesthouses – the latter being in decline by the 1950s – could not compete with the comfort, convenience and amenities that the new American-style motels offered. Motels were also cheaper than hotels, usually charging by the room rather than per head. Apart from en-suite bathrooms, motels provided electric kettles and toasters, at least, giving guests more independence. Customers could park their cars outside their rooms, allowing luggage to be loaded and unloaded easily. Most had good restaurants and also served breakfast delivered to the room, if desired. 51 Motels spread along major highways and by 1964 only the most remote routes and towns were without one. The NRMA’s Open Road magazine of January 1960 reported on the success of the new motel industry. Maurice Harkins, chairman of the Tourist Development Authority in Victoria, described the advent of the motel as ‘the biggest thing that had happened to the Australian travel industry since the war’. A representative of the Australian Automobile Association said that ‘motels had brought relief to the long-suffering travelling public’. Research showed that, by 1960, 70% of travellers preferred motels. While the motel concept may have originated in America, the Motel Federation of Australia (MFA) encouraged the use of ‘typical’ Australian names or local themes such as

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The Jolly Swagman at Taree, the Jacaranda Motel at North Grafton, the Cherry Blossom Motel at Young or the Tuckerbox at Gundagai, recalling the song and poem about the bullocky’s dog, who sat on said tuckerbox, five miles from the town. 52 From the 1950s onwards, roadhouses became a feature of the Australian roadside beyond established tourist routes (Figure 7.1). Roadhouses were similar to American truck stops, and initially catered mainly for long-distance truck drivers. They sold petrol, served meals, and some offered accommodation – usually a simple room and communal showers and toilets, where drivers could rest and refresh, in the days before trucks incorporated sleeper cabins. As more remote regions in northern, western and Central Australia opened up to tourism in the 1960s and 1970s, roadhouses also met the needs of motor tourists. On the Stuart Highway, many of the former telegraph repeater stations became roadhouses. They were also found at regular intervals on the Eyre Highway across the Nullarbor, as well as the Hume Highway and other major interstate transport routes. Many added motel accommodation and camping grounds. Most had a general store selling milk, ice creams, sweets, tinned food and other supplies for travellers. They were usually licensed to serve alcohol, and signs for ‘cold beer’ heralded the approaching oasis, and also warned that this would be the ‘last petrol’ for perhaps hundreds of kilometres. 53 Early roadhouses were family-run businesses, offering home-cooked meals and personal service. Before 24-hour operations and self-service petrol stations, customers who arrived after hours rang a bell to summon the proprietor to come out and fill the car with petrol. Many kept birds or

Figure 7.1 The Four Kings Roadhouse at Anglesea, Victoria Source: State Library of Victoria. Image H32492/7780.

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animals as an attraction to keep children entertained while their parents bought fuel and attended to the car. By the 1970s, most roadhouses were owned by or affi liated with the big oil companies. Some of the chains issued ‘passports’ as an incentive to visit their outlets and collect stamps from the various locations across Australia. 54 Steak and eggs, mate!

Despite the dominance of the big oil chains in the later 20th century, some roadhouse complexes remained owned and operated by families and continued to serve traditional home-style cooking. Proprietors developed close relationships with their regular customers, especially the truck drivers, many of whom would use their radios to pre-order their meals as they approached so that their food would be ready when they arrived. At the roadhouse nicknamed ‘the Rover’s Return’ on the Hume Highway, drivers recall that the mixed grill, accompanied by chips and salad, was so large that it had to be served on two plates!55 Until recent years, eating on the road remained fairly unsophisticated, and menus have changed little since the 1930s in many outback regions. C.A.S. Mansbridge wrote of dining at the only restaurant in Wilcannia, in far-western NSW, while caravanning around Australia with his wife in 1939. The Greek proprietor informed them that ‘You can have anything you wish. There’s steak and eggs, steak and onions, steak and tomatoes, or steak and spuds’. 56 Postwar European migrants were often frustrated in their efforts to change Australian tastes. Douglas Lockwood introduced Oscar Shank, who was born in the Netherlands but ran the Junction Hotel on the Stuart Highway in the 1960s. He and his wife loved cooking exotic food, but their patrons did not appreciate Wiener schnitzel, goulash, ragout, borsch or soufflé. Shank lamented: ‘They want steak and eggs. Steak and eggs! More steak and eggs! For breakfast, dinner, and tea. Sometimes they want porridge but generally … just “Steak and eggs, mate”’. 57 Even in 1988, an article in the Canberra Times by journalist Tony Wright, who was travelling around Australia, was titled, ‘Forget the food, just remember the folks’. Wright commented that on the ‘long stretches of bitumen’ across northern and western Australia, ‘a food stop is a dreary business’. He noted that at the Timber Creek Wayside Inn in the Northern Territory, ‘you can have steak and eggs, sausages and eggs, bacon and eggs or tinned spaghetti on toast’. 58 As highways were rerouted and old sections bypassed by new freeways and expressways, many of the traditional roadhouses went out of business. In their place are the homogenised ‘services’ with their large, impersonal petrol stations and fast-food chains. More recently, however, many of these have started to offer healthier alternatives, including vegetarian options and gourmet coffee.

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Since the 1990s, gastronomy has become the focus of tourism in some parts of Australia, particularly in wine-growing regions such as the Hunter Valley in NSW, South Australia’s Barossa and Clare Valleys, Victoria’s Yarra Valley, and the Margaret River in Western Australia. Boutique accommodation options are also becoming more popular, with the emergence of bed and breakfast establishments and a revival of the guesthouse. Such properties cater to those seeking a more individual and personal experience. ‘Big Things’

Another unique feature of the Australian roadside, which could hardly be described as ‘sophisticated’, are the ubiquitous ‘big’ roadside attractions, which punctuate the landscape like gigantic exclamation marks (Figure 7.2). As mentioned in Chapter 4, the obsession began with the Big Banana at Coffs Harbour in 1964. With construction booming in the 1970s and 1980s, there are now almost 200 ‘big things’ in Australia. They celebrate many features of Australian life, including local produce and industry: two Big Pineapples, a Big Mango, Big Orange, Big Strawberry, Big Barramundi and Big Oyster. Animals, birds and insects include: the

Figure 7.2 Postcard of some of ‘Australia’s Big Things’, by ‘BrisbanePom’, 2009 Source: Wikimedia Commons.

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Giant Koala in Dadswell’s Bridge, Victoria; the Big Merino near Goulburn in NSW; Rockhampton’s six Big Bulls; the Big Penguin, which guards the town of Penguin in Tasmania; and the Big Mosquito, or ‘Ossie the Mossie’, at the Hexham Bowling Club. Folk heroes are represented by the Big Ned Kelly, Big Soldier, Big Miner, Big Captain Cook and, more recently, the Big Bogan, built in September 2015, who stands proudly near the town of Nyngan, NSW in his singlet, shorts and thongs, with his esky and fishing rod close at hand. 59 Inanimate objects also feature in the shape of a Big Stockwhip, Big Rocking Horse and Big Lawn Mower. The Big Joint at Nimbin in northern NSW is unique in being the only ‘big thing’ representing an illegal substance. The 10-metre long bamboo and canvas marijuana joint hangs from the ceiling of the HEMP (Help End Marijuana Prohibition) embassy in the town, which since the 1970s has been known as the ‘hippie capital’ of Australia. The Big Joint sometimes features in events, being transported atop a bus during the annual Mardi Grass hemp harvest festival.60 Built to attract the attention of passing motorists, almost all of the ‘big things’ incorporate a café or restaurant and souvenir shop selling merchandise featuring – sometimes imaginative – versions of their namesake. While they are often dismissed as ‘tacky’ and ‘kitsch’, ‘big things’ are intended to make a bold statement about local, regional and national identity, and are often a source of great pride among local communities. The Big Prawn at Ballina on the north coast of NSW, for example, pays tribute to the important local prawn industry. Built in 1989 beside the Pacific Highway, the prawn, with its seafood restaurant and tourist complex, marked the southern gateway to the town.61 That section of highway is now bypassed, and in 2009 the local council approved the prawn’s demolition. A community campaign overturned the decision, however, and in 2011 hardware chain Bunnings bought the site, including the prawn, and relocated it to their premises in West Ballina.62 ‘Big things’ are a tongue-in-cheek expression of Australian larrikinism and humour. As a form of low art they invert reality or expected norms by making common objects surreal and larger than life, with the aim of surprising, shocking and amusing passing motorists. In this, they reflect the idea of the road as a space where normal rules do not apply. As Stephen Stockwell points out, however, they also harbour deeper meanings. He suggests that Australia’s love of ‘big things’ may also reflect a fear of the ‘empty space at the heart of the continent’, again highlighting the contested nature of the land itself. Given that huge creatures, such as the Rainbow Serpent, figure significantly in Aboriginal creation myths, Stockwell wonders if perhaps ‘big things’ are another means by which white Australia seeks to write itself and its stories large upon the landscape.63 Cultural theorists view the experience of travel and tourism as occurring within a time and space in which normal behaviours and social

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conventions are temporarily suspended. Such ‘liminality’ often produces a sense of solidarity or community among travellers. This is particularly true for road travellers. Over time, narratives reveal that as travellers left their familiar surrounds, they formed new communities and engaged in certain mutually accepted behaviours or ‘unwritten codes of the road’. The friendly wave to fellow motorists on the highway, the communal spirit of the camp and caravan site at which intelligence is exchanged regarding the best places to stay, eat or visit, and the concern for the safety and wellbeing of fellow travellers chiefly occur far from urban centres, and are, lamentably, not a part of everyday life. Within that realm of the road, sub-communities formed, including bikers, truckies and grey nomads, all of whom derived a sense of identity and camaraderie from their particular mode of travelling the road, and in relation to other road travellers. By the late 20th and early 21st centuries, some of those subcommunities began to fragment as members sought to differentiate themselves from their counterparts and claim a more unique and authentic experience in the face of mass tourism and mass-produced culture. Eating, sleeping and entertainment while on the road also involves a suspension or reversal of usual space, diet, behaviour and, at times, gender roles. The multitude of ridiculously ‘big’ roadside attractions which dot the Australian landscape appropriately represent this distortion or inversion of normality. While Australia’s ‘big things’ may, on some level, be another means of stamping our identity and culture upon this vast and sometimes frightening land, for most tourists they represent the playfulness, humour and escapism so commonly associated with a road trip. Yet it is not always fun and games. The road also has a dark side. The following chapter explores the road as a space associated with dystopian visions of death, disaster and horror.

Notes – Chapter 7: What Goes on Tour… .: Communities and Rituals of the Road (1) (2)

(3) (4) (5)

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Walkabout, October 1965, p. 28. Lawson, H. (1924 [1907]) The Romance of the Swag. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, pp. 3, 6. Lawson explained that the term ‘bluey’ referred to the blue blankets carried by the swagmen. Tritton, D. (1960) Once a jolly swagman. Walkabout, December, pp. 22, 24. Waterhouse, R. (2005) The Vision Splendid: A Social and Cultural History of Rural Australia. Fremantle, WA: Curtin University Books, pp. 103–104, 118. Murif, J.J. (1897) From Ocean to Ocean, across a Continent on a Bicycle, an Account of a Solitary Ride from Adelaide to Port Darwin. Melbourne: George Robertson, pp. 24, 118. Matthews, A. (2008) Backpacking as a contemporary rite of passage: Victor Turner and youth travel practices. In G. St John (ed.) Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 185–186. Saunderson, W., The open road or dingo track, pp. 8–9. In W. Saunderson, ‘Papers on Mount Kosciusko Expedition 1925’, NLA, MS 5868. A colleague told me about

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(8) (9) (10) (11) (12) (13) (14) (15) (16) (17) (18)

(19)

(20)

(21)

(22) (23) (24) (25) (26) (27) (28) (29) (30)

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a group of young men he knew who, in recent years, named their road trip ‘Adhesion’. At the end of the tour, they each got a tattoo of the word. The name, and the gesture, affi rmed their sense of ‘brotherhood’ and solidarity, and the desire for a permanent and indelible reminder of that significant and shared experience. Personal communication, Dr Sid French, 2008. Australian Motorist, July 1938, pp. 664–665. Idriess, I. (1951) Across the Nullarbor: A Modern Argosy. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, p. 86. Crake, E.M. (c.1998) The Highway of Haunting Hilarity. Perth: The author, pp. 29, 35. Willey, K. (1964) Up the Bitumen. Walkabout, March, p. 15. Turner, H.M. ‘A Round-Australia Journal: 30 Weeks and 25,000 Miles in 1972’. In H. Turner Papers, 1940–2003, ML MSS 7520, p. 14. Turner, Round-Australia journal, p. 111. Turner, Round-Australia journal, pp. 193–194. Palmer, S.C., ‘Diary of a Round-Australia Journey 14 May–26 June 1965’, ML Doc 2581, p. 49. Condon, S. (1996) Sean & David’s Long Drive. Melbourne: Lonely Planet, p. 65. Australian Motorist, April 1909, p. 431; Australian Motorist, August 1910, p. 912. The Royal Automobile Club of Victoria (RACV) Royalauto Journal reported that at a peak in 1950, just over 27,000 new motorcycles were registered, while at a low in 1963 there were only 5272. From 1966, however, sales rose by 50% each year and at December 1968 there were nearly 23,000 new registrations. Royalauto Journal, June 1969, p. 11; Scaysbrook, J. (2005) Riding Through Time – a Century of Australian Motorcycling. Bondi Junction, NSW: Focus, p. 7. Dulaney, W.L. (2005) A brief history of ‘outlaw’ motorcycle clubs. International Journal of Motorcycle Studies, November. See http://ijms.nova.edu/November2005/ IJMS_Artcl.Dulaney.html (accessed 4 December 2009). Goldstein, J. (2006) What can Marx and Hegel tell us about social divisions among bikers? In B.E. Rollin et al. (eds) Harley-Davidson and Philosophy: Full Throttle Aristotle. Chicago, IL: Open Court, pp. 53–54. Goldstein, Marx and Hegel, pp. 48, 53–54. It is notable that the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club was founded by returned WWII veterans in California in 1948. They are now an ‘outlaw’ gang, part of the ‘one-percenters’, who set themselves apart from mainstream bikers and were conspicuously contemptuous of the values of the majority of American society. Members tended to be marginalised and working class. See Pratt, A.R. (2006) Motorcycling, nihilism, and the price of cool. In Rollin et al. (eds) Harley-Davidson and Philosophy, pp. 77, 80, 81. Australian Motorist, November 1949, p. 128. Jakle, J.A. and Sculle, K.A. (2008) Motoring: The Highway Experience in America. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, p. 181. Barton, D. (1967) Let’s go trucking. Walkabout, May, p. 33. Turner, Round-Australia journal, p. 97. Jakle and Sculle, Motoring, pp. 180–181. Truckin’ Life, September–October 1976. Onyx, J. and Leonard, R. (2005) Australian grey nomads and American snowbirds: Similarities and differences. Journal of Tourism Studies 16 (1), 61. Open Road, December 1985, p. 3. Brayley, N. and Obst, P.L. (2010) The Australian grey nomads – are they who we think they are? Enhancing formative research through the quantitative assessment of psychological constructs. Health Promotion Journal of Australia 21 (2), 139. Onyx and Leonard, Australian grey nomads, pp. 61, 66. Onyx and Leonard, Australian grey nomads, p. 66. Hagon, T. (2013) ‘Geriatric gypsies’ leave grey nomads in their wake. Sydney Morning Herald, 29 June.

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(34) Hatfield, W. (1936) Australia through the Windscreen. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, p. 198. (35) Nullarbor Notes (1940) Walkabout, March, p. 3. (36) Lockwood, D. (1964) Up the Track. Adelaide: Rigby, n.p. (37) Dorney, M. (1928) An Adventurous Honeymoon: The First Motor Honeymoon Around Australia. Brisbane: Read Press, p. 13. (38) Dorney, Adventurous Honeymoon, p. 203. (39) Davison, F.D. and Nicholls, B. (1935) Blue Coast Caravan. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, pp. 1, 25. (40) Crake, Highway of Haunting Hilarity, pp. 16–18. (41) Crake, Highway of Haunting Hilarity, p. 18. (42) Turner, Round-Australia journal, pp. 36–37. (43) Davidson, J. and Spearritt, P. (2000) Holiday Business: Tourism in Australia since 1870. Carlton South, Vic: Melbourne University Press, p. 174. (44) Australian Motorist, October 1937, p. 109; Australian Motorist, February 1938, p. 354; The Mail, 18 September 1937, p. 6. (45) Open Road, December–January 1985, p. 6. (46) Davidson and Spearritt, Holiday Business, pp. 174, 178. (47) Destination NSW website at http://www.visitnsw.com/things-to-do/caravan-andcamping/plan-your-trip/glamping (accessed 30 March 2017). (48) Davidson and Spearritt, Holiday Business, pp. 98–100, 105–106. (49) Idriess, Across the Nullarbor, p. 12. (50) Davidson and Spearritt, Holiday Business, p. 104. (51) Davidson and Spearritt, Holiday Business, pp. 180–184. (52) Open Road, January 1960, p. 21. (53) History of roadhouses in Australia. ABC 70.2 Radio, Overnights, 13 May 2015. See  http://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/overnights/history-of-roadhouses-inaustralia/7725586 (accessed 24 March 2017); Turner, Round-Australia journal, pp. 95, 187. (54) History of roadhouses in Australia. (55) History of roadhouses in Australia. (56) Mansbridge, Capt. C.A.S (1939) Caravanning across Australia. Walkabout, September, p. 35. (57) Lockwood, Up the Track, p. 135. (58) Wright, T. (1988) Forget the food, just remember the folks. Canberra Times, 25 June, p. 3. (59) A ‘bogan’ is a term for a working-class, unsophisticated Australian. It has similar connotations to ‘yokel’ or ‘chav’. An ‘esky’ is a portable cooler box, usually used for carrying drinks. (60) Clark, D. (2004) Big Things: Australia’s Amazing Roadside Attractions. Camberwell, Vic: Penguin, pp. vi–x, 110. (61) Clark, Big Things, pp. 131–132. (62) Ballina Shire Advocate, 12 September 2012. See https://www.ballinaadvocate.com. au/news/big-prawn-has-been-moved/1531067/ (accessed 4 April 2017). (63) Stockwell, S. (2004) Introductory essay. Big things: Low art and the land. In Clark, Big Things, pp. viii–xi.

8 Blood on the Bitumen: The Dark Side of the Road

Peter Weir’s film, The Cars that Ate Paris (1974), opens with a couple setting off for a country drive in a convertible sports car. As they speed along curved roads, and crest hills through a picturesque pastoral landscape, we seem to be witnessing a typical idyllic Australian road trip. But the dream quickly turns to nightmare as the car runs off the road and overturns down an embankment. Similar scenes recur throughout the fi lm which continually juxtaposes peaceful rustic countryside with terrible car ‘accidents’, caused by the sinister residents of Paris, an isolated rural community that survives by living off the trade in car parts, smash repairs and dead victims’ belongings. The fi lm plays on the grotesque scenario that has troubled our psyche since the fi rst motor vehicles appeared – the car as freedom-machine turned killer. Across the 20th century, images of the Australian road shifted from romantic bush tracks to badlands, marked by ‘horror stretches’ and ‘black spots’, and preyed-upon by psychopaths and serial killers. How did we get there? This vision is at least partly inspired by the spectre of road trauma and fatalities which accompanied the rise of car ownership, as well as high-profi le stories of murders and disappearances, particularly on outback highways. The seeds of this vision were sown much earlier, however. Imagery of the Australian bush and outback as a ‘badland’ can be traced to the colonial era. As roads spread across the continent together with the rapidly developing technology of the motor vehicle, creative responses expressed fears over technology’s increasing alienation from the natural environment as well as its destructive potential. Those fears are reflected in representations of the road – and its surrounds – in literature and film as an increasingly violent and chaotic space. The Joy Ride

While the first cars appeared on Australia’s roads in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they were slow to feature in literature and fi lm. One of the earliest representations of the car’s deadly potential is found in William Gay’s poem, ‘The Song’ (1911). It depicts a man in rags, ‘his heart 183

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o’ercome with woes’, standing beside the road. The image of the marginalised and destitute man is contrasted with the all-powerful car, as: Along that great High Road Came the World’s Triumphal Car, With loud and vaunting wheels Proclaimed itself afar.

The car, a symbol of unrelenting progress and power, is roaring past the man without a care, but he casts himself beneath its wheels, committing suicide. The car crushes his limbs but ‘heedless’ roars along, while its wealthy occupants are oblivious and self-absorbed, remarking ‘how beautiful’, and not casting a backward glance at the road, ‘where dead in rags he lay’.1 Banjo Paterson’s poem, ‘The Lay of the Motor Car’ (c.1917) combines humour with the grotesque, while also capturing the car’s sleek modernity. As the speeding car sets off gathering speed, wind whistles through the occupants’ whiskers and teeth, while the ‘granite-like grey of the road’ seems ‘to slide underneath’ it. The car makes the occupants feel invincible, while pedestrians scatter when they hear it approaching. ‘We outpace, we outlast, we outstrip!’, the motorists declare, as nothing ‘can compete with our swiftness sublime’, or the ease and grace with which they ‘annihilate chickens and time and policemen and space’. 2 C.J. Dennis’s ironically titled, ‘The Joy Ride’ (c.1918), begins with the narrator recalling the gruesome aftermath of a car accident, the horrific end to a ‘joy ride’ gone wrong: Ah, Gawd! It makes me sick to think Of what I ’eard an’ seen: Poor ’Arry like a wet rag flung Across the wrecked machine; An’ Rose ’er face all chiner-white Against the gory green.

He tells the story of how Harry, who drove a car for Dr Percy Gray, persuaded his friend, the narrator, and two ‘bonzer girls’ – barmaids Rose and Lena – to come for a ride to the country on a Sunday when the doctor was away. On the way home at night, in high spirits after a pleasant day and a few drinks, Lena urged Harry to drive faster. While trying to put his arm around Lena’s waist, Harry took his eyes off the road and a pedestrian walked out in front of the car. Lena tried to grab the wheel, but it was too late and they hit the man and crashed, killing Rose. The narrator laments: We never dreamed of death an’ ’ell When we set out that day. 3

‘Death and hell’ are images more recognisably associated with late 20thcentury representations of the Australian road; however, as the foregoing

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examples demonstrate, the fears and anxieties that sowed the seeds for a darker vision of the road in the creative imagination existed long before that, although they became more pronounced as the century progressed. Road accidents began to spark more widespread public concern from the 1920s onwards, as cars became more common. In Melbourne, between 1922 and 1930, the road toll rose dramatically from 65 to 307 people.4 Records of road crash deaths in Australia began in 1925, when 700 people died. With some fluctuations, figures generally increased, corresponding with the rise in motor vehicle ownership. The toll climbed to over 1000 by 1930, spiking again in the late 1930s. 5 The impact on the public imagination is captured in a drawing by Percy Leason, which was published in the Bulletin in 1927 (Figure 8.1). Entitled ‘The Cave Man’, it depicts a demonic driver tearing through the streets as bystanders look on in horror, while others race to the aid of a pedestrian who has been struck. Riding alongside the car is a monstrous figure representing death, looking back at his trail of destruction.6

Figure 8.1 ‘The Cave Man’ by Percy Leason (Reproduced courtesy of Max Leason)

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The Australian Motorist ran features on road safety, but downplayed fears associated with vehicles themselves, emphasising that accidents were caused by stupidity and were avoidable if people took care and behaved responsibly. The magazine, which obviously aimed to promote motoring, was keen to divert responsibility away from motorists alone. It blamed pedestrians and lack of government spending on safety measures such as signs warning of road conditions, and posts to prevent vehicles from going over embankments.7 The growing alarm at road deaths is evidenced by the significant increase in headline space devoted to accidents and fatalities in the 1930s – something the Australian Motorist dismissed as ‘accident hysteria’. 8 Nevertheless, the June 1935 issue reproduced an article from the American Reader’s Digest, entitled ‘Avoiding Death on the Highway’. It reported that 36,000 people were killed on America’s roads in 1934 and a total of almost 300,000 fatalities occurred over the preceding 10 years, exceeding the death toll from all wars, including the Civil War. The article described the car as the ‘greatest man-made killer we have ever known’.9 Even the normally cheerful Burma Shave verses took a darker turn in the 1930s in the interests of promoting road safety. For example: ‘When you drive/If caution ceases/You are apt/To rest in pieces’; and ‘Don’t pass cars/On curve or hill/If the cops/Don’t get you/Morticians will’.10 It was another article published in the American Reader’s Digest in August 1935, however, which had the most impact on public consciousness. ‘– And Sudden Death’ by J.C. Furnas gave a graphic and gruesome account of the ‘reality of blood and agony’ at accident scenes. It was one of the most reprinted articles in the magazine’s history and provoked an explosion of public interest and concern.11 In the years during and immediately following WWII, road safety campaigns intensified in America, Britain and Australia. The Australian Motorist reported in July 1949 that, while America had made some progress in reducing road fatalities, Australia was less successful. Despite the fact that traffic volume in America was about six times that of Australia, the death rate here, per 100 million miles, was double. Apart from blaming poor driving habits, lack of road sense, and impatience, the Motorist concluded that Australia needed a new era of road building, similar to that undertaken in America.12 While Australia’s postwar road building programme was nowhere near as extensive as America’s, as more bitumen crept across the continent from the mid-20th century onwards, and as traffic volumes grew, creative representations reveal increasing unease with the damaging impact of roads and motor vehicles on the natural environment. The Long Fuse Laid

Judith Wright’s poem, ‘Sanctuary’ (c.1955), introduces the image of a black bitumen road, which was slowly becoming more common throughout

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Australia by the mid- to late 1950s. The poem continually juxtaposes the modern highway with the natural world through which it ever more destructively encroaches. The opening lines contrast the road – which hurries on impatiently – with the static ‘giant original trees’ which surround it. Glossy and dark with the dew of nightfall, the blacktop road is bright and mirrorlike when illuminated by the headlights of an approaching car, which also reveals to the driver the ‘panic eyes’ of an animal about to become roadkill. It is a convincing evocation of night-time driving in the bush, when only the road ahead is visible in the headlights, and behind the car all is engulfed by darkness. Unlike ‘nowhere roads’, this road ‘knows where it is going’ and will carry all in its wake with a mindless determinism, against which nature and humanity are powerless. The ‘sanctuary’ indicated by the road sign, suggesting a place where wildlife and the natural environment are preserved, obviously no longer exists. The native animals have been flattened so thoroughly by passing traffic that their skins are ‘pinned to the road’, while the long-standing gnome-tree has been cut down to make way for the new highway.13 The ‘road’ and the ‘progress’ it represents are all that have meaning here. In the second stanza, the road is imagined as a ‘long fuse’ connecting the world’s cities. The imagery of the bomb fuse signals impending devastation, imbuing the road with menace and danger. The poem was originally published in the collection entitled Two Fires (1955), which was heavily influenced by the horrifying impact of the first atomic bombs detonated at the end of WWII and also reflects Wright’s strong environmental activism.14 The following stanza continues: Fuse, nerve, strand of a net, tense Bearer of messages, snap-tight violin string, Dangerous knife-edge laid across the dark.15

This image of the road evokes enormous tension and anxiety, and also the sense that the road network is part of a web that will entrap and ensnare rather than offer freedom. It recalls Henry Lawson’s ‘treacherous tracks that trap the stranger’.16 The road in ‘Sanctuary’ represents a very fine line between progress and chaos. The fi nal stanza presents another powerful juxtaposition between technology and nature, with the image of doves, electrocuted, hanging from a power line above the road: ‘Swung on that fatal voltage like a sign’.17 The poem concludes that, for the road, which has no time to stop for a sanctuary or to pray, ‘perhaps’ these doves ‘are a prayer’. The timidity of ‘perhaps’ contrasts with the confident, purposeful description of the road, reinforcing the relative powerlessness of the natural world against the relentless march of progress and technology in the postwar era. A similar theme informs Les Murray’s ‘The Burning Truck’ (c.1965), in which a truck catches fi re during wartime, but runs on relentlessly, terrorising the people of the town, ‘coming and coming … but it would not

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stop’. All the residents can do is stand by, watching and praying that it does not destroy their homes or themselves.18 The confl ict between nature and technology is also present in The Shiralee, when Buster is knocked down by a car and almost killed. The novel describes the moment when, after hearing a screech of tyres and a scream, Macauley fi nds Buster on the road: The car thirty yards away, a bulk of darkness in the darkling scrub, seemed to be slowing. … Then he heard the engine roar and the car shot away accelerating rapidly, disappearing in a whine of sound and a fade of red tail-lights.

The hit-and-run car is depicted as sinister and monstrous. Macauley describes it as ‘a heavy job, modern shape … It could have been anything from a Chev to a Plymouth’. This modern American automobile, and the powerful technology it represents, is contrasted with the frailty of a child walking the roads, who is much more closely aligned with the natural world. Macauley thinks of the difference as an unfair and cowardly fight, imagining the driver as ‘a cur that wrapped forty hundredweight of steel round himself before he boxed on, and boxed on with fragile flesh and bone’.19 The deadly confrontation between technology and nature is poignantly drawn during the kangaroo hunting sequence of Wake in Fright. As the men continue their killing spree, they feel invincible in their car, with their guns and alcohol-fuelled machismo. John Grant thinks, ‘Dear God, but man was a powerful thing’. The sound and fury generated by the men and their technology contrasts with the silent acquiescence of the kangaroos: Their shouts and their laughter and their bottles and their bullets and the roar of the car’s engine and the crashing of its wheels through the scrub were their contribution to the sounds of the night. … And in dark glades and dry creek-beds kangaroos stood with bullets in their bodies waiting to die without comment. 20

The kangaroos are reminiscent of the prayerful doves of Wright’s ‘Sanctuary’. As the road became increasing disconnected and alienated from the natural environment, it was also represented as a more violent space. The roadkill depicted in Judith Wright’s ‘Sanctuary’ and the kangaroos butchered off-road in Wake in Fright foreshadow the human roadkill of the later 20th-century road genre. Similarly, in the redneck miners of Wake in Fright, can be seen the genesis of the larrikin bushman turned serial killer who appears in Wolf Creek. Colin Eggleston’s fi lm, Long Weekend (1978), explores a suburban couple’s alienation from nature as they embark on a camping trip to a remote coastal retreat. From the outset they are at odds with the natural environment. During the drive, Peter (John Hargreaves) throws a cigarette butt out the window, starting a fi re in the grass; he also hits a

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kangaroo but does not stop, and the caravan following runs over it. As they turn off the main road to Moondah Beach, ominously and incongruously located near an abattoir, they grow fearful of the strange noises coming from the dark bushland. As they set up camp the next day, Peter indiscriminately destroys his environment, cutting down a tree and shooting ducks, and anything else that moves, with a harpoon gun – including a dugong, which Marcia (Briony Behets) thinks is a shark in the surf. As the couple’s discomfort with their surrounds and with each other heightens, fear and panic overtake them as nature seems to be bent on revenge. The ultimate recrimination is visited upon Peter when, in shock after discovering that he has shot and killed Marcia, having mistaken her for a predator during the night, he wanders onto the road, only to be knocked down by a truck whose driver is distracted by a bird flying into the windscreen. Ironically, Peter himself becomes roadkill. 21 Anarchy Road

Road deaths in Australia escalated in the years from 1965 to 1982, peaking in 1970 with 3798 fatalities. Between 1925 and 1997, 160,670 people died as a result of road crashes – almost double the total number of Australians killed in four major wars (89,850). 22 In Australia, many fatalities occur on country roads and highways, leading to the labelling of sections as ‘horror stretches’. The disproportionate number of young adults, particularly males, killed on our roads has been, and continues to be, a major preoccupation that resurfaces in the media from time to time. Images of cars crushed against trees are a regular feature of television news bulletins. Shock-tactic road safety campaigns aimed at young drivers often depict graphic images of death and injury. Road safety initiatives introduced progressively in the 1970s included the compulsory fitting and wearing of seat belts, random breath testing, speed cameras, improved vehicles and roads, and heightened public awareness programmes. These elements, which are now taken for granted, highlight the fact that the road was once an even more dangerous and chaotic place than it is today. The impact of road trauma on the national psyche is evident in creative representations of the road, especially from the 1970s onwards. The Cars that Ate Paris exposes the term ‘accident’ as a misnomer to describe the carnage. Arthur, the survivor of a crash that killed his brother, is shown a series of photographs by the psychiatrist conducting ‘experiments’. Interspersed with innocuous images are pictures of mangled, bloodied car wrecks and their victims. Arthur is conditioned by the doctor to describe these as ‘accident’ rather than ‘smash’. When Arthur confesses to the Mayor of Paris that he was disqualified from driving, although acquitted of manslaughter, after killing an elderly pedestrian, the Mayor sympathises, saying ‘Yes, these old pedestrians are a real problem now’, thereby shifting the blame onto the victims. 23

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Ultimately, it is the cars of Paris that are personified as instigators of evil, visiting deadly vengeance on all who seek to control or destroy them. Discussing the trauma experienced by accident survivors with Arthur, the Mayor is philosophical: ‘Not very pleasant is it, but, that’s the world we live in – it’s the world of the motor car.’24 Echoing that view, Les Murray’s poem, ‘Portrait of the Artist as a New World Driver’ (c.1974), concludes: If you asked Where the New World is, I’d have to answer He is in his car He is booming down the highways In that funnel of blue-green-gold, tree-flecked and streaming Light that a car is always breaking out of – … Of course we love our shells: they make the anthill Bearable. Of course the price is blood. 25

Like many road movies, including The Cars That Ate Paris, the poem conflates archetypal imagery of an Australian road trip – car speeding along a country road, dappled sunlight streaming through trees – with a much darker vision, evoking the reality of how those trips often end – with blood on the bitumen. 26 Judith Wright’s ‘By-Pass’ (1976) continues the trajectory of everincreasing violence and alienation associated with the transcendence of technology over nature that was evident in ‘Sanctuary’. This poem depicts a road heading inexorably towards the city: No U Turn. The rules you keep here are the traffic rules. You can’t break those; Acres of plateglass ice Would shatter Blood glitter On neon roads under the stop-and-go lights, The ambulances come screaming.

Here, the violence on the road extends to the city’s inhabitants, as ‘violent boys stare from street-corners’. 27 Technology’s destructive impact is taken to even greater extremes in the Mad Max series of fi lms (1979–2015). The road, like civilisation, disappears over the course of the fi lms, which depict an increasingly surreal post-apocalyptic wasteland as the ultimate outcome of the late 20th century’s obsession with car culture and reliance on oil. 28 The fi rst fi lm offers the most recognisable setting – ‘Anarchie Road’ [sic] – on which Max and his fellow members of ‘The Bronze’ highway patrol take on lawless, reckless ‘glory riders’ like ‘The Nightrider’, who yells maniacally as he tears down the highway, ‘I’m a fuel-injected suicide machine’.

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He and the biker gang members who terrorise the roads are the apotheosis of the motorcycle rebels in The Wild One and the hoons in The Cars that Ate Paris, whose stunts grew ever-more violent and murderous. Borrowing lyrics from Bruce Springstein’s song, ‘Born to Run’, the Nightrider also represents the manic, suicidal tendencies attributed to young Australian males who annihilate themselves and others on the road. 29 The fi lm’s director, George Miller, confi rmed that despite its internationalisation Mad Max exploits the idea that road accidents are a ‘socially acceptable form of violence’ in Australia, a country with the highest incidence of road trauma in the world. 30 As Tom O’Regan notes, the fi lm portrays ‘the spectacular murderousness of the high-speed headon collision on country roads’ and the particularly Australian nightmare of a car cresting a hill on the wrong side of the road. 31 The road is an integral character in Mad Max, and the most memorable and dramatic moments take place in the middle of the road. 32 Road carnage is everywhere in Mad Max and it is not only the rebels who revel and die in it. After his friend and colleague, Jim Goose, is killed on his motorcycle, Max visits the hospital to see Goose’s body. As he pulls back the covers, the audience sees only a charred hand fall out from under the sheet, but the look on Max’s face expresses his horror and disbelief. He tells his colleagues waiting outside, ‘That thing in there, that’s not the Goose, no way’. 33 Max exacts his revenge on Toecutter, the leader of the biker gang that killed his wife and child, by forcing him into a head-on collision with a truck. He fi nally kills Johnny the Boy, who was responsible for Goose’s death. Max forces Johnny to handcuff his ankle to a wrecked car while Max sets fi re to the grass near the petrol tank, thus leaving Johnny with the option of losing his leg or dying in the inferno, each being a plausible outcome of a crash. The spectre of road trauma remains prominent in the Australian psyche, with increasingly graphic representations in fi lm and literature. Spider & Rose (1994) opens as Rose, suffering a head wound, wanders dazed along a country road. Gradually the camera reveals the black twolane road scattered with debris, including luggage, and then a car overturned in a ditch. Rose crosses the road to discover her husband’s body, covered in blood, lying beside the road with the sound of flies buzzing. That image and sound haunt her long after she has physically recovered, as she continues to experience flashbacks. As Rose is travelling back to her home in Coonabarabran after being released from hospital, she and Spider, the ambulance driver, revisit the spot where the accident happened. Rose finds it difficult to believe, saying, ‘It looks so ordinary. … He died right here, he died, but you’d never know’, and she throws some flowers at the tree as an improvised memorial. 34 Spider is also troubled by what he has seen in his line of duty, remarking that he would sometimes go back to the scene of fatalities, and there would be nothing there, as if nothing had happened.

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Roadside memorials – flowers and crosses placed close to the sites where fatalities occurred – have become increasingly common in recent decades. 35 Sean Condon’s narrative is punctuated by his neurotic obsession with death on the road. He writes, ‘I hate driving at night. Crucifi xes keep appearing in the headlights, placed by the roadside in memory of people who have died there’. Later, on the way to Surfers Paradise, he notes, ‘We pass another small, white wooden cross planted in the dirt by the roadside. It’s unmarked. A sad and creepy thing to see’. 36 Roadside memorials have also attracted controversy, with some critics arguing that they are distracting and upsetting reminders of accidental death. The title of Tim Winton’s novel, Dirt Music (2001), is based on the fate of Lu Fox’s family of musicians, who were all killed when their ute (utility vehicle) overturned on a dirt road within their own property as they were on their way to play at a wedding. Fox was the only survivor and he recalls the night vividly, ‘The earth at his feet tarry with blood and his brother … gone’, while still inside the cab his sister-in-law was ‘wedged under the steering column, bits of metal protruding from her trunk’, and his nephew’s ‘head rent like a cantaloupe’. 37 As Fox hitchhikes north in Western Australia, he cannot escape reminders of the past – Rusty, an exsurfer who gives him a lift, lost his lower leg in a car accident. During his trip north, Fox notes successively: a dead steer – one of many instances of roadkill – and then a white cross, indicating a roadside memorial at road’s edge. The conflation of images is a deliberate reminder of the constant presence of death that shadows the Australian road. The Making of an Australian ‘Badland’

The violent hoons and murderous locals of Paris, the marauding bikers of Mad Max and even the oft-described ‘madness’ that leads to road deaths and trauma contribute to the idea of a menacing presence lurking ‘out there’ on the road. Max himself declared: ‘Any longer out on that road and I’m one of them – a terminal crazy.’38 The wasteland inhabited by Max could be described as a ‘badland’, a term originally coined in North America over two centuries ago, when French colonists described a region of North Dakota where parched earth, deep ridges and ravines made it ‘bad lands to cross’. More recently, it was associated with Terrence Malick’s 1973 film, Badlands, which was based on the killing spree across Nebraska and Wyoming in 1958 committed by Charles Starkweather and his 14-year-old girlfriend, Caril Fugate, who became known as the ‘Badlands killers’. 39 The term ‘badland’ suggests a sinister or illicit space, dangerous, possibly psychotic inhabitants, and the potential for indiscriminate violence. Ross Gibson uses the term to explore the violent history of a so-called ‘horror stretch’ of the Bruce Highway between Rockhampton and Mackay, relating late 20th-century murders and kidnappings to memory

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embodied in that landscape of a much longer history of colonial frontier violence.40 I would suggest, however, that depicting the Australian road as a badland is more likely related to perceptions of Australian space, as well as real madness and violence occurring in that space, rather than ‘embodied memory’. As discussed in earlier chapters, the Australian landscape, especially in remote bush and outback regions, has long inspired a sense of mystery or ‘weird melancholy’, with stories of strange and unexplained presences like the ‘Hairy Man’. Aboriginal legends tell of evil spirits such as the kurdaitcha man of Central Australia, a malevolent murderer, who stalked those who had broken ancestral taboos. He wore shoes made of feathers and human hair glued together with blood.41 The Nullarbor Plain, with its underground caves, was said to be the home of a ‘snake-devil’. According to Ernestine Hill, Aboriginal people avoided the plain, fearing its ghostly voices and evil god. They believed that those who ventured into its territory and did not return had been devoured by the huge serpent, thus explaining mysterious disappearances.42 Hill described the Nullarbor as ‘one of the most melancholy patches in Australia’, while other travel writers use phrases such as ‘awesome and weird’.43 Sometimes the landscape itself was characterised as evil. William Hatfield wrote of the socalled ‘devil-devil’ country near Camooweal in outback Queensland. The unusual ground formation consists of a thin crust of earth hiding enormous subterranean caverns, causing the ground to make a hollow drumming sound. Cattle went mad with fright when driven over it, and drovers studiously tried to avoid it. Horses and riders could literally be swallowed up, crashing through the thin surface.44 For European travellers, the desolate landscape of remote regions inspired real and imagined fears. Jerome Murif recorded his impressions of cycling through parts of Central Australia on his transcontinental expedition in 1897. Riding amid countless ant-hills evoked the feeling of cycling through a silent burial ground: A ghostly suggestiveness, a little creeping of the flesh, an uneasy expectation of meeting with – one seldom questions at such moments what – urged me quickly on a little way, or, again, would prompt me suddenly to stop, dismount, lean over on the bicycle, and with craned neck peer into the gloomy scrub and rather hoarsely invite what might be therein to ‘come out’.

Murif’s overactive imagination was fuelled by stories of ‘armed and treacherous natives’ from this ‘wildest tract of the Australian continent’, who had ‘murdered settler and traveller in cold blood’.45 These stories overlooked the frontier violence, including several massacres, which indicated that Aboriginal inhabitants had more to fear than Europeans. It was not only people but the environment itself that could kill. Several writers draw upon imagery of animal and human skeletons that

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could be encountered when travelling in the outback. When ‘Dad’ in Steele Rudd’s story, Our New Selection (1903), heads to Marree en route to Queensland looking for good grazing land, he is confronted by a droughtscarred landscape of death on either side of the ‘infernal avenue … the terrible track’. The further he goes, the worse it gets: A horror? – It was hell! Shapeless, blear-eyed, loony bullocks – grotesque caricatures, staggered pathetically by the way. All day a foul, fetid air fi lled his nostrils; hateful crows flocked from carcass to carcass, clamouring in fiendish exultation. And skeletons – skeletons and bones lay everywhere.46

Similar imagery is evoked by Brady in King’s Caravan when, lost in the bush, the narrator comments, ‘There was something sinister about the silent Bush, the cynic grin of a skull, the glint of whitened bones’.47 Journalist Ernestine Hill also wrote of the sad fate of pioneers, told in the landscape of outback Queensland: ‘… the dead lie, unburied by the wind, with quizzically tilted chins and hollow eye-sockets, twisted, it seems, in a horrible silent laughter at the joke that went against them…’.48 Throughout The Back of Beyond, images of death surround the Birdsville Track, grim reminders of the fate that awaits those caught unprepared in this unforgiving environment. The film was scripted by Bulletin literary editor, Douglas Stewart. Verse and sketches created by Stewart to accompany the film were published in the Bulletin and are also full of images of death: bleached skulls – animal and human – glistening in the sun; dingoes, crows and eagles feeding on carcasses. Stewart wrote that this was ‘cruel country, always on the edge of drought, always close to danger’.49 Deadman’s Sandhill, near the notorious Birdsville Track, commemorates four men whose remains were found together with their horses, whose throats had been cut, and a billy-can of dried blood – a gruesome testament to their last desperate effort to survive. Ernestine Hill described the eerie experience of driving around the sandhill at night: ‘Then, indeed, one travels in a world of goblins. … The bush is a phantasmagoria of eyes’.50 It was near the appropriately named Deadman’s Sandhill that five members of the Page family perished in December 1963. The family of British migrants left their home in Marree shortly before Christmas in their Ford Customline V8, heading further north towards Birdsville, where they planned to resettle. They took a wrong turn away from the track, became lost and ran out of petrol. With insufficient food and water, in temperatures of over 50 degrees Celsius, they stood no chance of surviving. A rabbit trapper who found their abandoned car raised the alarm and a search began. The bodies of Ernie Page, his wife Emma and their sons Douglas and Gordon were discovered under a Coolibah tree two days later, on New Year’s Eve. Their eldest son Robert’s body was found at the top of Deadman’s Sandhill the next day. They were buried where they lay. 51

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Killers on the road

The vast uninhabited spaces in Australia are also places where those at the edge of mainstream society – economically and psychologically – may deliberately ‘disappear’. The combination of a threatening space inhabited by dangerous characters has powerful dramatic potential, which has been exploited extensively in film and literature since the 1970s. Long Weekend relies on the suggestion of menace from the natural environment and the characters’ growing paranoia that something or someone means them harm. A number of films set on the Nullarbor dwell on the eeriness of that landscape.52 Wolf Creek (2005) evokes a sense of weirdness associated with the landscape of Wilpena Pound, the huge and ancient crater in South Australia’s Flinders Ranges. The young backpackers’ watches stop, and when they return to their car it will not start. The scenario recalls the strange magnetic force of the landscape in Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), but is a more ominous harbinger of the horror that is to follow.53 The opening scenes in Mad Max establish the setting of ‘Anarchie Road’ by revealing a road sign warning of the high fatality toll on that road. The sign is riddled with bullet holes, alerting the audience to the fact that this is a dangerous and violent space. The motif of the bullet-ridden road sign, which also appears in Wake in Fright, is a common feature of the Australian badlands, where often the intimation of violence is as powerful as its enacting. Gibson notes an editorial which appeared in the Mackay Daily Mercury in 1975, shortly after the murders of Noel and Sophie Weckert on the Bruce Highway. Headlined ‘A Horror Strip’, it posed the question: ‘What was in the atmosphere that caused every new road sign to be peppered with bullets as soon as it goes up and no one ever sees it happen?’54 From the 1960s, travellers’ narratives often recorded their unease at seeing evidence of the violent impact of human presence on the landscape in the form of discarded beer bottles and cans, bullet holes through road signs, and other forms of vandalism. While the perpetrators are rarely seen, there is the sense that a sinister presence with malevolent intent is never far away. For example, Alastair Morrison was aghast to see holes kicked into the sides of water tanks when driving across the Nullarbor in the 1960s. While camped for lunch near the Stuart Highway, he and his wife ‘were incensed by a party of youngsters in a Landrover who fired a volley of .22 shots far too close … for comfort’. 55 While Tim Bowden did not fi nd the outback frightening, he was aware that many of his fellow travellers feared ‘gun-toting maniacs’ or ‘marauding hoons’. Bowden was irritated by those who wanted to share his campsite: ‘The chances of being shot and raped by a psychotic killer are so remote as to be dismissed. … Yet the fear of camping alone, for many, is palpable.’56 The couple in Going Inland are constantly uneasy as they hear sounds in the night near their campsites – angry shouts and screams, glass breaking, then a car taking off at speed, ‘tyres skidding on gravel’. When

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they arrive at their destination and fi nd no camping facilities, they feel ‘over-exposed’ and are reluctant to stay there. ‘The impact of stillness and space affected them. … There was the impulse to conceal, not to draw attention to themselves.’57 While the hoons usually fi red at sheep, cattle and signboards, some also preyed on human targets. Real stories of murders and disappearances on Australia’s outback highways have become part of the mythology of the road. A number of disturbing cases in the 1960s and 1970s led to sections of the Bruce and Flinders Highways being labelled as ‘Murder Highway’ and the ‘Highway of Death’. Gibson details occurrences on the Bruce Highway between Rockhampton and Mackay, on the far north coast of Queensland. In late October 1966 an ‘aggressive psychopath’ killed a camper and wounded his two companions, in the so-called ‘Lotus Creek outrage’. 58 In 1972, 14-year-old Marilyn Wallman from Eimeo near Mackay disappeared on her way to school. Her brothers, following only minutes behind, found her bicycle with its wheels still spinning by the roadside. Part of a skull found over two years later in a creek some 40 km away was finally identified as Marilyn’s in early 2015. Her abduction and murder remains unsolved. 59 Townsville couple, Noel and Sophie Weckert, were driving south on the Bruce Highway in March 1975 to attend a sky-diving carnival in Rockhampton. On 22 March, about half-way between Mackay and Rockhampton, near Connors River, they stopped to rest by the side of the road. A truck driver later found Noel’s body slumped over the car’s steering wheel. He had been shot in the head and neck. There was no sign of Sophie, but her remains were found two weeks later on the banks of Funnel Creek, 30 km away. She had been abducted and tried to escape, but was also shot in the back of the neck.60 Similar tales of brutal murders and mysterious disappearances surround the Flinders Highway between Townsville and Mt Isa in outback Queensland, including the still unsolved disappearance and suspected murder of a hitchhiker, Tony Jones, in 1982.61 The length of time taken to track down the killers in some cases, while others remain unsolved, touched on fears deep within the Australian psyche – an isolated landscape in which predators strike randomly, then seemingly vanish. Often, victims and perpetrators were drifters, reinforcing the idea of itinerancy and rootlessness as aberrant and dangerous. In the Weckert case, police eventually arrested three suspects who were originally from Tasmania. The two men and a young woman, nicknamed ‘Gypsy’, were described as ‘itinerant rouseabouts’ and ‘sideshow workers’. Further reports of their activities evoked images of 19th-century bushrangers at times, revealing that they had been involved in a series of break-ins, robberies and fraud, turning to banditry in desperation as their money and supplies ran low. When the Weckerts refused to cooperate, they paid with their lives.62 The impact of these and other cases on the creative imagination is obvious. As the 21st century approached, the road was becoming a badland haunted by maniacs and murderers, indicative of a culture that was

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perceived as increasingly violent and chaotic. In Robert Drewe’s short story, The Bodysurfers (1983), David drives across the bridge over Mooney Mooney Creek en route to his family’s weekender at Pearl Beach. His thoughts are dominated by a recent unsolved murder at the picnic ground car park, where ‘he had read in the papers, the lovers had apparently been forced from their car two nights before, ordered to strip and then struck and run over repeatedly by the murderer’s car’.63 Again, the victims’ fate is linked to that of animal roadkill, flattened beyond recognition – ‘Thump, break and reverse, wheels spinning crazily in the gravel. Skin and hair on the bumpers’. 64 The murder preoccupies David throughout the weekend and it is revealed that the ‘lovers’ were adulterers who came from the western suburbs of Sydney, thus characterising the victims as morally outside the mainstream and also out of their own territory. The fact that the killer or killers are still at large is most disturbing, as is the idea that they could blend in quite normally with their surrounds: ‘The killers were likely from these parts. Maybe he had stood alongside them tonight in the hotel bottle shop buying his Dimple Haig. Sandy-haired yobbos with a big gas guzzler throbbing in the car park.’65 In Going Inland, on the way south from Darwin down the Stuart Highway, Tom swaps tales with an outback petrol station attendant, who tells him that a man, ‘who had a Villa Nova [caravan] like [Tom’s] lost his wife on this stretch of highway’. The traveller stopped to fuel up and his wife, who had been sleeping in the van, got out to go to the toilet. When she came back the truck was gone. A traveller on a motor bike offered her a lift to chase her husband. Not realising what had happened, the husband was ‘amazed to see her hurtling past on the pillion of a motor bike, waving frantically, disappearing from view’, but he never saw her again. Tom also asks the attendant if he knows anything ‘about a young bloke, from the east … It happened around here somewhere. He was looking for parts for his four-wheel drive. Couple of blokes took him out the bush, shot him, buried him in an antheap’. The man replies, ‘They got them. … Gun crazy some of these bastards’.66 David Malouf’s short story, ‘Lone Pine’ (2000), is a dark tale of grey nomads, Harry and May Picton, who are executed by intruders who break into their caravan when they are camped in an isolated spot on their round-Australia trip. The story taps into the fear of random, unexplained killings of ‘ordinary’ travellers. As they set up camp, the couple had felt secure as Harry thought, ironically, that despite a few insects and an inquisitive animal there was ‘No need to worry. There were no predators out here’.67 Hitchhiking hazards

Hitchhiking, which had been romanticised and popularised by the likes of Kerouac in the 1950s, was becoming a dangerous, sometimes

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deadly activity for both drivers and hitchhikers by the late 1960s and 1970s. Victoria’s Royalauto Journal ran an article in August 1968 entitled ‘Should you stop for Hitch-hikers? There is a risk’.68 Douglas Lockwood wrote of his increasing wariness of hitchhikers on the Stuart Highway in the 1960s. He noted that the highway was popular with hitchhikers, and ‘in the years immediately after the war these itinerants were accepted without question’. Attitudes changed, however, following the brutal murder of Darwin taxi driver, George Grantham, in April 1952. Jerry Koci and John Novotny, two recently arrived migrants from Czechoslovakia, shot Grantham in the back of the head and dumped his body in the bush, before fleeing south in his taxi. When fi nally convicted, they were hanged in Darwin’s Fanny Bay gaol on 7 August 1952.69 Hitchhikers feature in several works which play upon the theme of ‘killer on the road’. The fi lm End Play (1976) is a psychological thriller based on serial killings by the ‘Maroondah maniac’, who preys on blonde female hitchhikers on a lonely stretch of the Maroondah Highway in Victoria. While the fi lm opens with a sequence in which a young woman is picked up and apparently stabbed by the driver, most of the action occurs off the road in an intriguing game of subterfuge between two brothers, one of whom is the killer. No real violence is depicted in the fi lm, but the knowledge that a killer is on the loose and doubt as to his true identity adds to the suspense and to the image of the road as a killing ground.70 Richard Franklin’s Roadgames (1981) uses the mysterious Nullarbor Plain as the setting for a thriller in which women are reportedly being murdered and their dismembered bodies strewn beside the highway. Much of the suspense in this fi lm is derived from the cat and mouse game between truck driver Pat Quid (Stacy Keach), hitchhiker Hitch (Jamie Lee Curtis), and a green van with a faceless driver whom Quid and Hitch suspect is the serial killer. The fi lm borrows from Steven Spielberg’s early American thriller, Duel (1971), in which a travelling salesman (Dennis Weaver) engages in an escalating battle to the death with a semi-trailer which stalks and terrorises him, its psychotic driver remaining unseen and anonymous.71 In Roadgames, Quid’s cargo is meat carcasses bound for Perth, and the connection between the slaughtered animals and the human slaughter occurring on the road is obvious and chilling.72 The psychopathic killer who fi rst appears to be an ordinary traveller is another source of fear haunting the highways. The film Deadly Chase (1993) begins with a seemingly harmless prank in which Tessa seeks revenge on her boyfriend for locking her out of the car and driving off, by hitching a ride with another motorist. The man – described only as ‘Driver’ in the credits – turns out to be a deranged sexual predator and murderer in a fi lm that also bears the influence of the classic Duel.73 In True Love & Chaos, hitchhiker Morris tells his companions that the last time he tried to cross the Nullarbor with his girlfriend, their car broke

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down. A tow truck came to their aid but the driver, tattooed and scarred, said little, only grinning from time to time. They noticed that the roof of the tow truck was covered in newspaper clippings of gruesome murders and realised that they might be about to become the next clipping. The road to ‘Wolf Creek’

During the 1990s and early 2000s, two high-profi le cases captured the Australian and international imagination. First were the Ivan Milat backpacker serial killings in the early to mid-1990s. Milat preyed on young travellers hitchhiking on a stretch of the Hume Highway in the Southern Highlands, south of Sydney. Milat tortured his victims before killing them and burying their bodies in the Belanglo State Forest, a few kilometres from the highway. In July 1996 Milat was convicted of the murder of seven backpackers, including three Germans, two Britons and two Australians, and for the attempted abduction of another British traveller, Paul Onions, who managed to escape and whose evidence helped to convict Milat. Each body was found face down with their hands bound behind their back. Most had been shot or stabbed repeatedly while others were beaten and strangled. It is possible that Milat may have killed more victims, as yet undiscovered. The second case was the bizarre attack on British backpackers, Joanne Lees and Peter Falconio, on the Stuart Highway in July 2001, as detailed in the Introduction. It took over four years for the perpetrator, Bradley John Murdoch, to be convicted. Murdoch was another outsider and drifter – a mechanic from Broome, who was known for drug running in the Northern Territory. The Falconio case prompted the release of Murder in the Outback, a tele-movie based on a re-enactment, as well as several books.74 The fi lm Gone (2007) depicts a sinister fellow traveller who is gradually revealed to be a psychopath, murdering the boyfriend of the girl he is obsessed with as the trio travel from Sydney to Byron Bay. The disappearance of the victim without trace also echoes the Falconio case.75 The best known fi lm of the road horror genre in recent years is Wolf Creek (2005), which draws heavily on the Milat serial killings, and the Falconio case to some extent. It depicts a trio of young travellers whose car breaks down in the Flinders Ranges. They are ‘rescued’ by seemingly genial bushman Mick Taylor (Jon Jarrett), who tows them to his property hidden deep within the outback, where they become the latest victims of Mick’s brutality as he tortures and mutilates backpackers. In Wolf Creek the bush legend is completely corrupted, as Mick transforms from laidback Aussie larrikin to murdering psychopath – the ultimate example of the ‘bushman gone wrong’ – hunting tourists rather than animals.76 While actual cases obviously inspire representations in popular culture, it is important to note that it is not a one-way road, and that popular culture also influences perceptions of reality. In 2014 sections of the media

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cast the Flinders Highway as ‘Queensland’s Wolf Creek’. Sensationalised reports attempted to link the several unsolved disappearances and murders since the early 1970s to a serial killer stalking the highway, despite the impossibility that the same person was responsible for all the incidents. Coincidentally, the reports appeared shortly after the release of Wolf Creek 2.77 The Australian road’s image as a badland continues to surface. The road toll, which fell to its lowest point since 1945 in 2014 following concerted public safety campaigns, is making headlines again due to a worrying increase over the last two years. In November 2016 news broke of an unprovoked attack on a French tourist, who was stabbed in front of his wife at a rest stop at Connors Well, north of Alice Springs. The location was not far from where the Falconio attack took place.78 If the road, at times, is a site of horror and fear, it can also be a stage for protest and activism. The following chapter explores how the road has been used, both physically and in creative representations, as a space for broader social commentary, particularly regarding some of the darker aspects of Australian history. Notes – Chapter 8: Blood on the Bitumen: The Dark Side of the Road (1) Gay, W. (1911) The song. In W. Gay, The Complete Poetical Works of William Gay. Melbourne: Thomas C. Lothian, pp. 77–78. (2) Paterson, A.B. (1917a) The lay of the motor-car. In A.B. Paterson (ed.) Saltbush Bill, J. P. and Other Verses. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, p. 55. (3) Dennis, C.J. (1918) The joy ride. In C.J. Dennis (ed.) Backblock Ballads and Later Verses. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, pp. 52, 54. (4) Anderson, W.K. (1994) Roads for the People: A History of Victoria’s Roads. South Melbourne: VicRoads and Hyland House, pp. 137–138. (5) Federal Office of Road Safety (1998) The History of Road Fatalities in Australia. Monograph 23. See http://www.tac.vic.gov.au (accessed 25 November 2016). NB: Figures cited exclude Northern Territory data. (6) Anderson, Roads for the People, p. 135. (7) Australian Motorist, May 1934, pp. 461–462. (8) Australian Motorist, January 1937, p. 240. (9) Peters, R.H. (1935) Avoiding death on the highway. Reproduced in Australian Motorist, June 1935, pp. 556–557. (10) Rowsome, F. Jr. (1990) The Verse by the Side of the Road: The Story of the BurmaShave Signs and Jingles. New York: Penguin, pp. 32, 34. (11) Furnas, J.C. (1935) – and sudden death. Reader’s Digest, August. See http://www. rd.com/culture/and-sudden-death-readers-digest/ (accessed 28 November 2016); Australian Motorist, January 1948, pp. 829, 831. (12) Australian Motorist, July 1949, p. 541. (13) Wright, J. (1994) Sanctuary. In J. Wright (ed.) Collected Poems 1942–1985. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, p. 139. Reproduced with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. (14) Wright, Forward. In Wright, Collected Poems, n.p. (15) Wright, Sanctuary, p. 140. (16) Lawson, H. (1912) Up the country. In H. Lawson (ed.) In the Days when the World Was Wide (revised edn). Sydney: Angus & Robertson, p. 139.

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(17) Wright, Sanctuary, p. 140. (18) Murray, L. (2006) The burning truck. In L. Murray (ed.) Collected Poems. Melbourne: Black Inc. Reproduced by permission of the author, Margaret Connolly & Associates Pty Ltd., and Carcanet Press Limited (UK). In the USA the poem appears in The Rabbiter’s Bounty by Les Murray. Copyright © 1992 by Les Murray. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (19) Niland, D. (1974 [1955]) The Shiralee. London: White Lion, pp. 230–233. (20) Cook, K. (1961) Wake in Fright. London: Michael Joseph, pp. 124–125. (21) Eggleston, C. (1978) Long Weekend. Australian Film Commission. (22) Federal Office of Road Safety, The History of Road Fatalities in Australia. (23) Weir, P. (1974) The Cars That Ate Paris. Australian Film Development Corporation. (24) Cars That Ate Paris. (25) Murray, L. (2006) Portrait of the artist as a new world driver. In Murray, Collected Poems. Reproduced by permission of the author, Margaret Connolly & Associates Pty Ltd., and Carcanet Press Limited (UK). In the USA, the poem appears in The Rabbiter’s Bounty by Les Murray. Copyright © 1992 by Les Murray. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (26) Scenes depicting a rural or outback road, bathed in sunlight, onto which a vehicle roars into or out of view, are repeated in numerous Australian road movies from the 1970s onwards. For example: Stone (1974); The Cars that Ate Paris (1974); Oz (1976); Out of It (1977); Summer City (1977); High Rolling (1977); In Search of Anna (1979); Mad Max (1979); Roadgames (1981); Backlash (1986); Travelling North (1987); Deadly Chase (1993); Spider & Rose (1994); Wolf Creek (2005); Cactus (2008); Charlie & Boots (2009). (27) Wright, J. (1994) By-pass. In Wright, Collected Poems, p. 357. Reproduced with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. (28) Falconer, D. (1997) ‘We don’t need to know the way home’: The disappearance of the road in the ‘Mad Max’ trilogy. In S. Cohan and I.R. Hark (eds) The Road Movie Book. London: Routledge, p. 249. (29) Biber, K. (2001) The threshold moment: Masculinity at home and on the road in Australian cinema. Limina 7, 26; Biber, K. (2000) ‘A certain look in the eye’: Masculinity in Australian cinema from 1970. PhD thesis, University of Sydney. (30) O’Regan, T. (1989) The enchantment with cinema: Film in the 1980s. In A. Moran and T. O’Regan (eds) The Australian Screen. Ringwood, Vic: Penguin Books Australia, p. 128. ATSB (2007) Road Crash Casualties and Rates, Australia 1925– 2005. Canberra: Australian Transport Safety Bureau. See http://www.infrastruc ture.gov.au/roads/safety/publications/2008/pdf/1925_05_casualties.pdf (accessed June 2011). (31) O’Regan, The enchantment with cinema, p. 128. (32) Martin, A. (2003) The Mad Max Movies. Canberra: Currency Press and ScreenSound Australia, p. 13. (33) Mad Max. (34) Bennett, B. (1994) Spider & Rose. Dendy Films. (35) The First International Symposium on Roadside Memorials was held at the University of New England in 2004 and papers from the symposium were published; see Clark, J. (ed.) (2007) Roadside Memorials: A Multidisciplinary Approach. Armidale: EMU Press. (36) Condon, S. (1996) Sean & David’s Long Drive. Melbourne: Lonely Planet, pp. 222, 229. (37) Winton, T. (2001) Dirt Music. Sydney: Pan Macmillan Australia, pp. 117–118. Now published by Penguin Random House. Copyright © Tim Winton 2001. Reproduced with permission of the author, Jenny Darling & Associates and Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd. (38) Mad Max.

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(39) Gibson, R. (2002) Seven Versions of an Australian Badland. St. Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, pp. 13–14. (40) Gibson, Badland, p. 68. (41) Upfield, A.W. (1948) This jealous land. Walkabout, April, p. 38; Gartrell, M. (1960) Kurdaitcha shoes. Walkabout, November, p. 14. (42) Hill, E. (1991/2016 [1937]) The Great Australian Loneliness: A Classic Journey Around and Across Australia. North Ryde, NSW: Angus & Robertson; Sydney: ETT Imprint, p. 248. (43) Hill, Great Australian Loneliness, p. 248; Nullarbor Notes (1940) Walkabout, March, p. 4. (44) Hatfield, W. (1936) Australia through the Windscreen. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, p. 79. (45) Murif, J.J. (1897) From Ocean to Ocean, across a Continent on a Bicycle, an Account of a Solitary Ride from Adelaide to Port Darwin. Melbourne: George Robertson, pp. 83, 108. (46) Rudd, S. (Arthur Hoe Davis) (1903) Our New Selection. Sydney: Bulletin Newspaper Co., pp. 110–111. (47) Brady, E.J. (1911b) The King’s Caravan: Across Australia in a Wagon. London: Edward Arnold, p. 251. (48) Hill, Great Australian Loneliness, p. 284. (49) Stewart, D. (1952) Films for Birdsville. The Bulletin, 5 November, p. 35. See also Stewart, D. (1952) The Birdsville Track … a Verse Commentary for a Film. The Bulletin, 22 October, pp. 18–19. (50) Hill, Great Australian Loneliness, pp. 290–291. (51) Sheedy, B. (1993) Driving the Birdsville Track. Fitzroy, Vic: Roadwrite, p. 29; Orr, S. (2011) One wrong turn and their fate was sealed. Adelaide Advertiser, 10 March. The timing of the Page family’s trip was also fateful, as there was even less vehicular traffic in the region due to the holiday season. (52) In True Love and Chaos, as the travellers enter the Nullarbor, conversation turns to strange sightings and UFOs (Kazantzidis, S. (1997) True Love and Chaos. Westside Film & Television). In Kiss or Kill, a motel proprietor tells the main protagonists about the ‘unfathomable caves’ that lie beneath the deceptively flat surface on the Nullarbor. The man’s wife disappeared, wandering off one night, attracted by lights, and was possibly claimed by one of the caves. He says that he ‘likes to think she just went for a walk – into nowhere’ (Bennett, B. (1997) Kiss or Kill. Australian Film Finance Corporation, Bennett Productions). (53) Picnic at Hanging Rock, directed by Peter Weir (1971) is based on Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel, which tells the fictional story of a group of schoolgirls who mysteriously vanish without trace while on a St Valentine’s Day picnic at Hanging Rock, a rare volcanic rock formation in the Mount Macedon area of Victoria. In one scene, the rock seems to exert a magnetic force which causes a teacher’s watch to stop. (54) Gibson, Badland, pp. 27–31. See also Morrison, A. (1961) Matilda’s travels. Diary of Alastair Morrison, NLA MS 9680, p. 31; and Turner, H.M. ‘A Round-Australia Journal: 30 Weeks and 25,000 Miles in 1972’. In H. Turner Papers, 1940–2003, ML MSS 7520, p. 69. (55) Morrison, Matilda’s travels, pp. 31, 86. (56) Bowden, T. (2002) Penelope Bungles to Broome. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, pp. 14–15. (57) Jacobs, P. (1998) Going Inland. South Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, pp. 31, 45. (58) Gibson, Badland, pp. 31–35. (59) Gibson, Badland, pp. 27–31; ABC news website at http://www.abc.net.au/news/ 2015-01-19/police-confi rm-skull-is-missing-mackay-girl-marilyn-wallman/602 5348 (accessed 5 December 2016).

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(60) Gibson, Badland, pp. 27–31, 43–46; Bradley, K. (2015) The Weckert murders. Australian Police Journal, March. See https://apjl.com.au/articles/the_weckert_ murders (accessed 2 December 2016). (61) Healy, S. (2014) Grisly tales of terror punctuate route’s gloomy past. Townsville Bulletin, 15 February. (62) Gibson, Badland, pp. 43–47. (63) Drewe, R. (2008) The bodysurfers. Extract from The Bodysurfers [1983] in D.  Falconer (ed.) Penguin Book of the Road. Camberwell, Vic: Viking (Penguin Group), p. 266. (64) Drewe, Bodysurfers, p. 271. (65) Drewe, Bodysurfers, p. 271. See also Barry, I. (1989) Bodysurfer, Episode 1. John Sexton Productions in association with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. (66) Jacobs, Going Inland, pp. 43–44. (67) Malouf, D. (2008) Lone Pine. In D. Falconer (ed.) Penguin Book of the Road. Camberwell, Vic: Viking (Penguin Group), p. 357. (68) Royalauto Journal, August 1968, p. 11. (69) Lockwood, D. (1964) Up the Track. Adelaide: Rigby, pp. 124–125; National Archives of Australia website at http://guides.naa.gov.au/records-about-northern-territory/ part2/chapter16/16.11.aspx (accessed 6 December 2016). (70) Burstall, T. (1976) End Play. Hexagon Productions. (71) Spielberg, S. (1971) Duel. Universal. (72) Franklin, R. (1981) Roadgames. Essaness Pictures. (73) McLachlan, D. (1993) Deadly Chase. Driven Mad Production. (74) Books based on the Falconio case include: Bowles, R. (2005) Dead Centre: The Inside Story of the Peter Falconio Mystery. Scoresby, Vic: Five Mile Press; Maynard, R. (2006) Where’s Peter: Unravelling the Falconio Mystery. Pymble, NSW: HarperCollins; Shears, R. (2005) Bloodstain: The Vanishing of Peter Falconio. Frenchs Forest, NSW: New Holland; Toohey, P. (2007) The Killer Within. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin; and Williams, S. (2006) And then the Darkness: The Disappearance of Peter Falconio and the Trials of Joanne Lees. Sydney: ABC Books. (75) Ledwidge, R. (2007) Gone. Universal. (76) McLean, G. (2005) Wolf Creek. Australian Film Finance Corporation. (77) See ABC Media Watch (2014) Harnessing a Horror Story, 3 March, at http://www. abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s3956021.htm (accessed 9 October 2016). (78) ABC News website at http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-12-01/french-tourist-deadman-arrested-over-outback-stabbing/8082488 (accessed 6 December 2016).

9 Politics and Protest on the Road

On Sunday 7 March 1965, as thousands of voting rights activists walked over the crest of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, they were confronted by lines of state troopers who set upon the peaceful marchers with clubs, bullwhips, cattle-prods, tear gas and dogs, and trampled them with their horses when they refused to turn back. The scenes were among the most memorable images of the American civil rights era. ‘Bloody Sunday’ may have been a defeat for the protesters, but its broadcast on national television garnered support from around the nation. Two weeks later, 3200 people led by Martin Luther King Jr crossed the bridge and many continued along Route 80 to the steps of the state capitol in Montgomery for a rally. It was a defi ning moment in the civil rights movement, and eventually led to legislation ensuring that African Americans could exercise their right to vote.1 Apart from their role as transport corridors and tourist routes, roads have also been a stage for activism and protest. The fight for women’s suffrage in the early 20th century took to the streets with marches, and transcontinental envoys who drove from the West to the East Coast of America.2 Gandhi’s Salt March, over 240 miles and 23 days from Ahmedabad to the Arabian Sea coast in March–April 1930, was an act of civil disobedience protesting against the British monopoly on the salt trade, and an important milestone in India’s struggle for independence. 3 The road was a focal point for several pivotal events of the civil rights movement, including the Freedom Rides of 1961 and the March on Washington in August 1963. The 1960s and 1970s brought immense social upheaval in America and Australia, as in much of the Western world. The counterculture movement, Vietnam War, second-wave feminism and gay and lesbian rights campaigns saw the road become the scene of demonstrations and sometimes violent confrontations between activists and authorities. The road genre also became a vehicle for social commentary and political protest. From the 1970s onwards, road movies and literature explored Australia’s ongoing struggle with race relations in a much more conscious and direct way. Writers and fi lmmakers employed the road and road journeys as motifs through which to examine the legacy of colonialism and 204

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ideas about identity, heritage, memory and forgetting at both personal and national levels. The physical embodiment of the road itself – the extension of the black bitumen line across and around the continent – also became symbolic of the impact of colonisation and the disjunction between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia. ‘We’re Against Pigs and Everything They Stand For’: Social Commentary and the Road Genre

The road movie genre began to flourish in America from the late 1960s and 1970s, as the Western declined in popularity. The Western, with its traditional values and clearly defined opposition between good and evil, was becoming less relevant to a society struggling to come to grips with an increasingly complex social, cultural and political context – particularly, the rise of the youth counterculture and anxieties over the moral ambiguities of the Vietnam War. Road movies examined contemporary issues that concerned youth – alienation, rebellion, escape and the power of conservative forces – and often focused on protagonists operating outside mainstream society. Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969) epitomises the road genre of this era, emphasising male camaraderie, opposition to conventional social mores, the quest for a natural vision of America and a search for enlightenment.4 The film is also a social critique, a failed quest for the unobtainable ‘American Dream’. A poster summarised: ‘A man went looking for America. And couldn’t fi nd it anywhere.’ As Wyatt declares the night before their final, fatal ride: ‘You know Billy … we blew it.’ Ultimately, for Wyatt and Billy, who represent idealistic youth and the counterculture generation, the only real freedom they fi nd is in death, delivered at the hands of small-town Southern rednecks who hate and fear them.5 In Australia, following decades in which few local features were produced, the fi lm industry began to revive in the 1970s, buoyed by an injection of government funding, renewed interest in Australian identity, and a greater awareness by fi lmmakers of the international context in which they operated. As well as revisiting familiar bush legends and celebrating the ‘ocker’ larrikin, fi lms began to demonstrate an interest in social realism and issues relevant to contemporary Australian society, expressing elements of social and political protest.6 Unlike America, Australia produced only one major biker fi lm in the 1970s – Sandy Harbutt’s Stone (1974). While the film is by no means comparable to Easy Rider in terms of quality or cultural impact, it nevertheless reflects the mood of anti-establishment rebellion and alienation of the Vietnam generation and the biker subculture. Stone is an undercover drugs squad detective who joins an outlaw biker gang, the ‘Grave Diggers’, whose members are being murdered in what appears to be rival gang warfare. From the outset, the gang’s position, well outside the mainstream, is emphasised at the funeral of one of their members, ‘Go Down’. The gang

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members’ incantations over the grave call upon Satan to welcome one of his own and to look after their brother, there being no doubt as to where he will spend eternity. Initially hostile to the idea of allowing Stone into their circle, they tell him, ‘The reason we’re an outlaw gang is because we’re against pigs and everything they stand for’.7 The ‘establishment’ they oppose also includes the property developers who are really behind the biker murders, which followed when Go Down witnessed the assassination of an environmental activist. As Stone becomes more entrenched in the gang, riding and living with them, he comes to understand better the forces that have shaped their philosophy, and even to admire them for their sense of honour. Over a shared marijuana joint one night, some of the bikers reveal that most of the gang served in Vietnam and came home disillusioned, or had somehow been exploited by ‘the system’ and power structure of mainstream society. They found a sense of release and escape in hard-core motorcycle riding and, with other marginalised and outcast ‘fellow travellers’, formed their own community with their own laws. One explains to Stone the hypocrisy of ‘his’ law: All law is based on violence. … Your law sends blokes to somebody else’s country to fight someone they know nothing about. As long as you keep shooting them you get a medal. When you stop shooting them they put you in jail. Now someone’s knocking off our mates and you tell us we’re not supposed to do anything about it. That’s bullshit, man.

The strong identification between masculinity, motor technology and violence exhibited in Stone echoes Wake in Fright and foreshadows the Mad Max fi lms. It is a theme that recurs in film throughout the late 20th century as a commentary on Australia’s masculinist motoring culture.8 The Thin Black Line: Race and Racism on the Road

For most of the 19th and early 20th centuries Aboriginal peoples were ignored, marginalised or denigrated in most cultural representations. Charles Chauvel’s fi lm Jedda (1955) was ahead of its time in featuring Aboriginal actors in the leading roles and in its controversial subject matter, which attempted to demonstrate the failure of racial assimilation policies and the gulf between Aboriginal and white culture.9 From the mid-1960s, however, with increasing Aboriginal activism, including land rights and anti-discrimination campaigns, race relations became more prominent on the social, political and cultural agenda. The ‘Freedom Ride’ of February 1965, in which a group of students from the University of Sydney travelled by bus through north-west and northern New South Wales, protesting against segregation and other forms of racial discrimination, was based on similar civil rights campaigns in America. The Freedom Ride drew attention to Aboriginal living conditions,

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including health, education and housing, as well as racial disharmony, as the students filmed and recorded their encounters.10 Footage of protests outside swimming pools, clubs and other venues where Aboriginal people were barred in country towns, and the locals’ often hostile reactions, gained national media coverage. As the students’ bus left Walgett one night, a convoy of cars followed it out of town and ran it off the road. One of the students, Jim Spigelman, filmed the incident on his home movie camera. Evidence of racism and discrimination shocked the nation, fuelling further campaigns and putting pressure on the government.11 Voting rights in federal and state elections were granted to Aborigines by 1965, and the 1967 referendum amended the Australian Constitution to count Aboriginal people as part of the population. These events, together with the escalating land rights campaigns and the highly symbolic Tent Embassy set up on the lawns of Parliament House, Canberra in 1972, contributed to Indigenous Australians becoming more visible, and to growing awareness of their political and moral rights. Such awareness is evident in travellers’ narratives in the later 20th century. Until the 1960s and 1970s, most published accounts of travel in remote and outback Australia rarely engaged with Aboriginal society and culture other than on a superficial level. Many were derogatory or dismissive. An exception was Rex Ellis, who incorporated visits to Aboriginal sites of significance on his outback ‘safaris’ in the 1960s. In his introduction to Ellis’s Bush Safari, published in 1976, Vincent Serventy acknowledged Aboriginal peoples’ unique relationship with their country, ‘through a hundred thousand years of living with the land’. He praised Ellis for being among those who were ‘dimly beginning to share their unity with the landscape’.12 Filmmakers and writers also began to portray Aboriginal people and culture in a more realistic and sensitive way, as well as to contribute to the political debates of the times by engaging with issues of injustice and discrimination. As discussed in Chapter 5, Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971) is an early example of a nuanced exploration of the clash of black and white cultures. Phillip Noyce’s Backroads (1977) addresses Aboriginal race relations much more directly, using the framework of a joyride. Jack (Bill Hunter), a white drifter, steals a car and picks up Gary (Gary Foley), a young Aborigine whose car has broken down in Collarenabri.13 After heading first to Bourke Reserve, where Gary lives, to collect Gary’s Uncle Joe, they then drive towards the coast, as Uncle Joe has never seen the sea. They pick up other hitchhikers along the way, including Frenchman Jean-Claude and Anna, a young white woman who simply wants to escape from her ‘chained’ life. Scenes at the reserve and along the road provide opportunities for sharp criticism of dispossession and policies of assimilation, as well as Aboriginal–white gender relations. Much of the fi lm’s overt political protest is articulated through conversations during the journey. As they drive through the reserve, Jack

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remarks ‘What a dump!’, to which Gary responds, ‘This is what you white folk have done to us’. An Aboriginal woman explains to Anna, ‘There’s not a thing a blackfella can call his own – until he’s six feet under’. She elaborates on the loss of land, culture and the killing infl icted upon the Aboriginal population with the coming of the white man. While driving, Jack admits to Gary that he once befriended a young Aboriginal woman hitchhiker, but after a drinking session with mates, the men gang-raped her. When he saw her again she had become an alcoholic. Social commentary in the fi lm extends to criticism of Australian racism generally, as Jean-Claude complains about the way he is treated as a ‘wog’. Gary explains that the one thing he must understand about Australians is that they ‘can’t handle anyone who’s different’. After an argument, Jack forces Jean-Claude out of the car. Gary wishes him luck, advising that the only way to survive is to let people like Jack think they have the upper hand, and saying, ‘You enjoy my country’.14 The fi lm offers no resolution and the road here is no place of redemption, escape or freedom for any of the characters.15 When they fi nally reach the coast, Anna takes off in the car while the others are swimming. Attempting to steal another car, Joe kills the owner who arrives unexpectedly, making them the targets of a police hunt. When Joe and Jack are captured, Gary’s last stand takes on the character of a Western, as he hides behind rocks near the beach while police surround him. He shouts a fi nal, defiant ‘Fuck you!’ as he stands up, but is immediately shot and killed. As for many protagonists in the road genre, the only ‘escape’ from their situation is death.16 Backroads thus demonstrates an awareness of its genre’s heritage while also representing the beginning of greater social realism in the depiction of race relations in Australia. The fi lm Backlash (1987), directed by Bill Bennett, explores concepts of Aboriginal versus European ‘justice’ through a road trip in which two white police officers, Trevor and Nikki, escort Kath, an Aboriginal woman charged with murder, from Sydney to Broken Hill, where she is to face court.17 When the openly racist Trevor insists on taking a short cut, turning off the main highway onto a dirt back road, two flat tyres leave them stranded in the middle of nowhere. In a scenario similar to Walkabout, Trevor and Nikki become dependent on Kath and her knowledge of the country for survival. Away from the main road it is Trevor and Nikki who are most lost. Personal and racial barriers begin to break down as power relations are reversed. Nikki, who is studying to be a lawyer, becomes disillusioned with the police and justice system as she comes to believe in Kath’s innocence. Kath explains that she was subjected to continued sexual harassment by the publican of the hotel in Quandong where she worked as a barmaid, and that he was attempting to rape her when his wife came home unexpectedly and caught him. Kath tells Nikki that white law is not fair, but Aboriginal law, based on payback, provides greater justice.

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Trevor also reveals that he is haunted by the past, having been demoted to ‘country chauffeur’ following a drugs operation in which an Aboriginal boy was killed. Trevor took the blame for his partner and has suffered guilt, anguish and bitterness ever since. In a subplot, a mysterious Aboriginal man appears to be tracking the party. The fi lm ends when the man spears Trevor in a payback killing to avenge the death of the Aboriginal boy. Backlash provides another exploration of one of the road genre’s key themes – the difficulties of escaping one’s past. The Road and National Memory

In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the themes of memory and the past haunting the present took on particular significance in relation to issues of race relations and national memory in Australia. From the late 1970s, academic historians, influenced by New Left critiques of racism, became increasingly interested in Aboriginal history and the history of Aboriginal–European relations in the colonial and postcolonial period. A number of works published in the 1980s emphasised Aboriginal responses to colonialism. They included oral histories as well as narratives and autobiographies giving greater voice to Aboriginal people themselves.18 It was in the 1990s, however, that these issues entered public consciousness more prominently. Reports from a Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, which concluded in 1991, pointed to wider social, cultural and legal issues. Former Prime Minister Paul Keating’s now famous ‘Redfern Speech’, delivered at Redfern Park in Sydney on 10 December 1992, was a defi ning moment. Keating spoke frankly about the theft of Aboriginal land and children, and the impact of diseases, alcohol, murder, violence and discrimination inflicted by the policies and practices of non-Indigenous Australians. This was the first time that a Commonwealth Government had acknowledged the dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.19 The landmark High Court decisions of Mabo (1992–1993) and Wik (1996) recognised the existence of native title on Australian land. In 1997 the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission published its report on the ‘Stolen Generations’, based on the Commission’s review of past governments’ ‘separation’ policies whereby, between 1910 and 1970, Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their parents. The report, entitled Bringing Them Home, included testimonies given by members of the Stolen Generations, graphically telling of the physical and psychological trauma they suffered. 20 While academic works continued to proliferate, debate spilled dramatically into the public sphere and became increasingly politicised. The so-called ‘History Wars’ erupted over the interpretation of the history and impact of European settlement on the Aboriginal population. A backlash against what historian Geoff rey Blainey called the ‘Black Armband’ 21

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view of Australian history was led by conservative commentators, including former academic Keith Windschuttle, and was taken up by Prime Minister John Howard, who won office in 1996. 22 Howard’s stance was partly a response to views expressed by his predecessor, Keating. He was also reacting to the emergence of Pauline Hanson and her One Nation Party, which threatened to undermine the Liberal Party’s traditional conservative constituency. In her maiden speech to parliament in 1996, Senator Hanson railed against ‘political correctness’ and special treatment of Aboriginal Australians. Howard and other prominent conservatives argued against an excessively pessimistic interpretation of Australian history that emphasised the negative impact of European colonisation. Such a history challenged and disturbed the traditional progressive narrative, which focused on the positive legacy of settlement and the triumphs of European and Anglo-Celtic achievement. Howard was keen to promote a more reassuring and unifying national story, of which Australians could justifiably be proud, rather than wallowing in ‘endless and agonised navel-gazing about who we are’. 23 As the ‘History Wars’ raged in the academic and popular press, resurfacing from time to time over several years, Australians were engaged in a public contest over the nature and control of national memory. The influence of this debate is apparent in creative responses as writers and fi lmmakers also grappled with questions about Australia’s past and identity. The protagonist in Richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide (1994), Aljaz Cosini, was born in Trieste to a Yugoslavian mother, Sonja, and an Australian father, Harry. Aljaz came to Australia as a baby with his unmarried parents in 1958. The novel explores several themes, but predominantly it is a story about journeying, fate, identity, history, memory, and the impact of the past on the present. Harry’s Aboriginal ancestry was a source of shame for some of his family, such as his Auntie Ellie, who denied it completely. Aljaz comments on the ‘lies’ and denials of Tasmanian history, for example, the lies that ‘Blackfellas had died out. That the exconvicts had left the island for gold rushes in other countries. That only pure free white settler stock remained’. The descendants of those ‘blackfellows and convicts’ who remained, ‘sick with syphilis and sadness and fear and madness and loss’, reacted by denying their ancestry. 24 Both Aljaz and his father led itinerant lifestyles, going wherever work and fate led them. Much of this travelling, however, was inspired by a desire to escape painful situations or memories, even to escape oneself. In one of his visions, as Aljaz is travelling through suburban Perth in a taxi, he ponders the ‘anchored’ lives of those living in the houses, driving their cars, tethered to the steering wheel each day commuting between home and work. He wonders if perhaps they also dream of escape: What if nobody was anchored but everyone pretended to be? … What if nobody knew where they came from or where they were going? … Maybe,

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thought Aljaz, just maybe everybody else was also on the road … all of them and all of us seeking constant flight from our pasts, our families, and our places of birth … And maybe all the rest of them were as wrong as I was, thought Aljaz, and maybe it was time to walk off the road and head back into the bush whence we came. 25

Understanding and coming to terms with one’s past is a major theme of the novel and clearly extends to the Tasmanian and national context. The idea of getting ‘off the road’ and ‘back into the bush’ recalls Harry’s circuitous drives, and could suggest the need to engage with the past and embrace other more authentic, Indigenous ways of seeing, rather than speeding headlong into the future on highways, running from and obliterating uncomfortable memories. For Aljaz, his visions of the past are too much to bear: Why do I feel as if I am being destroyed by history? As if the past is some snake venom … slowly tearing my mind apart piece by piece? I, who felt I had lived in a country beyond history! Who had no future and wanted no past! I never asked for these visions, was content to remain ignorant about who I was and where I came from. … The past is a nightmare and I want to wake up and I can’t. I was happy in my way, running from all this – for now I can see this is what I quite rightly was running from. Who in their right mind wants to own up to all that?26

Throughout this novel, Flanagan exploits the idea of constant movement as a means of escape – a theme central to the road genre – as an allegory for the desire to escape from confronting the less desirable aspects of Australia’s history. Tom and Zoe Drewe’s road trip in Going Inland also facilitates both memory and amnesia. A road sign to Noonkanbah triggers memories of the 1980 conflict over mining in the Kimberley region when the Aboriginal community protested against the violation of sacred sites on Noonkanbah Station. Zoe recalls the tension and fear and the ugly scenes as mining trucks crossed picket lines, but she notes that, ‘No one ever mentioned it now. It was as though it had never happened’. As Zoe becomes more aware of the racism and brutality that lies beneath the surface in Australia, she confronts Tom and his own intransigence: ‘Terrible things have happened in this country, they happen now and … we don’t acknowledge it. We call it by other names. Or we stay silent.’27 Jean Baudrillard described driving as ‘a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated’. 28 In this novel the road journey is also a means of negating memory, as the desire for constant movement, to keep going, not lingering in one place too long, impels the traveller to look forward rather than back. After a spell in Darwin, Tom and Zoe ‘wanted the road again, the smooth clean momentum of escape’. 29 The all-consuming task of driving, especially with a large camper vehicle or towing a caravan, completely engages the mind, leaving little space for other thought or activity, creating an insular world

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disconnected from its broader context. Smooth, straight outback roads also produce a hypnotic effect, further distancing a vehicle’s occupants from reality. In the late 20th century, with anxieties over the past again resurfacing, the act of driving around the country involved both discovery and obliteration of the past through selective amnesia. 30 Throughout Going Inland, Jacobs draws attention to the inadequacy of maps as spatial representations of the landscape, and the way in which this contributes to the selective amnesia of the road trip. Just as European representations cannot communicate the depth of meaning, spirituality and history imbued in the landscape, maps reveal little. Zoe thinks: ‘The map gave you the names and the distance but it didn’t tell you anything else.’31 Tom and Zoe are often ‘caught out by the map’, fi nding that their selected destination turns out to be ‘a signpost, an abandoned fuel pump on a concrete slab’. 32 They become increasingly mistrustful: ‘The map gave them no certainty. It was evidence of calculated measurement – nothing more; an artifice of ownership.’33 What the maps leave blank is more telling than what they include, as Zoe realises as they skirt around the Maralinga area in South Australia. This was the site of nuclear testing in the 1950s and 1960s, which had a devastating and long-term impact on the Aboriginal inhabitants. On the touring map: The southern interior, from the Bight to the Northern Territory border, was blank. … The large map showed only the boundary highways and the network of major internal roads. ‘You could drive along this highway and have no idea that Maralinga is in there’, Zoe said. ‘No signs, no indication of a nuclear landscape just over the hills.’ … It was easier to delete it, leave it out; the mapmakers deciding what the tourists needed to know. A quick safe passage around the edge was best for everyone. 34

Jacobs’ novel provides an insight into the way the physical structure of the road, the way it is travelled and its spatial representation can become complicit in erasing memory. Kiera Lindsey’s study of the Hume Highway examines the process by which Aboriginal space was reconfigured as colonial space, commencing with explorer Hamilton Hume’s act of drawing a line through blank space on a government chart. Lindsey argues that the highway was made by various acts of intrusion and negation by the Europeans – drawing, walking and writing the road. 35 The modern Hume Highway, with its four-lane dual carriageway, has become for many a ‘quick, boring route’, emblematic of the homogenised interstate freeways disconnected from the landscape with little to remind travellers of its historical associations. 36 In Bernard Cohen’s novel, Hardly Beach Weather (2002), Jack and his ex-girlfriend, Maria, deliberately avoid the Hume Highway on their journey from Sydney to Adelaide, where Maria is to meet up with her new boyfriend. They prefer to take a ‘real way’, travelling via Bathurst and the Mid-Western, Newell and Sturt Highways rather than the ‘boring’ Hume.

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The novel also explores the nature of memory through the symbolism of the road trip, in which the two former lovers are constantly accosted by strangers who insist on telling their own life stories of love and loss. Jack comments that perhaps they should have taken the Hume after all: ‘The alternative road may have destroyed memory whereas the route we have chosen seems to trigger it.’37 Maria is a photographer and along the way she photographs war memorials for a project on national memory. She is interested in ‘the cumulative resonance, the entire country a war memorial’. 38 Jack, however, perceives the irony in her endeavour, seeing in the landscape they have traversed constant memorials to forgetting in the obliteration of an Indigenous landscape by a European one, which includes the road. He says: I think to accuse Maria of participating in a cover-up, of furthering misrepresentations of Australia … almost the entire country dedicated to losing its past and she portrays it in memorials of historical events. History is the whole trouble here, in this country, I could tell her, or its defi nition as a series of commemorative monuments. What about the ‘memorials’ to forgetting, Maria? Irrigated fields to the horizon, as though this was the way the landscape had always been; rabbits’ eyes suddenly green by the side of the road – or, for that matter, cats’ eyes reflecting car headlights – appear as natural as swollen wombats lying stiffly on the Sturt Highway’s clay verges. 39

Tim Bowden’s road trip narrative is one of few accounts to acknowledge the extent to which the ‘natural’ Australian landscape was in fact shaped by Aboriginal land use. In concluding his book, Bowden records that his strongest impressions of the journey were ancient Aboriginal rock paintings which reflected ‘how incredibly ancient Australia’s land forms were, with its flora – and indeed fauna – influenced by fi restick farming by Aboriginal people for 40,000 years, perhaps longer. It was an unimaginable time scale compared with European history’.40 Bowden also addresses uncomfortable truths about the impact of European colonisation on Aboriginal peoples, acknowledging that pastoral expansion into the Northern Territory meant that Aboriginal tribes were decimated, their wells poisoned and, in many cases, groups massacred.41 A Dark Stain upon the Landscape

The image of the modern highway as a black line imposed unnaturally across the landscape recurs in works such as Going Inland. For example, the Stuart Highway ‘dissected the landscape like a magnetic strip’, while the ‘Lasseter Highway was a straight black line dissecting the red dunes. … Pared to the ultimate bare line; a minimal elegance of geometrical precision’.42 These descriptions are stark and clinical. In other works, the physical imprint of the road takes a more sinister form.

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Catherine Jinks uses the imagery of the bitumen as a dark stain on the landscape as another symbol of the horrific legacy of colonialism, racism and violence against Aboriginal people in her novel, The Road (2004). Following the murder of an Aboriginal woman and her son by the woman’s white ex-husband on a property near Broken Hill, a ‘curse’ is unleashed upon travellers, including the killer, driving the Silver City Highway between Broken Hill and Mildura. After the murder, travellers on the highway are no longer able to make any progress; no matter how long they drive, they get nowhere. The story was inspired by the Aboriginal legend of Ngurunderi, who killed a wombat. The animal’s spilled blood then took the form of a man, who continued to hound Ngurunderi. Upon resuming his journey, Ngurunderi made no progress, repeatedly passing the same sandhills and the same trees. He could not escape the creature, which devoured every living thing in its path.43 In a tale of ever-escalating horror, eventually the entire highway becomes a quagmire of blood and gore, a mass of roadkill: Blood had trickled off its bitumen surface, which was uneven with gobbets of tissue – with reaching bones. Yet around it, on either side, stretched red earth and dry grass, saltbush and acacia, all of it as clean as the wind. Through a countryside innocent of any dark stain rolled a thread of putrefaction.44

In this novel, the Aboriginal characters’ close identification with the ancient, natural and spiritual world is often contrasted with the killer’s association with the modern world dominated by technology and violence – guns, cars and the road. The road as ‘a thread of putrefaction’ through an ‘innocent countryside’ could be read as an allegory for the impact of European colonisation and its – often bloody – aftermath. The connection between roads as symbols of colonialism and its impact is also strong in Samuel Wagan Watson’s poetry collection, Smoke Encrypted Whispers. Watson, an Aboriginal man of Bandjalung, Birri Gubba, German and Irish ancestry, identifies roads and cars with the technology of the ‘settler/invader’. His poetry details the damage caused by that technology, which also signifies the ‘devastating and ongoing effects of colonialism on Aboriginal peoples and culture’. One of his poems describes the bitumen as a ‘vine’ wandering across the bora ring, thus desecrating sacred ceremonial ground.45 Perhaps the most eloquent representation of the darker symbolism of the road for Aboriginal Australia was depicted by Gordon Lansden (also Landsen), an Aboriginal elder of the Kudanji peoples. His painting of his ancestral Frog Dreaming country near Borroloola in the Northern Territory (c.2005) portrays Old Man Frog hiding from the devil, represented by ‘the modern double-lane black bitumen highway’, which was built for large ore trucks and cuts straight through the Frog Dreaming country (see Figure 9.1).46

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Figure 9.1 Gordon Lansden (Milindirrie), untitled painting of Frog Dreaming country near Borroloola, NT. Reproduced with permission of Renatta Ahwon. Mayne, A. (2008) Introduction. In A. Mayne (ed.) Beyond the Black Stump: Histories of Outback Australia. Kent Town, SA: Wakefield Press, p. 9.

Aboriginal Voices on the Road

In the early 21st century, a number of fi lms exploring Aboriginal history, culture and identity emerged, focusing on Aboriginal viewpoints and experiences. They include Rolf de Heer’s The Tracker, Phillip Noyce’s Rabbit Proof Fence and Ivan Sen’s Beneath Clouds, all released in 2002 and, more recently, Richard Frankland’s Stone Bros. (2009). The fi rst two films are off-road rather than road movies. The Tracker, set in 1922, is the story of the search across outback Australia for an Aboriginal man accused of murdering a white woman. Rabbit Proof Fence, based on a book by Doris Pilkington Garimara and set in 1931, focuses on three Aboriginal girls who were taken from their families to be trained as domestic servants as part of the government’s enforced removal and assimilation policies which produced the Stolen Generations. The girls escape and attempt to return home by following the rabbit proof fence across Western Australia for over 1500 miles.47 Both Beneath Clouds and Stone Bros. use road journeys to explore themes in which the concepts of home and belonging are central, in terms both of place and of racial identification. In Beneath Clouds, the paths of two teenagers of Aboriginal descent cross as they each attempt to journey from Moree to Sydney. Lena is seeking her Irish father, with whose cultural heritage she wants to identify, rejecting her Aboriginality, while Vaughan, more obviously Aboriginal in appearance, is escaping from a prison farm to visit his dying mother. Vaughan is resentful of white society, although he and Lena, whom he mistakes for white, do form a bond of sorts. The road and the landscape shots accentuate both Vaughan and Lena’s alienation from this country, which is at once threatening, hostile

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and dismissive, as cars and trucks roar past and the fear of police pursuit or harassment is ever present.48 Stone Bros. offers a much more humorous examination of cultural alienation, as Eddie and his cousin Charlie drive from Perth to Kalgoorlie to return a stone which Eddie’s uncle gave him when he left for the city, telling him that he must bring it ‘home’ again when the time was right. Like Beneath Clouds, the film highlights the tensions and anxieties inherent in being caught between differing cultures, not fully belonging to either. Eddie is keen to reconnect with his own culture, but Charlie, who goes along for the ride to escape a vengeful and hostile girlfriend, is cynical and interested only in partying, smoking joints and living for the moment. At the heart of the antagonism between Eddie and Charlie is Eddie’s resentment that Charlie is much blacker than he is. Throughout his life, Eddie has often been identified as white, and this is a source of great pain and confusion for him. The fi lm also mocks white Australian attitudes towards Aboriginal culture, particularly the commodification of and phoney identification with that culture. For example, in their travels Eddie and Charlie meet a ‘New Age Copper’ (Peter Phelps), who comes from Melbourne but, after enrolling in a series of workshops, is about to acquire his own ‘Dreaming’ in outback Western Australia. Towards the end of the journey, their relationship having been tested to breaking point, Charlie and Eddie come closer together as Charlie reveals that he too has a stone which his uncle gave him, and he also wants to return it ‘home’. When Eddie says, ‘Maybe I’m not cut out for all this culture stuff ’, Charlie replies, ‘It’s not just culture, it’s home’.49 It is clear that many of the themes that continue to resurface in imagining, experiencing and representing the road – including: the search for and defi nition of ‘home’; memory and forgetting; and environmental impact – remain central in the Australian road genre as we enter the early 21st century, although the context and means of expression have changed dramatically. These themes take on particular significance when viewed from the perspective of Indigenous Australians, and in light of recent developments which have brought past injustices to the forefront of national consciousness and political debate. It is important to note, however, that as well as negative representations there is also evidence of Aboriginal peoples’ positive engagement with roads and motor vehicles by appropriating the new modes of transport for their own social and cultural purposes. 50 By the 1950s, many Aboriginal communities in remote regions had embraced cars and roads as a means of maintaining social and kinship connections, accessing seasonal work, and continuing trade, ceremonial, hunting and gathering activities, despite efforts by authorities to restrict their movements. 51 Anthropologist Gertrude Stotz noted that, by the late 1980s, ‘Toyota’ had become a generic term among Aborigines for all four-wheel-drives and a

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highly prized symbol of restored mobility that had been lost through years of institutionalisation. 52 Diana Young’s research among the Pitjantjatjara and Yankuntyiatiara peoples of South Australia in the late 1990s revealed that cars were considered essential to life in remote bush communities, not only for practical purposes, but because of ‘the emotional compulsion to be mobile, to be moving through country especially one’s own’. Young found that, for many Aboriginal people, car travel reinforced their spiritual connection with the land rather than rendering the relationship more distant or inauthentic. The act of travelling through country could transform both the vehicle and its passengers through access to ancestral power, and travelling all day inside a car on a hunting expedition could be as emotionally satisfying as ‘physical contact with red earth’. Road journeys also provide opportunities for travellers to tell stories about the history of the road, and the people, places and events associated with it, thus passing on community memories. 53 Also worth noting is the distinction between fictional and non-fictional representations in their treatment of Aboriginal and European relationships to the road and landscape. Novels and films often depict that relationship as antithetical, portraying a negative or critical view of European perspectives. Bruce Chatwin’s novel The Songlines, which was first published in 1987, offers a more nuanced understanding which illustrates the intersections and overlays between Aboriginal and European conceptions of space and mobility. Closely based on the English travel writer’s journey through Central Australia, the book blends fiction and non-fiction; it is non-linear and fragmented in structure, comprising elements of a novel and travel narrative. It also incorporates musings, quotes and vignettes from Chatwin’s notebooks, which were compiled over several years during his travels throughout the world in a quest to better understand nomadism, which Chatwin came to see as a unifying human impulse. 54 In Australia, Chatwin meets Arkady, an Australian of Russian descent, who is mapping Aboriginal sacred sites along the proposed route of the new Alice Springs to Darwin railway line. Chatwin accompanies Arkady as they drive Aboriginal informants over their traditional hunting grounds to identify sites that need to be protected. Through journeying, encounters and discussions with Arkady and members of the Aboriginal and white communities, Chatwin learns some of the songlines – Chatwin’s own term – of Central Australia and their significance for Aboriginal people. He learns more about the complex relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures, including conflict and racism, but he also witnesses genuine attempts at understanding and mutual respect. He sees a connection between the importance of song in Aboriginal culture and that of other nomadic peoples. The interweaving of Aboriginal and European perspectives is illustrated by a scene in the fi nal chapter in which an Aboriginal man, Limpy,

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travels with Arkady, Chatwin and their party to the Cycad Valley, an immensely important place in Limpy’s Native Cat songline. As they drive, Limpy recites his song, but the Land Cruiser is moving so fast that he has to rush the lines. When Arkady realises what is happening, he slows the car to a walking pace, and instantly Limpy ‘matched his tempo to the new speed’. In doing so, he became happier and at one with the landscape. Chatwin remarks: ‘You knew that, as far as [Limpy] was concerned, he was the Native Cat.’55 The book was unusual and influential, becoming a worldwide bestseller, and it has been in print continuously. While also controversial and flawed, The Songlines represents an attempt to engage more deeply with Aboriginal cultural heritage, to give voice to Indigenous perspectives and to publicise those views to a wide audience, both in Australia and globally. The road continues to be a stage for activism and protest. On 28 May 2000, over 250,000 people walked across the Sydney Harbour Bridge in a show of support for reconciliation between Indigenous and nonIndigenous Australians. It was the largest political demonstration in Australian history. In the following months, millions more marched at locations around the country. 56 The marches also aimed to demonstrate widespread public demand for an official apology to the Stolen Generations by the Australian government. Then Prime Minister John Howard’s obstinate refusal to make such an apology was a source of ongoing tension and protest for many years. The apology was fi nally realised in February 2008 under Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s leadership. Another step towards reconciliation on the road is the Canning Stock Route Project, which began in 2006 as a joint initiative between the National Museum of Australia and FORM, a Western Australian nonprofit cultural organisation. The project tells the story of the stock route, which traverses the deserts of Western Australia, from the perspective of the Aboriginal people whose country it crossed, and who lived and worked along the route. Since the late 1970s the Canning Stock Route has become a popular and world-renowned four-wheel-drive and adventure tourism route. While the non-Indigenous history of the route and its importance for the pastoral and mining industries is fairly well known, the stories presented in paintings, cultural artefacts, fi lm, photography and oral histories collected during the project reveal another side of Australia’s ‘frontier legend’. Many Aboriginal people were displaced and suffered mistreatment at the hands of the explorers, surveyors and droving parties who encroached across their lands and songlines. The impact of contact, confl ict and survival on Aboriginal land, people and culture is told through Aboriginal voices. Outcomes of the project include a website and permanent exhibition, Yiwarra Kuju, meaning ‘one road’, which opened at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra in July 2010. The innovative, interactive exhibit attracted record attendances and has since toured nationally and internationally. FORM also developed the ‘One

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Road’ digital application, which is both a travel guide and a cultural resource, and makes the rich archive of material relating to Aboriginal cultural heritage resulting from the project available to local communities and the wider public, including travellers. 57 In America and Australia, the road has increasingly become a place where politics and protest are enacted, particularly since the turbulent years of the later 20th century. For both countries, race relations have been a major issue, prompting physical and cultural activism. While Australia has drawn inspiration from America in both the form and expression of that activism – in its ‘Freedom Rides’, street demonstrations, and in the use of the road genre as a means of political protest – those cultural forms have been adapted effectively, and new forms created, to tell stories with distinctly Australian voices and perspectives. Aboriginal stories are an integral part of the heritage of roads and routes. Yet a process of remembering and forgetting, or selective memory, operates in the way in which roads are ‘culturally constructed’ and interpreted for heritage and tourism purposes. The fi nal chapter focuses on three of Australia’s best-known roads, examining their history, significance and interpretation, which often privileges particular stories while ‘forgetting’ others. As will be seen, this process of cultural construction also has a political dimension, with far-reaching implications for the nation’s understanding of its past. Notes – Chapter 9: Politics and Protest on the Road (1)

(2) (3)

(4) (5)

(6)

(7) (8)

Hampton, H. and Fayer, S. (1990) Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s. New York: Bantam Books, pp. 209, 227–229, 236–237. For a discussion of the ‘suff rage envoys’, see Clarsen, G. (2008) Eat My Dust: Early Women Motorists. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, Chapter 5. Salt was a staple of the Indian diet, but the British Salt Acts prohibited Indians from collecting or selling it. See http://www.history.com/topics/salt-march (accessed 14 December 2016). Carfrae, M. (1994) Roads to heaven: The American road genre in fi lm and literature 1945–1992. MPhil thesis, University of Sydney, pp. 89–90, 100. Wyatt and Billy also reference classic Western figures: lawman, Wyatt Earp and outlaw, Billy the Kid. Wyatt, also called ‘Captain America’, has the stars and stripes of the American flag adorning his jacket, helmet and motorcycle, while Billy wears Native American-style buckskin pants and jacket, and a cowboy hat. Carfrae, Roads to heaven, pp. 106–107. Pike, A. and Cooper, R. (1998) Australian Film 1900–1977. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, pp. 234–235, 250; Shirley, G. and Adams, B. (1983) Australian Cinema: The First Eighty Years. Sydney: Angus & Robertson and Currency Press, pp. 242, 267; Turner, G. (1993) The genres are American: Australian narrative, Australian fi lm, and the problem of genre. Literature Film Quarterly 21 (2), 105. Harbutt, S. (1974) Stone. Hedon Productions. Other examples include: The Cars that Ate Paris (1974), The F.J. Holden (1977), Dead End Drive-In (1986) and Metal Skin (1994). See Biber, K. (2000) ‘A certain look in the eye’: Masculinity in Australian cinema from 1970. PhD thesis, University

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(11) (12) (13)

(14) (15) (16) (17) (18)

(19)

(20) (21) (22)

(23) (24) (25) (26) (27) (28) (29) (30)

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of Sydney; and Biber, K. (2001) The threshold moment: Masculinity at home and on the road in Australian cinema. Limina 7. Shirley and Adams, Australian Cinema, pp. 198–199. Davison, G., Hirst, J. and Macintyre, S. (eds) (2001) The Oxford Companion to Australian History (revised edn). South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, p. 271. See Curthoys, A. (2002b) Freedom Ride: A Freedom Rider Remembers. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin. National Museum of Australia website at http://indigenousrights.net.au/civil_rights/ freedom_ride,_1965 (accessed 12 December 2016). Ellis, R. (1976) Bush Safari. Adelaide: Rigby, pp. 10, 32. Graeme Turner describes Bill Hunter as ‘an actor who stands as an icon of hard-core Australian values’. See Turner, G. (1989) Art directing history: The period fi lm. In A. Moran and T. O’Regan (eds) The Australian Screen. Ringwood, Vic: Penguin Books Australia, p. 108. Noyce, P. (1977) Backroads. Australian Film Commission. Biber, A certain look in the eye, pp. 58–59. Carfrae, Roads to heaven, p. 26; Turner, The genres are American, p. 110. Bennett, B. (1987) Backlash. Mermaid Beach Productions. Curthoys, A. (2001) Aboriginal history. In Davison, G., Hirst, J. and Macintyre, S. (eds) (2001) The Oxford Companion to Australian History (revised edn). South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, pp. 4–5. Examples include: Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier (1981) and Invasion and Resistance (1982); Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians (1981); Ann McGrath, Born in the Cattle (1987); Bain Attwood, The Making of the Aborigines (1989) and Power, Knowledge and Aborigines (1992); Sally Morgan, My Place (1987). Gilchrist, C. (2015) Redfern Park. Dictionary of Sydney. See http://dictionaryof sydney.org/entry/redfern_park (accessed 25 February 2016). The full text of Keating’s speech can be found on the National Film and Sound Archive website at  https://www.nfsa.gov.au/collection/curated/keating-speech-redfern-address (accessed 15 August 2018). Davison, Hirst and Macintyre (eds) Oxford Companion, p. 617. Blainey, G. (1993) Drawing up a balance sheet of our history. Quadrant, July– August, 10–15. Windschuttle published several articles in journals such as Quadrant, and a series of books on The Fabrication of Australian History, between 1994 and 2009, aiming to discredit accounts of the extent of frontier violence and racism in Australia. See Curthoys, Aboriginal history, p. 5; Macintyre, S. and Clark, A. (2004) The History Wars. Carlton: Melbourne University Press, p. 3. Flanagan, R. (1994) Death of a River Guide. Ringwood, Vic: McPhee Gribble, pp. 259–260. Flanagan, Death of a River Guide, pp. 224–225. Flanagan, Death of a River Guide, pp. 264–265. Jacobs, P. (1998) Going Inland. South Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, pp. 22, 96. Baudrillard, J. (1989) America (trans. C. Turner). London: Verso, p. 9. Also cited in Carfrae, Roads to heaven, pp. 19–20. Jacobs, Going Inland, p. 41. For the older grey nomads, who are referred to as SADs (‘See Australia and Die’) by one of the characters in Tim Winton’s Dirt Music, the constant movement is also perhaps a way of escaping their own mortality (Winton, T. (2001) Dirt Music. Sydney: Pan Macmillan Australia, p. 220). This sentiment is also present in Jacobs’ novel. After talking at the caravan park with a much younger traveller who had visited Arnhem Land and other places beyond their reach, the older generation felt uncomfortable: ‘The next day they would be anxious to move on, covering their

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(44) (45)

(46) (47) (48)

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tracks, concealing, in their concentration on the mechanics of driving, their knowledge that they had waited too long’ (Jacobs, Going Inland, p. 66). Jacobs, Going Inland, p. 24. Jacobs, Going Inland, p. 45. Jacobs, Going Inland, p. 47. Jacobs, Going Inland, p. 186. Lindsey, K. (2006) Drawing a line: The colonial genesis of the Hume Highway. MA thesis, The Australian Centre, University of Melbourne. Lindsey, K. (2004a) Free way: The Hume Highway as a spatial narrative of nation. Traffi c: An Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Journal 5, 131. Cohen, B. (2002) Hardly Beach Weather. Sydney: Harper Collins, pp. 292–293. Cohen, Hardly Beach Weather, pp. 267–268. Cohen, Hardly Beach Weather, p. 293. Bowden, T. (2002) Penelope Bungles to Broome. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, pp. 300–301. Bowden, Penelope, pp. 20–21. Jacobs, Going Inland, pp. 42, 153. Jinks, C. (2004) The Road. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, Prologue. Reproduced with permission of the author and Allen & Unwin. The story appears in Reed, A.W. (1999) Aboriginal Myths, Legends and Fables. Sydney: Reed New Holland, pp. 57–65. Jinks, The Road, pp. 297–298. See Bode, K. (2011) ‘We’re not truckin’ around’: On and off -road in Samuel Wagan Watson’s Smoke Encrypted Whispers. Humanities Research 17 (2), 109– 110, 115. Mayne, A. (2008) Introduction. In A. Mayne (ed.) Beyond the Black Stump: Histories of Outback Australia. Kent Town, SA: Wakefield Press, pp. 8–9. International Movie Database (IMDB) website at http://www.imdb.com/title/ tt0252444 (accessed May 2011). See Byrnes, P. (2002) ‘Beneath Clouds’ review. Sydney Morning Herald, 23 May at http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/05/22/1022038435433.html (accessed May 2011). Frankland, R. (2009) Stone Bros. ScreenWest. See, for example, Clarsen, G. (2002) Still moving: Bush mechanics in the Central Desert. Australian Humanities Review 25 (March) at http://pandora.nla.gov.au/ pan/10116/20020912-0000/www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-March-2002/ clarsen.html (accessed February 2012), in which Clarsen discusses Aboriginal relationships to ‘car culture’ as presented in the television series, ‘Bush Mechanics’. A special issue of Humanities Research published in 2011 and devoted to ‘Automobilities in Non-Urban Australia’ includes a number of articles relating to Aboriginal engagement with automobility. Clarsen, G. (2010) Automobiles and Australian modernisation: The Redex AroundAustralia Trials of the 1950s. Australian Historical Studies 41 (3), 367; Brady, M. (1999) The politics of space and mobility: Controlling the Ooldea/Yalata Aborigines, 1952–1982. Aboriginal History 23, 5–8. Stotz, G. (2001) The colonising vehicle. In Miller, D. (ed.) Car Cultures. Oxford: Berg, pp. 223, 227. Young, D. (2001) The life and death of cars: Private vehicles on the Pitjantjatjara Lands, South Australia. In Miller, D. (ed.) Car Cultures. Oxford: Berg, pp. 37, 43, 53, 46. Stewart, R. (2012) Walking with Chatwin. The New York Review of Books, 25 June. See http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2012/06/25/walking-with-bruce-chatwin/ (accessed 19 March 2018); Chatwin, B. (1988) The Songlines. London: Picador. Chatwin, Songlines, pp. 322–324.

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(56) Reconciliation Walk. Monuments Australia website at http://monumentaustralia. org.au/themes/culture/indigenous/display/23459-reconciliation-walk (accessed 19 January 2017). (57) See Canning Stock Route Project website at http://www.canningstockrouteproject. com/about/ and http://www.canningstockrouteproject.com/yiwarra-kuju-exhibition/ yiwarra-kuju-the-canning-stock-route/?phpMyAdmin=cf6eef0d78cfc7351153be1331 b126b8 (accessed 16 December 2016); FORM website at https://www.form.net.au/ project/one-road-mira-canning-stock-route-project/ (accessed 24 February 2018).

10 Romancing the Road: Constructing Australian Icons

In his study of America’s Route 66, one of the world’s most famous roads, Peter Dedek describes the road as a ‘state of mind’, evoking images, ideals and experiences, and argues that in driving the route one encounters multiple layers of memory, history and myth. In attempting to explain its iconic status, Dedek points to the route’s symbolism and association with prominent American cultural tropes, including that of the ‘Wild West’. The road was immortalised in John Steinbeck’s novel, The Grapes of Wrath, and became associated with Depression-era ‘dust bowl’ migrants’ flight from adversity towards promise and opportunity in the ‘West’. From the 1950s, the road represented the power and freedom of the private automobile.1 Its roadside architecture of neon-lit diners, motels and gas stations evoke the heyday of the American road trip. As the preceding chapters have shown, the road is a space constructed both physically and imaginatively. Certain roads assume particular significance not only because of their strategic importance or engineering excellence, but because they have gained national, and possibly international, attention through their widely recognised cultural symbolism. While there is no Australian equivalent to Route 66, this chapter examines three routes that have captured the Australian imagination: the inland Birdsville Track, the transcontinental Stuart Highway and Victoria’s Great Ocean Road. Each route’s cultural significance is also ‘constructed’ through a dynamic process of interaction between tangible and intangible elements. All have been shaped extensively by their physical environment; all are associated with powerful national mythologies – the bush and pioneering, or Anzac legends; all demonstrate the complex interplay between landscape and memory, past and present. They demonstrate that, as Dedek argues, roads have both a material and a symbolic history. 2 The reasons why some roads become significant in the national imagination also reflects changing historical and cultural contexts. As valuable cultural resources, roads and routes can tell us much about the heritage of a locality, region or nation, yet they also present 223

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particular challenges for cultural heritage management. Roads embody elements of both the natural and cultural environment. They often extend over vast geographic distances, and their meanings and significance are not static or tied to a particular historical moment, but are constantly being recreated and overlaid through journeys along the route over time, as past and present interact. Yet it is these intangible qualities that are most difficult to incorporate in preservation and interpretation strategies. The heritage profession, until recently, has imagined roads predominantly as physical entities. Heritage studies are usually managed and driven from an archaeological, architectural or engineering perspective, with the main focus being on material and aesthetic qualities, on specific items of road infrastructure, or on particular sites of built and natural heritage along the road corridor. Tourism and heritage interpretations often privilege or romanticise particular periods of their history, while ‘forgetting’ or marginalising others, particularly Indigenous journeys and stories. A route’s significance is more than the sum of its parts. Internationally, the heritage community is beginning to recognise the importance of identifying, preserving and interpreting ‘cultural routes’ as heritage resources and as part of national and regional tourism strategies. The concept of ‘cultural routes’ was defi ned by UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee in 1994 and further developed by the ICOMOS International Scientific Committee on Cultural Itineraries (CIIC). A ‘cultural route’ encompasses multiple layers of meaning based on the dynamics of movement, exchange and interaction over a long period of time, across a wide geographic region and among diverse cultural groups. 3 Exploring these roads as ‘cultural routes’ and taking a longer view of their histories reveals the complex interrelationships between landscape, memory, history and mythology in constructing their meaning and interpretation over time. Such an approach allows for more holistic and dynamic understandings which may enhance tourism, preservation and interpretation. ‘Back of Beyond’: The Birdsville Track

The Birdsville Track has been described as ‘Australia’s most legendary road’.4 Traversing just over 500 km or 300 miles between Birdsville in south-west Queensland and Marree in South Australia, the track developed as a stock route in the late 19th century. It is one of a number of such routes in the region, including the Oodnadatta Track to the west and Strzelecki Track to the east, which evolved to provide crucial transport links for stock, produce and supplies between the pastoral stations of Queensland and north-eastern South Australia, and the rail heads of the Central Australian Railway from Port Augusta. The track lies in one of the most arid regions of Australia, bounded by and partly traversing Sturt’s Stony Desert and the Simpson, Tirari and Strzelecki Deserts (see Figure 10.1). Beneath the ground surface is the

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Figure 10.1 Map showing Birdsville Track Source: Section of Birdsville and Strzelecki Tracks map courtesy of Westprint Maps at http:// westprint.com.au/.

Great Artesian Basin, the world’s largest subterranean water basin extending over Central and north-eastern Australia, giving rise to a series of mound springs along its margins. 5 The track was once barely distinguishable from its surrounding landscape of flat, stony gibber plains and sand dunes; at times it is cut by flooding of the Cooper and Diamantina Rivers

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Figure 10.2 View of Birdsville Track, ‘The Gap, Mungarannie to Mira Mitta Section’ by E.L. Walpole, c.1930 Source: State Library of South Australia B47089/85.

(Figure 10.2). Journalist and author George Farwell, who travelled the track many times, wrote in 1950: In my mind’s eye the hot and dusty track unrolled before me … the mile upon mile of glittering, loose-paved gibber plains, the drifting sandhills, the sun-baked claypans, the huge, dry, sanded river beds of the Cooper and Diamantina, the sand storms whipped up by boisterous winds from which there was no protection. There is much beauty too, but it is just not the kind of country a man attempts on foot.6

This dramatic environment impacted upon the physical formation and reformation of the route and provided fertile ground for legends.

The first journeys

Like many roads and highways, the Birdsville Track is said to roughly follow an Aboriginal trade and ceremonial route. The original inhabitants of the region belonged to a number of ‘tribes’ or nations, more accurately described as language groups, including the Arabana, Wanganuru, Guyani, Dieri and closely related Dirari, Namani, Karanuru and Yaluyandi, and Yawarawarga.7 Understandably, sources of water have been crucial to human habitation here, and the Aboriginal names of several places along the Birdsville Track with the suffixes ‘anni’, ‘manna’ and ‘ninna’, such as Mungeranni, Kopperamanna, Dulkaninna and Killalpaninna, signified places where water was to be found.8

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The Mindiri Emu story united peoples from a wide region and refers to sites in the vicinity of the Birdsville Track. The story tells of an ancestor who had picked up an emu’s tracks near Mirra Mitta Lake and followed them down to Mungerannie (now the approximate half-way point on the Birdsville Track). From there they led him to Port Augusta, then doubled back to Mungerannie again, and as the day broke he found the tracks leading him straight to the previously unknown fresh water of Coongy Lake (north-west of Innamincka).9 The story was celebrated in the Mindiri cycle or ritual, which comprised a series of ceremonies where people gathered from the country embraced by the Emu’s path. The preliminary Idigaru ceremony was celebrated at Mirra Mitta or ‘Rat-place’, where there are two salt lakes: the main Mirra Mitta Lake where the men danced, and a smaller salt lake where the women danced. This was usually performed during the night preceding the fi nal main ceremony which took place at Koonchera Waterhole, near what is now the ‘Outside’ or ‘wet weather’ Track, to the north of Mirra Mitta.10 Kopperamanna, in Dieri country close to the track near Lake Hope, was a great trading centre, and people came from far afield to exchange goods and knowledge. The name means ‘root-hand’: as all fi ngers lead to the hand, so all roads lead to Kopperamanna. The Wanganuru and Dieri produced ochre and hard wood, and at Kopperamanna they exchanged these for goods unobtainable in their own region. Red ochre from a quarry in the Flinders Ranges was regarded as superior due to its smooth, silvery appearance, which was attributed to the blood of the creation Emu. For the northern tribes, Birdsville and Goyder Lagoon were key meeting places for trading the highly prized red ochre and pituri, or tobacco plant.11 The track also traverses a tract of ground that was a sanctuary for all tribes, being territory where those who had offended the laws of their tribe could move about without fear of retribution or retaliation from their own or neighbouring tribes.12 The route known as the Birdsville Track is thus at least partly related to a complex network of journeys that had powerful significance for Indigenous peoples long before the arrival of Europeans changed their way of life forever. Travelling stock route

The water sources that defi ned much of the route’s significance for Aboriginal inhabitants also determined its development in the postcontact era. In the 1850s, European exploration parties, with the aid of Aboriginal guides and informants, located springs of water along the periphery of the Great Artesian Basin. The springs defi ned an inland route for the movement of stock, providing important watering places on the way to the country beyond. An artesian spring found by a member of John McDouall Stuart’s expedition in 1859 determined the site of the township

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of Herrgott Springs (later named Marree) over two decades later, when the railway from Port Augusta fi nally reached it in 1884. From the 1860s, but particularly during the late 19th century, pastoral stations were established throughout northern South Australia and the Channel Country of south-west Queensland, where cattle grew fat on the  lush pastures of the floodplains. Birdsville, situated just over the Queensland border, near the main crossing place of the Diamantina River on ‘the main stock road’, developed as a store depot and township from the early 1880s.13 Drovers followed the Diamantina south from Birdsville, around Goyder Lagoon, along the route now referred to as the ‘Inside Track’. The Birdsville Track, originally known as ‘the Queensland Road’, carried mobs of cattle with their drovers and stockmen, as well as produce, supplies, building materials and mail to and from the stations and rail heads.14 Unreliable water supplies were a constant threat, and so from the mid-1880s to the early 20th century the South Australian government funded the drilling of a number of bores at intervals of about 30 miles along the track, to provide more regular watering points, thereby considerably lessening the hazards of the track and further defining its route.15 Along the Birdsville Track today, several stone cairns are visible – of Aboriginal and European origin – some marking water sites or serving as survey trig points and route markers.16 Conflicts, collisions and camels

News of the ill-fated Burke and Wills expedition of 1861 attracted international attention to the Cooper’s Creek Aborigines, who had assisted the sole survivor of the expedition. Inspired by concern for the Aborigines’ welfare, two groups of German missionaries set out for South Australia and established themselves near the Birdsville Track in 1866 and 1867 – the Moravians at Kopperamanna, near Lake Hope on the Cooper, and Lutherans at Lake Killalpaninna, about 11 miles west of the track. The Moravians did not stay long, discouraged by severe drought and confronted by hostility and resistance from the Dieri peoples, whose meeting grounds were close to the mission site. The Lutherans and, later, lay missionaries continued at Killalpaninna Mission – subsequently named Bethesda – until the outbreak of WWI. Kopperamanna became an outstation to the Mission, which also operated as a sheep station. Johann Ernst Jacob, a lay missionary, spent about eight months each year on the road, transporting supplies by wagon and driving ration carts to cattle camps and shepherds, at fi rst from Port Augusta and then, after 1883, from Marree.17 Cattle and sheep stations established along the track between Marree and Birdsville from the late 1860s onwards included Lake Harry, Clayton, Dulkaninna, Etadunna, Mulka, Cowari, Mungerannie, Mt Gason and Clifton Hills. As the pastoralists moved in, Aboriginal peoples were

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forced off their traditional lands and many lived at the mission or on stations. Some worked as stockmen and station hands or even managed stations, while trying to maintain something of their traditional way of life, despite the missionaries’ attempts to forbid this. Acts of resistance against the invading people and animals that encroached on their lands, polluting their water holes and abusing their women, often brought violent retribution. At least three major massacres are documented in the region, all coinciding with great ceremonial occasions when a large number of people had come together at one important site. The massacre at Koonchera waterhole on Clifton Hills Station occurred around 1885 as peoples gathered for the Mindiri ceremony. Police killed hundreds of Aborigines in retaliation for the spearing of a small bullock. The massacre virtually annihilated the Mindiri peoples.18 Despite the devastating impact of European encroachment, there is evidence that Aboriginal cultural traditions continued well into the 20th century. R.B. (Bruce) Plowman spent five years as parson at Beltana, then Oodnadatta, from 1912 to 1917. His diaries were published in a series of books in the mid-1930s. The third volume, The Boundary Rider, relates his travels by horse and buggy along the Birdsville Track. Plowman’s account is unusual in that it reveals the layering of stories and journeys along the track and the ongoing use of the route by Aboriginal inhabitants. He documented the continued importance of the pituri plant, found only in the district north of Birdsville, with which the Aborigines made a narcotic. Couriers were sent from hundreds of miles away to barter for this crucial article of trade. The Birdsville Track thus remained a vital communication route for Aboriginal peoples, albeit in ways that appropriated the evolving means of transport. For example, messages were passed between people at various stations via other travellers on the track. On one occasion, an Aboriginal man asked Plowman to convey a letter stick to ‘Jimmy’, working at a station near Farina, asking him to send clothes, which again would be transported via the track.19 By the 1920s, as the missions closed, and with their numbers further depleted from the influenza outbreak following WWI, most of the remaining Aborigines had regrouped near Marree and on various pastoral station camps, particularly around Muloorina, Mungerannie and Cowarie. Many, whose original territories were further north, did not return to stations north of Mt Gason on the Birdsville Track because the area held too many traumatic memories. 20 Myles Lalor, an Aboriginal man, worked as a stockman and general rouseabout, travelling the Birdsville Track in the 1950s by horse and car. Lalor found it difficult to reconcile his memories of the track with those of his friend, George Dutton, who had travelled the route on packhorses some 40 years earlier. While Dutton’s memories focused on meeting up with others of his ‘mob’ at the various stations along the track, by the time Lalor went through, nearly all had disappeared. 21

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The arrival of camels and their handlers brought other ‘tribes’ and another dimension to the history of the track. In 1863, pastoralists Thomas Elder and Samuel Joseph Stuckey introduced camels to carry wool and station supplies for a sheep stock run near Lake Hope. At their Beltana property south of Marree, they established a base for a commercial carrying business providing camels and labourers. Elder and Stuckey’s business flourished, stimulating further private ventures across the outback. The cameleers were known generally as ‘Afghans’ and came mainly from what is now Afghanistan or parts of Pakistan, and some from India. By the 1880s and 1890s, the Afghans themselves owned and operated the majority of camel carrying businesses, including several major operations based at Marree and the Date Plantation at Lake Harry, working the Birdsville Track and hiring camel teams to others, including the Birdsville coach and the German missionaries at Killalpaninna. The camels carried all manner of supplies: cases of whiskey, bar iron, bags of chaff, fencing material, building materials, furniture, food and 200-gallon tanks for rainwater storage, as well as equipment for bore drilling. A few Afghans worked as hawkers or mobile grocers, selling food, clothing and household goods from the back of a camel-drawn wagon or from a small string of pack camels.22 With the Afghans and their camels came further cultural tensions, based on racial and commercial grounds, as they competed with and threatened the survival of the European horse and bullock teamsters. Not only were the camels able to endure the desert conditions better than their competitors, but their handlers’ total abstinence from alcohol made them more reliable than their Australian counterparts. The Afghans’ strange appearance, dress, language and culture, and even stranger animals, were met with distrust and derision. They set up rough makeshift camps and later ‘Ghantowns’, which were separated from European communities. Marree was the northernmost and most important railhead for all activity in central regions of Australia; hence the largest and longest surviving Ghantown developed there, comprising about two dozen corrugated iron dwellings and a mosque. Separated from the rest of the town by the railway line, Ghantown shared the eastern side of the line with Aboriginal camps, while the white population lived on the western side. 23 The Aboriginal peoples of the area regarded the Afghans, like the Europeans, as outsiders. The Arabana people called the Afghans Abiganas, meaning ‘white fellows with hair-string’, referring to their turbans. They feared that the Afghans would take their women and girls. 24 Relations between the races were not always hostile, however: many of the Afghans eventually formed relationships and marriages with Aboriginal women; and some Aboriginal men worked with Afghan camel teams. 25 The Afghans were further alienated by their association with the camels – ugly, smelly, foul creatures that no white man wished to handle. Camels supposedly upset horses, with the mere sight or smell of a camel often causing violent reactions. In some parts of the country, camels were

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Figure 10.3 Afghan mosque, Marree Source: State Library of South Australia, B15341.

forced to travel a minimum of 22 yards off the road and to wear a bell to signal their approach. 26 Despite the tensions, camels and horse teams shared the Birdsville Track. In some instances, horses remained the preferred means of transport, proving nimbler than camels in boggy weather. 27 The fortnightly mail service, carrying parcels, letters and passengers, ran between Marree and Birdsville with a coach and five horses until 1926, changing horses at stations along the track. 28 The police patrol from Marree, however, still used camels in the 1950s to cover wider territory. From the 1920s and 1930s, motor transport began to challenge the camel’s dominance. According to George Farwell, when motor trucks first began to compete with the cameleers, the latter sometimes spread broken glass on the track to cut tyres, and often fought with the truck drivers. 29 Some of the Afghans turned to hawking to survive, but by the end of WWII many had left the country, leaving their camels to run wild. A few Afghans and their descendants remained around Marree. Some found employment as truck drivers, traveling virtually the same route as their forebears, finding the nomadic lifestyle and camaraderie appealing. 30 The remains of an Afghan mosque survives in Marree (Figure 10.3). The Afghans’ legacy and impact on inland Australia is also recalled in the naming of the famous ‘Ghan’ railway route between Adelaide and Alice Springs. Trucks on the Track

The arrival of the motor vehicle altered travellers’ relationship to the track and its physical nature. The ‘Outside Track’ developed as an alternative

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route around Goyder Lagoon, as motor vehicles could not cross the lagoon.31 While trucks were faster, more comfortable and could carry more weight than horses or camels, they encountered their own particular hazards. Travellers were at the mercy of mechanical failure, bogging, treacherous sandhills and deceptive gibber plains that looked solid but were really just a thin crust over sand, where a car or truck would sink to its axles.32 Sandhills posed a constant challenge; some could be 50 feet high, with a reasonably gentle slope on the windward side and a near vertical drop on the other, so that drivers had to negotiate the correct speed to ensure that the truck would slide down the steep side, rather than dropping and damaging the vehicle. The South Australian Government provided mail contractors working the track with sheets of iron six feet long by two feet wide, to lay continuously in front of the wheels, thus forming the ‘road’ as they went along. Passengers on the mail truck had the pleasure of dragging the heavy, red hot metal sheets along the sand.

Constructing legends

During the motoring era the Birdsville Track entered popular consciousness on a broader scale. A number of works published from the 1930s onwards about life in the region and travelling the track helped to publicise it and to construct its notoriety as well as a particular version of its history. Narratives by Plowman and biologist Francis Ratcliffe in the 1930s, and later travel writers such as Ernestine Hill, Arthur Upfield and George Farwell, focused on the physical challenges of travelling the track, and celebrated characters such as drovers, people living on the remote stations, and the outback mail carriers. These works fed into the fascination with the outback and the promotion of the so-called ‘real Australia’ by travel writers and others, which began in the interwar years. Journalist and travel writer George Farwell was one of the track’s most prolific exponents. He published several articles in the Walkabout journal, as well as books including Traveller’s Tracks and Land of Mirage, the latter based partly on his journey up the track with the police patrol on camels in the 1940s and 1950s. Farwell wrote in Land of Mirage: The Birdsville Track has developed a folklore of its own over the years. Like the folklore of ancient Europe, its heroes are usually those who defy the elements, the malice of fate; enlarged and legendary figures whom you would hardly recognise if you met them over a modest drink. That is as it should be in a land where man is dwarfed by the mighty, tidal forces of nature, and yet asserts his independence. 33

Farwell was in no doubt as to which heroes had ‘made’ the track and its folklore – ‘pioneering’ drovers and mail carriers.

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Figure 10.4 Tom Kruse with his mail truck Source: State Library of South Australia, B47089_57.

In Land of Mirage Farwell introduces the current mailman of the Birdsville Track, Tom Kruse (Figure 10.4): He swung down from the cabin of his heavy, time-worn six-wheel truck, smiling expectantly. Big and broad-shouldered, with bare feet, trousers rolled up … he greeted us so casually that you would never suspect he had travelled two hundred and fi fty exhausting miles in a day and a night. 34

By romanticising characters like Kruse, who exemplify the Australian bush and pioneer legends, Farwell effectively rewrites the track’s ‘history’, marginalising and overlaying other histories such as those of Aboriginal and Afghan inhabitants. Contemplating the environment in which the track lies, he describes ‘a world empty as the ocean’s bed’, thereby negating the presence of the Indigenous owners. For Farwell, the track’s ‘history’ begins with the arrival of pastoralists. The skill of Aboriginal tracker, ‘Micky’, Farwell attributes to ‘living the stone age life of his people’. Aboriginal inhabitants are relegated to a past era which has, inevitably, all but disappeared. Uley, described as ‘the last of the Dieri tribe’, accompanies Farwell on one leg of the journey. Farwell comments on the fate of Uley’s people: ‘They had been scattered like the blown sand, had perished of the white man’s diseases or simply because they had been robbed of the will to live.’35 Similarly, Farwell casts descendants of the Afghan population, some of whom still lived in the region, as faded remnants of a dying past. John Heyer’s fi lm, The Back of Beyond, released in 1954, was also instrumental in more widely popularising the folklore surrounding the

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Birdsville Track. The fi lm captured public imagination in Australia and overseas, winning awards at international fi lm festivals and receiving widespread media coverage. It is estimated that 750,000 Australians saw the fi lm within the fi rst two years of its release. It has subsequently been screened on television and at film festivals and has become established as a classic Australian fi lm. 36 In the fi lm, as in Farwell’s texts, characters like Kruse and the ‘tribe’ he represents emerge triumphant. As Kirsten Weidenbach has also noted, the Birdsville Track was the stage whereupon visions of the ‘real Australia’ and its legends could be enacted by the people living and travelling along it. 37 The droving parties encountered by Farwell and seen in the film provide a contrast between the old and new, and represent another ‘vanishing race’ which would soon be overtaken by motorised transport. Indeed, the era of the overlanders was coming to an end. In response to the needs of motor traffic, the Birdsville Track was improved by grading from the early 1960s and a more defi nite route was defi ned. A federally funded programme to improve the ‘Beef Road’ network signalled the end of the droving era and the beginning of stock transport by road trains. In 1961, 80% of stock were transported down the Birdsville Track by road trains and 20% on hoof – an exact reversal of the prior year’s figures. From this time onwards, the Birdsville Track was transformed from a stock route to a road. 38 These changes also transformed perceptions of the route. Having travelled the track in the 1950s, Myles Lalor barely recognised the new road as it did not go near the places he remembered, such as Mulka, Mount Gasson or Clifton Hills. 39 The road’s improvement considerably lessened the dangers of the track, although certain legends of the past do not fade easily as current efforts to promote and interpret the track indicate. Tourism and heritage on the Track

Today, while still remote, the Birdsville Track has gained popularity as a tourist route, and the main track is drivable in about two days, even with a standard vehicle. The Mungerannie Roadhouse, the only place on the track that offers food and lodging, still screens The Back of Beyond, and one of Tom Kruse’s trucks stands as a memorial in Marree township.40 Some tourists, however, prefer to relive an earlier phase of the route’s history. The Great Australian Outback Cattle Drive, a South Australian tourism initiative to give city dwellers the chance to experience droving life, was first held on the Birdsville Track in 2002 to celebrate the ‘Year of the Outback’, and again in 2005.41 It is now held every second year along the Oodnadatta Track, and the five-week drive attracts Australian and international tourists. The official Tourism Australia website promises: ‘You can trace the trail of Australian pioneers who forged their way through these raw, powerful landscapes. Meet modern-day droving legends and feel like one yourself, after a day herding 500 head of cattle from

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horseback.’42 The Australian bush and pioneering legends remain alive and well. Interpreting the Birdsville Track is problematic, as it is difficult to defi ne physically, with few surviving remnant sites and a multi-layered history. In 2001 Heritage South Australia and the Australian Heritage Commission jointly funded a survey to identify places of historic heritage significance along the Birdsville and Strzelecki Tracks. The study was also intended to contribute to developing a regional heritage tourism strategy for the Lake Eyre Basin. As with most road-related heritage studies, the focus was on identifying remnant physical or archaeological sites within a 50 km radius of the tracks. Indigenous cultural heritage was not included, except where it related to ‘contact history’. This was largely due to the fact that Indigenous (pre-contact), ‘historic’ (post-contact) and natural (environmental) heritage are each managed under separate legal and administrative structures, making an integrated approach difficult.43 Sites related to the Birdsville Track recommended for listing on the South Australian or Queensland Heritage Registers included the Marree Mosque site, the former Afghan quarter at Marree, the Kopperamanna Mission remains and the Koonchera Waterhole massacre site.44 While these listings and their accompanying documentary research go some way towards representing non-European cultural heritage along the track, they are not widely available to the general public. They do little to address the ‘startling lack of awareness of Indigenous connections with outback country’, and poor representation of Indigenous cultural heritage in tourist literature and on the ground, as noted by Lyn Leader-Elliott, one of the authors of the heritage study.45 In 2005 a collaborative project by the Department for Environment and Heritage and the South Australian Tourism Commission installed interpretive panels at sites along the Birdsville and Strzelecki Tracks ‘to promote and protect South Australia’s outback heritage and to enhance the tourist experience in this remote region’.46 The only sites ‘interpreted’ along the Birdsville Track, however, were the former Date Plantation at Lake Harry, the ruins of Mulka Store and Homestead and the M.V. Tom Brennan ferry, which was once used to cross the Cooper in flood. The stories evoked remain primarily those of the European ‘pioneers’, celebrating a fairly narrow and relatively recent period of the route’s history, rather than revealing the other journeys and layers of meaning – stories that intersect, overlap and collide – and which contribute to the rich cultural landscape embodied in the Birdsville Track. Beyond ‘The Bitumen’: The Stuart Highway

‘The Stuart Highway has about it an aura of stark heroism, of haunting romance. It’s our equivalent of ancient spice routes, of the Canadian Pacific Railway, of the Grand Trunk Road, prizing riches from the

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uninhabitable.’47 These words, by Australian travel writer Keith Willey, convey something of the romanticism surrounding Australia’s fi rst transcontinental highway, which connects Port Augusta, near Adelaide on the southern coastline, to Darwin in the tropical north, through Central Australia and the Great Australian Desert, a distance of almost 3000 km or 1800 miles. It was named in honour of explorer John McDouall Stuart, who first completed a successful south-to-north crossing of the continent in 1862 (Figure 10.5). The path of the Overland Telegraph Line, built in the 1870s, roughly followed Stuart’s route. The telegraph line ran from Port Augusta to Darwin, where it was connected to an undersea cable to England via Indonesia and India. It was described as ‘a thread of civilisation running through the desert’.48 Once again, Afghan cameleers played a major role

Figure 10.5 John McDouall Stuart’s route through Central Australia, 1862 Source: Betheras, J.L. (1957) The Story of John MacDouall [sic] Stuart. Walkabout, December, p. 31. (State Library of NSW.)

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in building the telegraph line, and in transporting construction materials and supplies for workers.49 The rough tracks formed by the telegraph line and the partly constructed Great Northern Railway – a forerunner of the now legendary ‘Afghan Express’ or ‘Ghan’ – provided some direction, if not much comfort, for intrepid travellers for whom the challenge of crossing the continent proved irresistible. The route remained a rough track until WWII, however, when anxieties grew regarding Australia’s vulnerability to invasion from the north. The north–south transcontinental corridor was a vital pathway in the nation’s defence strategy and the track north of Alice Springs was transformed into an all-weather road in record time. Bitumen sealing of the North-South Road between Larrimah and Alice Springs was completed in December 1943, and this section of the road was named the Stuart Highway in April 1944. 50 By 1968 the southern section was also named the ‘Stuart Highway’; however, it was not until the mid-1970s that major upgrading, bituminising and some realignment of the route took place. The entire length of the Stuart Highway from Port Augusta to Darwin became part of the national highway system, introduced in 1974. The southern section between Port Augusta and Alice was rerouted several kilometres to the west of the original line and this new ‘Stuart Highway’ was officially opened in 1987. 51 Beyond ‘the Bitumen’: Creating a legend

Almost as soon as the northern section of the road was completed during WWII, folklore developed surrounding the Stuart Highway. The fact that a world-class highway could have been built at all, across those black soil plains, amazed many. The speed of its construction was also a first for Australia; hence, many called it ‘the miracle highway’. 52 Nicknamed ‘the Track’, ‘the Road’, ‘the Bitumen’ or, to long-distance transport drivers, ‘the Bitch-O’Mine’, it soon developed legendary status beyond anything its planners or builders could have envisaged. 53 As the sole land transport link between Alice Springs and Darwin, for Territorians the 40-foot strip of bitumen was their life-blood, supplying mining districts and pastoral stations, transporting cattle and goods in road trains, and facilitating the tourism boom that began in the postwar era. As travel writer Kathleen Woodburn wrote in 1947: ‘The Bitumen is more than just a road. It is an identity, and has a life and influence of its own such as few other highways possess.’54 Much of the Stuart Highway’s ‘aura of heroism and romance’ derives from its physical environment and the stories associated with the route, particularly Stuart’s arduous journey, during which he battled drought, illness, lame horses and, at times, hostile Aborigines. ‘Attack Creek’, named by Stuart, recalls the place where he was forced to abandon a previous expedition after a violent confrontation. Just as Stuart’s successful

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transcontinental crossing and the subsequent building of the Overland Telegraph Line were stories of triumph over the harsh environment, so the highway’s construction represented the further taming of the frontier, fitting with the pioneer legend. Later generations of travellers engaged with the memory and myths of earlier journeys as they drove the route. For example, Douglas Lockwood, who travelled extensively up and down the highway in the mid-20th century, wrote that he always stopped at Attack Creek to ‘drink a silent toast to one of the greatest of all Australian explorers, a man who proved that his heart was made of Highland rock’. 55 As the highway’s nickname ‘the Bitumen’ indicates, the physical nature of the road helped to defi ne it and contributed to the aura of the modern Stuart Highway. For long stretches, especially in the north, it is as straight as a gun barrel, running through flat featureless country (Figure 10.6). Douglas Lockwood described it as ‘a seemingly endless highway, stretching out between tall mulga into a contracted pencil-line on the horizon, bending gently only once or twice on the fi rst leg to Aileron’. 56 The 1994 edition of the Visitors’ Guide to Outback South Australia begins its description of the highway as follows: ‘The Stuart Highway from Port Augusta to Darwin lost its reputation as the roughest stretch of road in South Australia when sealing and rerouting was completed in 1987.’57 For some, the lack of adventure on the new road was a disappointment, yet the long, straight stretches of bitumen that now characterise the highway also contribute to its status as one of Australia’s iconic road trips, in a similar way to the Eyre Highway, which runs east-to-west between Adelaide and Perth, across the Nullarbor Plain.

Figure 10.6 The Stuart Highway by K. McLean, 2005 Source: Wikimedia Commons website at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stuart_ Highway,_Australia.jpg (accessed 20 March 2017).

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As earlier chapters revealed, embracing the nation by driving around and through it has been a highly symbolic national ritual since the earliest days of motoring. As the main artery through the heart of Australia, the Stuart Highway has become an essential part of any around-Australia journey for local and international travellers from backpackers to grey nomads. Interpreting and preserving the Stuart Highway

The Stuart Highway is not listed, in whole or in part, on any national or state heritage register and, apart from tourism interpretation strategies, relatively little attention has been given to assessing, interpreting and preserving its cultural heritage. Current efforts tend to focus on physical aspects of the highway itself. The northern section of the highway between Alice Springs and Darwin is managed by the Northern Territory Government and Department of Infrastructure and Planning, and from 2007 historic engineering markers were erected at various locations along the route. According to the Institution of Engineers, Australia, examples of each era of the road’s construction remain in use. 58 The 1990s saw the beginning of greater efforts at interpreting the Stuart Highway as part of the Northern Territory’s tourism strategy, but again the emphasis was on physical sites and discrete phases in the route’s history. The Northern Territory Tourist Commission (now Tourism NT) promoted the Stuart as the ‘Explorer Highway Tourist Drive’, emphasising the route’s and the region’s association with 19th-century exploratory journeys, including those of Eyre, Sturt, Burke and Wills, as well as Stuart. 59 ‘Information stands’ at service stations provided regional maps and historical information, with the aim of encouraging travellers to stop at various points along the road. More recently, web-based interactive maps provide more detailed and easily accessible interpretation by highlighting particular sections of the route, with brief pop-up windows on towns or sites.60 Key sites focus on those associated with Stuart’s expedition and with the Overland Telegraph Line, including former telegraph stations and memorials, as well as with remnants of the pastoral and mining era. The wartime era is also generously represented. In 1992 the old NorthSouth road was reopened as a detour from the Stuart Highway and this allowed travellers to experience something of the wartime highway, including the much-photographed and commented-upon natural feature, ‘Churchill’s Head’, a rock formation which resembled Britain’s wartime leader (Figure 10.7). In 1995, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Victory in the Pacific, a convoy re-enactment, ‘Back to the Track’, took place along the old road, and the many veterans who participated retook photos they had taken and posed for at this landmark during the war. 61 The Northern Territory Tourist Commission’s publication, A Wartime Journey: Stuart Highway Heritage Guide, released in 2006, is accompanied

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Figure 10.7 ‘Churchill’s Head’, by Arthur Groom, 1952 Source: National Library of Australia.

by two audio CDs, with narration, music and archival sound grabs, telling the wartime story of the highway through the voices of soldiers, airmen, nurses and construction workers, who describe the wartime sites. Surviving sites include the remains of construction and staging camps, wells, bores and maintenance depots.62 The few stories relating to Aboriginal heritage that are interpreted along the route usually focus on sites of conflict with Europeans, such as Attack Creek, and the Barrow Creek telegraph station where, in February 1874, the stationmaster James Stapleton and linesman John Franks were killed by local Aborigines in an attack which inevitably brought violent retribution. The gravestone of Stapleton and Franks remains in place today.63 A complex cultural route

Such interpretation ignores the deeper significance of the route and its interrelationship with Aboriginal culture. The central inland corridor through which the Stuart Highway now passes encompassed the territory of several Aboriginal language groups. Among these, the region extending

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from the South Australian border to Alice Springs and north towards Tennant Creek was the territory of the Arrernte peoples, while the Walbiri occupied an area north of Tennant Creek.64 As discussed in Chapter 1, the Arrernte’s Native Cat songline is one of the longest in the country. Like the Stuart Highway, the songline extends from Port Augusta to the north coast of Australia. While the Arrernte-speaking territory included some of the best-watered and more fertile regions of Central Australia, the Arrernte engaged in trade and ceremonial exchanges with neighbouring groups in arid areas, including the Alyawarre and the Northern and Eastern Arrernte, the Wangkangurru of the southern Simpson Desert and the Arabana to the west of Lake Eyre. The groups gathered at places such as the Native Cat (Urumpele) site, an important ceremonial area roughly midway between Alice Springs and Lake Eyre.65 Waterholes near Coglin Creek, near its junction with the Finke River, closer to the South Australian border at what is now Charlotte Waters, formed part of the Emu ritual songline, which was also of great importance for the Arrernte peoples.66 The mound springs, the only permanent water source in the region, featured prominently in several Arabana and Wangkangurru myths and songlines, with individual springs taking on varying roles, from simple watering points to locations where important actions or incidents associated with major Dreaming cycles took place.67 Stuart’s expedition overlapped with these Aboriginal pathways. His journals make several detailed references to the mound springs, invariably accompanied by observations of ‘native tracks’ or other indications of Aboriginal presence. His party sometimes followed these tracks to water or asked the Aborigines where to fi nd it, and they usually obliged. Stuart could not fully understand the profound significance of the pathways with which his own journey intersected, but he knew that his ultimate success depended upon them. The mound springs became the ‘stepping stones’ which Stuart and successive Europeans followed into the interior of the continent and onto the far north coast.68 Stuart named various distinctive landmarks on his route, thereby furthering the process by which the landscape’s Aboriginal meanings were overlaid and overwritten. For example, Stuart named a sandstone column ‘Chambers Pillar’ after one of his fi nancial backers. For Aboriginal peoples, the landmark represented the embodiment of Itirkawara, a knobtailed gecko, who was transformed into the sandstone pillar because of sexual transgressions committed with women of the wrong kinship group. Subsequent European travellers carved their names into this landmark as they passed, unwittingly desecrating a sacred Aboriginal site. A nearby mound, which Stuart named ‘Castle Hill’, originally represented a female crouching in shame.69 While European encroachment transformed the Aboriginal way of life, it did not eliminate cultural traditions and, as with the Birdsville Track, there is evidence of continuity, adaptation and cross-cultural

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exchanges along the route. Frank Gillen, who staffed the Charlotte Waters repeater station in the 1880s, accompanied Baldwyn Spencer, leader of the Horne scientific expedition, on an anthropological study in 1901. They travelled along the Overland Telegraph Line, fi lming Aboriginal activities and ceremonies, and were assisted by Arrernte men. Gillen learned to converse in the language and published a word list as his fi rst study.70 Victor Cranley travelled to the region with a party of English tourists in the 1960s. At Warrabri Aboriginal Reserve, en route to Darwin, they witnessed ceremonial performances including the Frog and Emu dances.71 Even in the mid-1970s, when changes to the southern portion of the Stuart Highway’s route were being planned, a report by the South Australian Highways Department noted the presence of sites of ceremonial significance, sacred to the Aboriginal peoples of the area, although exact locations were not identified.72 As Leader-Elliott notes, interpretation of Indigenous cultural landscapes and recognition of the deep significance of ‘country’ for Aboriginal peoples are essential, yet largely absent, in tourism and heritage interpretation strategies in this region. A more recent and innovative contribution towards recognising Aboriginal perspectives is the ‘Stuart Highway Fence’ in Alice Springs, which was designed by Susan Dugdale in 2008. The fence, which borders the commercial centre of the town, provides a protective screen for the railway yards. It incorporates an abstract map of the highway from Port Augusta to Darwin, and Indigenous art of the region, representing ‘a cultural mapping of country’. Designed to be viewed while moving – walking, cycling or driving – the fence is described as ‘an abstract representation of travel and movement, reflecting the function of the Stuart Highway’.73 Such interpretation comes closer to engaging with the dynamic nature of the route, its intangible qualities and its significance for Aboriginal peoples. There is, however, still a long way to go. The Birdsville Track and Stuart Highway reflect mythologies that have evolved through their inland and transcontinental locations and their association with people and events along the routes. Victoria’s Great Ocean Road, by contrast, is an iconic coastal route, upon which a variety of meanings have been superimposed, thus revealing a slightly different process of cultural ‘construction’. ‘A Road of a Thousand Charms’: The Great Ocean Road

The Great Ocean Road is officially recognised as ‘Australia’s most famous coastal drive’.74 In April 2011 the road and its environs achieved National Heritage listing, which affi rmed its status as a nationally and internationally renowned scenic touring route.75 The road extends over 242 km (150 miles) along Victoria’s south-west coast between Torquay and its junction with the Princes Highway near Warrnambool (Figures 10.8 and 10.9). For most of its length, the two-lane serpentine route hugs

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Figure 10.8 Great Ocean Road location Source: Australia-Trips.Info. See website at http://www.australia-trips.info/Destinations/Vic/ Great_Ocean_Road_Victoria_Australia/Great-Ocean-Road.html (accessed August 2011).

Figure 10.9 View of the Great Ocean Road © Bill Bachman

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the coastline abutting Bass Strait and the Southern Ocean, revealing diverse landscapes and seascapes, including the temperate rainforest, heathlands and wetlands of the Otway Ranges, and the ancient rock stacks of the Port Campbell Limestone Coast – most notably, the famed Twelve Apostles.76 Among the features contributing to its heritage listing are the route’s ‘outstanding scenic landscape values and diversity of natural landscapes’, with the coastline between Lorne and Kennett River offering ‘among the world’s most dramatic cliff and ocean scenery able to be viewed from a vehicle’.77 A terrible beauty is born

The south-west coastal region of Victoria contains remnants of an ancient and spectacular landscape, over 100 million years old. East of Anglesea, rock platforms are backed by steep cliffs, occasionally cut with valleys. The Otway Range forests, within which lie numerous waterfalls and cascades, extend to the coastline, offering a contrasting backdrop to a wild seascape. The Port Campbell Coast is characterised by softer limestone, which has eroded rapidly, battered by the full force of the Southern Ocean, resulting in dramatic overhanging cliff s, rock stacks, gorges, arches and blow holes.78 It is a landscape that well suited the description ‘sublime’ – suggesting a mixture of beauty, grandeur, danger and awe – long before the Romantics popularised that concept. Explorer Matthew Flinders wrote of his impression as his ship rounded Cape Otway in the early 1800s: ‘I have seldom seen a more fearful section of coastline.’ 79 In the 19th century, clipper ships sailing the ‘Great Circle Route’ – the fastest sea passage between Europe, the Far East, Australia and New Zealand – harnessed the ‘Roaring Forties’ in the Southern Ocean to gain speed before turning into Bass Strait.80 Small coastal trading vessels also plied between Port Phillip and Van Diemen’s Land, with Loutit Bay, near Lorne, named after the master of a schooner that sheltered there in 1841.81 The wild conditions and treacherous rocky coast claimed many victims, some of whom were buried on the mainland. The numerous wreck sites are recalled in place names such as Schomberg Rock and Loch Ard Gorge. Aboriginal occupation of the region dates to at least 5000 years before European colonisation. Groups occupied the coast and hinterland seasonally. The earliest recorded European presence in the region is the legendary William Buckley, a convict who escaped from the Sorrento settlement in December 1803. Buckley was adopted by the local Wada Wurrung Balug people, who believed him to be one of their dead leaders reincarnated, and called him ‘Murrangurk’. He lived with the Wada Wurrung for over 30 years before surrendering to a party of Europeans led by John Batman in 1835. He secured a pardon from Governor George Arthur in return for helping them to settle the region.82

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Sealers and whalers operated in Bass Strait from the 1810s to 1830s, and frequented the south-west coast. By the mid-1830s whaling stations were established at Portland and Port Fairy as well as the newly founded settlement of Melbourne. In the 1840s whaling gave way to timber-getting, farming and grazing, and isolated settlements including Anglesea, Aireys Inlet, Loutit Bay (Lorne) and Apollo Bay sprang up along the coast.83 The Aboriginal population suffered the devastating consequences of frontier warfare, disease, loss of their traditional lands, starvation and forced encroachment onto other groups’ territory as scarce resources were depleted. A census conducted in 1841 by George Augustus Robinson, Chief Protector of Aborigines in the Port Phillip District, recorded 2949 individuals. By 1881 only 780 Aborigines were counted in the census for the whole of Victoria.84 The isolated towns along the rugged coastline began attracting tourists from the mid- to late 19th century, to fish, bathe and admire the sublime scenery. With the opening of the Grand Pacific Hotel in 1879, Lorne became a popular destination for Melbourne’s establishment and the Western District ‘squattocracy’. Lorne flourished as the premier coastal resort, known as ‘the Queen of the Watering Places’, from the 1880s as several more guest and boarding houses were built, and a regular steamer service operated between Melbourne and Lorne from 1886. 85 Rudyard Kipling visited Lorne and Apollo Bay in 1891 and was inspired to mention them in one of his poems, ‘The Flowers’.86 Visitors depended on water transport as land access was virtually non-existent due to the difficult, dangerous terrain. While demands for a coastal road began in the 1890s, it was not until after WWI that plans were realised. As well as being one of the first roads in Australia constructed purposely as a scenic tourist route, the Great Ocean Road was also intended to be a memorial to WWI servicemen. It was built between 1919 and 1932 by returned ‘diggers’, as part of a repatriation employment scheme. Landscape and legends: The Great Ocean Road as an Anzac Memorial Highway

The ‘Anzac legend’ developed during WWI, following the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign on the Turkish peninsula in 1915, an event which is widely regarded as representing Australia’s coming of age as a nation. The term ‘Anzac’ is an acronym for the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. War correspondent Charles Bean was instrumental in helping to create the legend, through stories, poems and images he selected for his Anzac Book. With their defi ning character traits of courage, resilience, resourcefulness and mateship, the Anzacs inherited and embodied characteristics of the earlier bush and pioneer legends.87 Anzac continues as Australia’s most powerful national foundation myth.

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While the concept of a road constructed as a war memorial was novel, the idea began to capture public imagination on a much grander scale in 1917. 88 The Australian Motorist began a series of articles in February with the headline: ‘How to Preserve the Memory of the Anzacs – A Great National Anzac Highway’, which envisaged a highway almost entirely encircling the continent, linking Perth to Brisbane.89 The idea of a practical memorial suited the characterisation of the ‘diggers’ themselves as practical, down-to-earth men of action rather than sentiment and ornament. A further article in May 1918 urged the adoption of the name ‘Anzac Highway’ as ‘carrying this title, a road would go down to posterity in the same manner as the “Appian Highway” and the more modern “Lincoln Highway”’.90 Although it did not officially bear that title, nor circumnavigate the continent, the ‘Great Ocean Road’ scheme was launched in March 1918, to build a road from Barwon Heads to Warrnambool. 91 The Great Ocean Road Trust, established and chaired by Howard Hitchcock, aimed to raise funds, employ workers and oversee the road’s development in cooperation with the Country Roads Board and the Repatriation Board. Over 3000 returned servicemen laboured on the road, which had to be hewn and blasted out of rocky cliffs, over steep escarpments and through forest, following the natural contours of the landscape as far as possible (see Figure 10.10). Place names such as Big Hill, Devil’s Elbow and Mount Defiance hinted at the obstacles to be overcome.

Figure 10.10 Workers clearing rocks on the Great Ocean Road, west of Lorne, 1932, by Michael Terry Source: National Library of Australia.

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During construction and in the early years of the road’s existence, great efforts were made to link the route to the Anzac legend. Initially, there were suggestions that the road be named ‘the Anzac Memorial Ocean Road’, but this did not eventuate. Places along the route were renamed after battlefields or generals, such as Messines Ridge, Suvla Bay, The Somme and Monash Gully, although only the latter remains in use. Promoters linked the physical difficulties and dangers faced by the men in building the road to the hardships and sacrifices they had endured in battle, and to their character. Howard Hitchcock declared in 1931 that the road commemorated ‘the brave men whose spiritual ideals made them defy distance and defy death’.92 In 1936 George Broadbent, a passionate advocate for roads and motoring, reflected on how travelling the road could be an act of memorialisation for tourists: The Great Ocean road is now a glorious avenue that breathes life. It is a road of a thousand charms. To traverse it is an inspiration … and as a memorial [it] will always be modern and all-significant. … It is enduring and as a monument it is from its nature admirably suited to recall to the minds of future generations the tragedy and the glory of our country’s part in the greatest of all wars and of the heroism of those who fought for the country through which the road passes.93

The road’s proposed length of over 100 miles was equated with the nation’s anticipated ‘long memory’ of the Anzacs.94 A memorial wall at Mt Defiance, one of the most spectacular look-outs along the road, sought to unite the sublime scenery with the awe-inspiring memorial. A memorial archway at the eastern end of the road fi rst appeared in the 1930s and a rebuilt arch remains today.

Memory and forgetting along the Great Ocean Road

After WWII, in a changing cultural context and with improvements to the road and the growth of the tourism industry, the road’s memorial associations were overshadowed by an emphasis on pleasure touring. From the 1950s onwards, tourism promotion focused on personal enjoyment, escapism and indulgence, through the consumption of beautiful scenery, ‘basking’ on golden beaches, enjoying superior accommodation and cuisine, and participating in the ‘gaiety’ of social life at resorts like Lorne. ‘Paradise’ was within easy reach thanks to the ‘comfort, convenience and speed’ of improved roads and motor vehicles.95 In the late 1950s, the section of coastline through which the Great Ocean Road passed was often referred to as the ‘Riviera of Victoria’, bestowing a sense of European sophistication on the ‘playgrounds of Anglesea, Lorne and Apollo Bay’.96 The more hedonistic attitude towards tourism along the Great Ocean Road after WWII reflected the impact of postwar prosperity

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and material consumption, including private car ownership and leisure, in Australia generally. The road’s memorial function was almost entirely forgotten in the decades following the war. This was partly due to changes in the context and meanings for memorialising war. In particular, a much more critical attitude towards Anzac Day developed from the 1950s and especially in the aftermath of the Vietnam conflict in the 1960s and 1970s. At the time of the road’s construction, war was seen by some as a purifying experience, ‘diverting attention from pleasure, leisure and material advancement to more serious, spiritual concerns’.97 In the aftermath of the Depression and another world war, Australians reacted against such sentiments; they wanted the good life. Although enthusiasm for the Anzac legend revived in the 1990s, the Great Ocean Road’s role as a war memorial never fully recovered. Modern tourist guides continue to highlight the spectacular scenery, natural beauty, gastronomy and beach culture.98 Bells Beach is now a world-famous surfi ng destination. In recent years, the coastline between Apollo Bay and Port Campbell has been christened ‘the Shipwreck Coast’ and features prominently in tourism promotion. It is the ‘memory’ of these wrecks, with their sometimes visible and tangible remains including wreck sites and graves and the tragic, romantic stories they convey, which resonates most powerfully in this land and seascape, rather than the memory of WWI servicemen. As Bill Bryson noted in Down Under, ‘This stretch of Victoria is famous for two things: surfi ng and shipwrecks’.99 Ironically, along a route originally dedicated to memorialising a war that had no direct connection to this landscape, there is little acknowledgement of Aboriginal lives lost in the aftermath of colonisation. Only the place names Massacre Bay, Massacre Point and Bay of Martyrs hint at the violence that took place in the undeclared frontier warfare on Australian soil. As Julianne Lewis points out, such names usually recorded European victories rather than commemorating the loss of Aboriginal lives. Recently, researchers have identified several other massacre sites in the vicinity of the Great Ocean Road, but none of the sites is publicly memorialised.100 Many guides devote considerable attention to William Buckley, the escaped convict who spent over 30 years in the area living with the local Aboriginal people. A number of sites in the vicinity of the road have been named after Buckley, including ‘Buckley’s Falls’, and ‘Buckley’s Cave’ at the foot of Mount Defi ance, where he allegedly camped for several months. Visitors can explore the area that Buckley traversed by following the ‘William Buckley Discovery Trail’.101 Tourist guides frame Buckley’s story as an example of positive European interaction with the Aboriginal peoples and a tale of remarkable survival. His story is publicised as the origin of the saying: ‘You’ve got two chances – Buckley’s, and none.’102 Such ‘interpretation’ also serves to overwrite a European narrative upon an unheard Aboriginal one, allowing no room for conflicting memory.

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On a more positive note, guides and interpretive material produced in the last 20 years reflect an increasing awareness and acknowledgement of the region’s Aboriginal history. In the 1990s, a Koori Heritage Walk opened through the Ironbark Basin near Anglesea. Public artworks along the Surf Coast also incorporate Aboriginal cultural heritage. For example, in 1996 an environmental surfers’ group, Surfers Appreciating the Natural Environment (SANE), began a mural project depicting the environment and Aboriginal history of the area, which was painted on the public amenities block at Bell’s Beach. Artwork by two local artists, Mark Trinham and Glen Romanis, represents significant and rare geographical features, flora, fauna, and the surrounding sea life, local middens and traditional Dreamtime stories of the local Wathaurong tribe.103 Currently, the Great Ocean Road Coast Committee (GORCC) is implementing the Great Ocean Road Renewal Program, a $1.35 million project supported by federal government funding. The programme includes a ‘Cultural Values’ project, which seeks to recover, interpret and manage the Aboriginal heritage of the region in an ongoing partnership with local Aboriginal groups.104 Roads and routes are important parts of the physical and cultural fabric of a nation. How they are imagined, experienced and interpreted, and which meanings are privileged, have important implications for a nation’s understanding of its history and heritage. While the three routes discussed here are very different – physically, historically and culturally – from America’s iconic Route 66, there are similarities in the way their ‘fame’ has been ‘constructed’ through associations with key cultural symbolism – especially the bush, pioneering and Anzac legends – and their representation reflects the layering of memory, history and myth. Perhaps the trends in tourism along these routes also reflects a continued – and nostalgic – longing for affirming foundation mythologies in a predominantly urban nation long removed from the ‘Bush’, and where debates over the past are never far from the surface. Opportunities exist for more holistic interpretations that engage with other journeys and stories, through multi-disciplinary research and communication across disciplines including history, archaeology, anthropology, tourism and cultural heritage. Technology also has a role to play as web-based interactive media enable multi-layered interpretations that could tell more complex, nuanced stories. Greater acknowledgement and recognition of Aboriginal cultural heritage must be balanced with the need to protect sacred and significant sites from the potentially destructive impact of widespread tourism promotion. Dialogue between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities is also vital. Finally, the Birdsville Track, Stuart Highway and Great Ocean Road provide some insights into how roads and routes reflect a dynamic and ongoing process of interaction between tangible and intangible elements

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over time. Their meanings are ‘constructed’ through the complex interplay between: the physical environment, the route’s history, technology, travellers’ experiences and representations in popular culture, as well as tourism promotion and heritage interpretation. Interpretations that recognise roads and routes as spaces where meanings are not necessarily linear, progressive or static, but overlapping, intersecting and at times conflicting, will lead to a richer understanding of roads and routes as an integral part of the nation’s cultural heritage, as well as the cultures that produced them. Notes – Chapter 10: Romancing the Road: Constructing Australian Icons (1)

(2) (3)

(4) (5)

(6) (7) (8) (9) (10) (11) (12) (13)

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Dedek, P. (2007) Hip to the Trip: A Cultural History of Route 66. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, pp. 2–8, 45, 53. Much of the roadside architecture along Route 66 was inspired by imagery of ‘cowboys and Indians’, including the Will Rogers Motor Court, Tulsa, OK, the Wigwam Village, in Holbrook, AZ, and Tee Pee Trading Post, Tucumcari, NM. Dedek, Hip to the Trip, p. 2. UNESCO, World Heritage Committee (1994) Routes as Part of our Cultural Heritage, Report on the Meeting of Experts, Madrid, 24–25 November. See http:// whc.unesco.org/archive/routes94.htm (accessed 9 May 2012). Sheedy, B. (1993) Driving the Birdsville Track. Fitzroy, Vic: Roadwrite, p. 2. Bell, P. and Iwanicki, I. (2002) Overview history. In Historical Research Pty Ltd, Austral Archaeology, L. Leader-Elliott and I. Iwanicki (eds) Heritage of the Birdsville and Strzelecki Tracks. Adelaide: Department for Environment and Heritage, p. 17. Farwell, G. (1950) Land of Mirage: The Story of Men, Cattle and Camels on the Birdsville Track. Melbourne: Cassell, p. 19. Hercus, L. (1977) Tales of Nadu-Dagali (Rib-Bone Billy). Aboriginal History 1 (Part 1), 55. Historical Research Pty Ltd. et al., Heritage of the Birdsville and Strzelecki Tracks, p. 11. Horne, G. and Aiston, G. (1924) Savage Life in Central Australia. London: MacMillan, p. 40. Hercus, L. and Sutton, P. (eds) (1986) This is What Happened: Historical Narratives by Aborigines. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, pp. 187, 192. Horne and Aiston, Savage Life, pp. 35, 81–82, 156–157. See also Mulvaney, J. (2002) … these Aboriginal lines of travel. Historic Environment 16 (2), 4–5. Horne and Aiston, Savage Life, map showing location of Aboriginal tribes east of Lake Eyre, n.p. Litchfield, L. (1983) Marree and the Tracks Beyond in Black and White: Commemorating the Centenary of Marree, 1883–1983. Marree, SA: The author, pp. 2, 5–6. Sheedy, Driving the Birdsville Track, p. 12. Litchfield, Marree and the Tracks Beyond, p. 94; Ferber, H. (1995) Stagecoach to Birdsville. Kenthurst, NSW: Kangaroo Press, p. 28. Sheedy, Driving the Birdsville Track, p. 38. Litchfield, Marree and the Tracks Beyond, p. 3. Hercus and Sutton (eds) This is What Happened, pp. 187–192; Historical Research Pty Ltd. et al., Heritage of the Birdsville and Strzelecki Tracks, pp. 45–46.

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Plowman, RB. (1935) The Boundary Rider. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, pp. 266–267. (20) Hercus, Tales of Nadu-Dagali, p. 53. (21) Beckett, J. (ed.) (2000) Wherever I Go: Myles Lalor’s ‘Oral History’. Carlton, Vic: Melbourne University Press, pp. 2, 91–93. (22) Stevens, C. (2002) Tin Mosques and Ghantowns: A History of Afghan Camel Drivers in Australia. Alice Springs: Paul Fitzsimons, pp. 1–2, 13–14, 16–20, 100, 118–124, 324. (23) Farwell, G. (1948) Camel Town. Walkabout, February, pp. 16, 18. (24) Hercus, L.A. (1981) Afghan stories from the north-east of South Australia. Aboriginal History 5 (Part 1), 39–79. (25) Stevens, Tin Mosques and Ghantowns, pp. 218–221. (26) Stevens, Tin Mosques and Ghantowns, pp. 26, 75–76, 139, 152, 160–161. (27) Jensen, S. and Parker, J. (eds) (2005) In Search of the Birdsville Track: An Artist in the Outback, by Noelle Sandwith [c.1952]. Canberra: National Museum of Australia Press, p. 131. (28) Litchfield, Marree and the Tracks Beyond, p. 49. (29) Farwell, Land of Mirage, p. 9. (30) Stevens, Tin Mosques and Ghantowns, p. 324. (31) Dobre, C. and Dobre, P. (2003) The Strzelecki, Birdsville and Oodnadatta Tracks in Outback Australia. Happy Valley, SA: Oz Scapes, p. 5. (32) Stevens, Tin Mosques and Ghantowns, pp. 269–270; Beckett (ed.) Wherever I Go, pp. 95–96. (33) Farwell, Land of Mirage, p. 192. (34) Farwell, Land of Mirage, p. 106. (35) Farwell, Land of Mirage, pp. 33, 40, 60. (36) Williams, D. (2002) Traces in the sand: Internationalising the back of beyond. Australian Studies 17 (1), 66. (37) Weidenbach, K. (2003) Mailman of the Birdsville Track: The Story of Tom Kruse. Sydney: Hodder, pp. 138–139. (38) Historical Research Pty Ltd. et al., Heritage of the Birdsville and Strzelecki Tracks, p. 54. (39) Beckett (ed.) Wherever I Go, pp. 83, 85. (40) Johnson, J. and de Courcy, C. (1998) Desert Tracks. Port Melbourne, Vic: Lothian Books, p. 113. (41) Lewis, D. (2005) Blazing Saddles. Sydney Morning Herald, 11 June, Travel supplement, p. 1. (42) Tourism Australia website at http://www.australia.com/en-in/places/sa/outbackcattle-drive.html (accessed 22 February 2017). (43) Leader-Elliott, L. (2002) Indigenous cultural tourism as part of the Birdsville/ Strzelecki experience. Australian Aboriginal Studies 2, 35, 39. The Strzelecki Track is part of the Innamincka/Cooper Creek State Heritage Area, listed on the South Australian Heritage Register. See South Australian Department for Environment and Water website at https://www.environment.sa.gov.au/our-places/heritage (accessed August 2018). (44) Historical Research Pty Ltd. et al., Heritage of the Birdsville and Strzelecki Tracks, p. 261. (45) Leader-Elliott, Indigenous cultural tourism, pp. 35, 38. (46) South Australian Department for Environment and Water website at https:// www.environment.sa.gov.au/our-places/heritage (accessed August 2018). (47) Willey, K. (1973) Way of the Never Never. Walkabout, November, p. 44. (48) Clune, F. (1947) Roaming around Australia. Melbourne: Hawthorn Press, p. 193. (49) Stevens, Tin Mosques and Ghantowns, pp. 71–72.

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Tanner, A. (1995) The Long Road North. Richmond, SA: The author, pp. 153–154, 204. Wells, D. (2005) From Wagon Tracks to Bitumen: The Evolution of the Stuart Highway. Hawthorndene, SA: Douglas Wells, pp. 140–141. Bernstein, D.L. (1966) Building ‘the Bitumen’. Walkabout, September, p. 31. Lockwood, D. (1964) Up the Track. Adelaide: Rigby, p. 13. Woodburn, M.K. (1947) The bitumen. Walkabout, March, p. 16. See also Kerr, R. (2013a) The bitumen and beyond: The Stuart Highway as a cultural route. Historic Environment 25 (3), 83. Lockwood, Up the Track, p. 17. Lockwood, Up the Track, pp. 54–55. Outback Tourism SA (1993–1994) Visitor’s Guide to Outback South Australia Featuring the Stuart Highway, Oodnadatta Track, Strzelecki Track, Birdsville Track, Desert Parks and More. Adelaide: Outback Tourism South Australia, p. 5. Historic Engineering marker, Stuart Highway North, Institution of Engineers, Australia and Department of Planning and Infrastructure, 2007. Engineers Australia website at http://www.engineersaustralia.org.au/ (accessed June 2010). Carment, D. (2001) A Past Displayed: Public History, Public Memory and Cultural Resource Management in Australia’s Northern Territory. Darwin: Northern Territory University, p. 91. For example, Tourism Information Distributors Australia website at http://www. exploringaustralia.com.au/stuart.php (accessed May 2010). Pearce, H. and Alford, B. (2006) A Wartime Journey: Stuart Highway Heritage Guide. Darwin: Northern Territory Tourist Commission, Department of Natural Resources, Environment and the Arts, NT Archives Service, p. 55; Bonney, A. (1995) Victory in the Pacifi c: Fiftieth Anniversary Commemorations in the Northern Territory. Research paper. Darwin: Northern Territory Library. Pearce and Alford, A Wartime Journey, Introduction. Mulvaney, … these Aboriginal lines of travel, pp. 5–6. Strehlow, T.G.H. (1965) Culture, social structure, and environment in Aboriginal Central Australia. In R.M. Berndt and C.H. Berndt (eds) Aboriginal Man in Australia. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, pp. 123, 125. Donovan, V. and Wall, C. (eds) (2004) Making Connections: A Journey along Central Australian Aboriginal Trading Routes. Brisbane: Arts Queensland, p. 40. Mulvaney, … these Aboriginal lines of travel, p. 6. Harris, C. (2002) Culture and geography: South Australia’s Mound Springs as trade and communications routes. Historic Environment 16 (2), 8. Kerr, Bitumen and beyond. Mulvaney, … these Aboriginal lines of travel, p. 5. Mulvaney, … these Aboriginal lines of travel, p. 6. Cranley, V. (1976) 27,000 Miles through Australia. London: Robert Hale, pp. 37, 51. South Australian Highways Department, Report on the National Highway Linking Adelaide and Darwin, Port Augusta to Northern Territory Border/Prepared by a Steering Committee Comprising Representation from the Commonwealth Department of Transport, the South Australian Highways Department and the Commonwealth Bureau of Roads. Adelaide: Government Printer, p. 29. Stuart Highway Fence by Susan Dugdale & Associates. See website at http://www. architecture.com.au/awards_search?option=showaward&entryno=2009001756 (accessed December 2010). Commonwealth of Australia Gazette, No. S53, 7 April 2011, p. 9. The National Heritage List replaces the former Register of the National Estate which was phased out in 2012. The National Heritage List grants protection and

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management, under Commonwealth constitutional powers, to places recognised as being of exceptional natural and/or cultural heritage to the nation, according to a number of criteria, including: historical, aesthetic or technical, social and scientific significance, as well as rarity or representativeness. See Australian Government Department of Environment and Energy website at http://www.environment.gov. au/heritage/about/national/index.html (accessed August 2011); Leaver, B. (2002) Protecting routes of national significance. Historic Environment 16 (2), 27. Australian Heritage Database – Great Ocean Road. See Australian Government Department of the Environment and Energy website at http://www.environment. gov.au/cgi-bin/ahdb/search.pl?mode=place_detail;search=place_name%3Dgreat %2520ocean%2520road%3Bkeyword_PD%3Don%3Bkeyword_ SS%3Don%3 Bkeyword_ PH%3Don%3Blatitude_1dir%3DS%3Blongitude_1dir%3DE%3 Blongitude_2dir%3DE%3Blatitude_2dir%3DS%3Bin_region%3Dpart;place_ id=105875 (accessed October 2018). Commonwealth of Australia Gazette, p. 9. Australian Heritage Database. Planbooktravel, Great Ocean Road and Grampians, Australia’s Top Touring Regions (1st edn). Sydney: Gregory’s Publishing, p. 67. Cousland, C. (2007) Travelling the Great Ocean Road … a Journey Through Time and Place. Apollo Bay, Vic: Petticoat Publishing, p. 33. Cecil, K.L. and Carr, R.V. (1988) The Roads to Lorne: The Story of Communication between Geelong and Lorne including that via the ANZAC’s Highway. Anglesea, Vic: Anglesea & District Historical Society, p. 7. Australian Heritage Database; Stone, D. (1991) Explore the Great Ocean Road: Along Australia’s Southern Touring Route Geelong to Mt Gambier. Lilydale, Vic: See Australia Guides, p. 16. Cousland, Travelling the Great Ocean Road, pp. 22–23, 37; Cecil and Carr, Roads to Lorne, p. 7. Lewis, J. (1999) Shadows on the landscape: Memorial aspects of the Great Ocean Road. Masters of Tourism and the Visual Arts thesis, University of Melbourne, p. 43. Cousland, Travelling the Great Ocean Road, p. 39; Cecil and Carr, Roads to Lorne, pp. 13, 24. The Argus, Women’s Supplement, 26 March 1947, p. 18. White, R. (1992) Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688–1980. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, pp. 130–131. Inglis, K.S. (1998) Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape. Carlton: Melbourne University Press, p. 121. Australian Motorist, February 1917, p. 648. Australian Motorist, May 1918, p. 790. Alsop, P. (1982) A History of the Great Ocean Road. Geelong, Vic: Geelong Historical Society, p. 12. Cecil, K.L. (1990) The Great Ocean Road. Anglesea, Vic: Anglesea & District Historical Society, pp. 128, 141; Stone, Explore the Great Ocean Road, p. 41. Broadbent, G. (1936) The Great Ocean Road. Road of remembrance. Soldiers’ Memorial Highway. The Argus, 10 October, Weekend supplement, p. 30. Anon. (1918) The Great ANZAC Highway: Victoria’s Memorial to Her Soldiers Welding Practical Patriotism to National Service. Land & Transport 2 (13), p. 11. The Argus, 16 June 1950, p. 7; The Argus, 10 March 1951, p. 47. Australian Women’s Weekly, 22 April 1959, p. 34. Lake, M., Reynolds, H., McKenna, M. and Damousi, J. (2010) What’s Wrong with Anzac? Sydney: UNSW Press, p. 31.

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(98) In recent years, published guides frequently focus on gastronomic touring, for example: Allen, M. (2005) The Food and Wine Lover’s Guide to the Great Ocean Road: Restaurants Wineries People Places Produce Recipes. Prahran, Vic: Hardie Grant Books. (99) Bryson, B. (2000) Down Under. London: Doubleday, pp. 140–141. (100) Lewis, Shadows on the landscape, pp. 42, 46; Clark, I.D. (1995) Scars in the Landscape: A Register of Massacre Sites in Western Victoria, 1803–1859. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. (101) Stone, Explore the Great Ocean Road, p. 16; Planbooktravel, Great Ocean Road and Grampians, p. 29. (102) Stone, Explore the Great Ocean Road, p. 16. (103) Planbooktravel, Great Ocean Road and Grampians, p. 38; Acknowledging and celebrating Aboriginal heritage in the Surf Coast Shire, at https://www.surfcoast. vic.gov.au/fi les/.../04...culture...heritage/aboriginal_heritage.pdf (accessed 20 March 2017). (104) Great Ocean Road Renewal Program website at http://www.gorcc.com.au/proj ects/255/ (accessed 15 March 2017).

Are We There Yet? Conclusions on the Road

On – and off – the road in Australia, travellers and tourists have engaged with the landscape and its peoples, sought to discover the country and themselves, and experienced a sense of adventure, freedom, escape and even transformation. Technological, economic, social and cultural changes, and the changing physical nature of roads themselves, have influenced those experiences and perceptions over time, but certain themes have resonated from the earliest journeys to the most recent. This book opened with some observations on the familiar imagery of the American road and, throughout, comparisons have been drawn. It is clear, however, that while movement and mobility across vast geographies are dominant themes shaping the history of both North America and Australia, and while roads and road tourism loom large in the popular culture and imagination of both countries, the Australian road is imagined very differently, reflecting its divergent physical, historical and cultural contexts. The Australian road is a space that reveals conflict and contestation; it troubles physical and imaginative boundaries between: Aboriginal and European conceptions of space; road and off road; coast and outback; freedom and constraint; nostalgia and modernity; nature and technology; memory and forgetting; dream and nightmare. Those contrasts and contradictions provide insights into issues at the core of Australian society and culture. Relationships to landscape, modernity, national identity and the colonial past are central themes, or connecting threads, running through the narrative, and are key to understanding the ways in which the road is imagined, experienced and represented in Australian culture, including tourism practices. The story began with Aboriginal songlines, which epitomise the interaction between the physical and imaginative dimensions of ‘the road’. For Aboriginal peoples, the entire Australian landscape is traversed by a network of ‘cultural routes’. These intersecting, overlapping, circular and linear routes of trade, ceremony and ritual, across which goods and knowledge are exchanged, connect people physically and spiritually. Stories of Creation Ancestors’ epic journeys along these routes explain how the landscape was formed and map key topographical 255

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features which, in turn, aid navigation and survival. It is a story of belonging and understanding. For the European colonisers, the landscape was something to be conquered, tamed and developed. Roads represented a mark of ‘civilisation’, imposing order and ownership on an otherwise chaotic and potentially dangerous space. The distinction between ‘road’ and ‘off road’ was important in imagining those spaces – the ‘road’ delineating the known, ‘safe’ bounds within which movement could be controlled, while the space at or beyond the road’s edge was often imagined with a certain unease, contributing to the sense of ‘weird melancholy’ and menace that often characterised Australia’s bush and outback regions as ‘badlands’. From the outset, the physical environment was crucial in shaping the development of roads in Australia. A scarcity of inland water sources meant that the population was scattered around the coastal fringe, leaving a sparsely settled interior, or ‘outback’, dominated by vast, isolated pastoral stations. This region became Australia’s ‘frontier’. Apart from the Stuart Highway, which bisects the country from north to south, the national highway system encircles the perimeter of the continent. Unsurprisingly, circular road journeys take on particular significance in Australian culture. The difficulties of overland transport meant that beyond major settlements roads remained relatively undeveloped even well into the 20th century. The Australian road was often closely defi ned by, and differed little from, the ‘natural’ environment. Some of Australia’s most iconic ‘roads’, including the Birdsville Track and Stuart Highway – the latter nicknamed ‘the Track’ – derived some of their romance from their physical nature and, as their names testify, remained little more than tracks for much of their history. The ephemeral quality of ‘roads’ like the Birdsville Track, which was made by wagon and wheel ruts, appearing and then disappearing under sand drifts, and constantly having to be remade, could be seen as emblematic of Europeans’ sometimes tenuous grip on the country, and contributed to the impression of the Australian road as a road to nowhere. Landscape is a central element in constructions of Australian identity. The bush and pioneer legends, so powerful in Australian culture since the late 19th century, attempted to defi ne a distinctive national culture in the face of rapid economic, social and technological changes. The legends celebrated the courage, resilience and resourcefulness of the explorers, pioneering settlers and itinerant rural and pastoral workers in moving across and taming a harsh ‘frontier’, blazing trails and building the foundations of a nation. Poor or non-existent roads could only enhance the heroism of these legendary figures, who ‘rode the trackless bush in heat and storm and drought’.1 The legends also served to confi rm the legitimacy of white settlement, creating more positive and progressive foundation mythologies, effectively dismissing the presence of Indigenous peoples and their dispossession on that other, often violent, side of the frontier. 2

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Colonialism and its aftermath has an ongoing impact on Australian culture, including representations of the road and road tourism. It is reflected in the epic transcontinental and around-Australia expeditions of early cyclists and motorists, whose efforts in traversing the boundaries and penetrating the ‘dead heart’ of the continent could be interpreted as a form of recolonisation, as they attempted to more fi rmly secure its possession. It continued, as successive generations of motor tourists sought to perpetuate the ‘frontier’ by identifying with earlier explorers and pioneers and recasting their own journeys and modern modes of transport as ‘pioneering’ ventures. The development and bitumen sealing of the national highways, encircling and bisecting the continent, made ‘going around’ and through Australia achievable for more Australians than ever by the late 20th century. While the physical nature of such a journey has altered immensely across the century, some travellers continue to approach driving Australia’s vast distances as an endurance test, intent on covering as much territory and claiming as many destinations as possible in the shortest time. They thus continue the process of conquering, taming and possessing, albeit in the relative comfort of air-conditioned sedans and camper-trailers. Perhaps the numerous ‘big’ roadside attractions, which have sprung up across the Australian landscape since the mid-1960s, are further expressions of a desire to stamp ownership and identity upon the country. Frontier legends functioned to make a settler society feel more ‘at home’, yet for a nation of immigrants – originally enforced, in the case of convicts – with underlying doubts over claims to place, the concept of ‘home’ is problematic. In this context, the motifs of ‘freedom’ and ‘escape’, so central to the promotion of road tourism, and to the road genre, also became ambiguous. Mobility and wanderlust are among the defi ning qualities of Australian identity; however, the ‘freedom on the wallaby’, associated with the nomadic life of swagmen and sundowners, was tinged with pathos and suggested a state of aimless perpetual wandering or restless alienation. The ‘cry of the exile’ resonated loudly in Australian culture. In the motoring era, the language of ‘freedom’ and ‘escape’ lured motorists and caravanners onto the open road, but only temporarily. Any suggestion that such wandering was a permanent way of life carried negative, class-based connotations. The theme of ‘escape’ – and the imperative for constant movement, never settling in one place for too long – figured in several works of literature and film as a metaphor for Australia’s collective desire to escape the memory of its colonial past, as the road and road genre became platforms for more overt political protest in the later 20th and early 21st centuries. Over time, ‘the road’ itself became emblematic of the negative impact of colonialism, particularly in creative representations. Black bitumen, contrasting starkly with the surrounding landscape that it dissected, symbolised the encroachment of European settlement and its aftermath.

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The late 19th to early 20th centuries represented a watershed for Australia, as the bicycle and the motor vehicle revolutionised overland travel and transportation. This period coincided with major technological, social and cultural transformations which intensified in the interwar years as Australia shifted from a predominantly rural-pastoral to an urban-industrialised economy. While motor vehicles and the improved roads they necessitated brought many benefits, the modernisation process of which they were part also engendered anxiety and tension between embracing the future and nostalgia for the past. That tension was expressed in a number of ways as Australia looked both forward and back in experiencing, representing and imagining the road. In romanticising the bush and outback, and their inhabitants, as the embodiment of the so-called ‘real Australia’, far from the urban fringe, Australia echoed similar ‘romantic nationalisms’ that developed in several Western cultures as a response to modernity, particularly the much mythologised American ‘West’. This trend supports Dean MacCannell’s thesis that ‘for moderns, reality and authenticity are thought to be elsewhere: in other historical periods, in purer, simpler lifestyles’ – an idea which has important implications for modern tourism. 3 While America resolved its anxieties over modernity relatively quickly by embracing the road and automobile travel as another means of recreating the frontier through perpetual movement, the Australian response was far more ambivalent for much longer, possibly because, unlike America, Australia’s physical ‘frontier’ never completely closed. On the one hand, travellers and promoters embraced and celebrated the road as the ideal means of escaping the confines of the city, and accessing that ‘real Australia’, witnessing its unique landscape and encountering ‘typical’ Australians who accorded with mythologised bushmen and pioneering types. Yet in traversing the country, travellers also saw a traditional way of life disappearing: ‘swagmen’ no longer trod the ‘wallaby’ track; motor vehicles replaced drovers on horseback; and the wide expanse of the stock route was eventually reduced to the narrow line of an upgraded ‘beef road’ or highway, plied by ‘mechanical drovers’ in trucks and road trains. The Birdsville Track, a former stock route, became more firmly entrenched in the national imagination and celebrated in popular culture as the droving era was ending and as it was transformed from a ‘track’ to a ‘road’. Yet the track’s defining imagery and romance – and current tourism promotion and interpretation – stems from looking back to its earlier incarnations and its association with pioneering legends, when travelling the route required ingenuity and endurance. Paradoxically, modern roads and vehicles are the means of accessing a past or pre-industrial Australia. As improved roads lessened travellers’ physical and imaginative engagement with the environment, many expressed regret at losing a sense of adventure. They romanticised the hardship of earlier eras when conditions allowed for closer identification with the landscape, as opposed to

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smoother, less challenging journeys on ‘boring bitumen’ roads in modern vehicles. The Stuart Highway illustrates the tension between modernity and nostalgia. The highway’s more recent nickname, ‘the Bitumen’, indicates that part of its aura derived from its modernised form in the postwar era. Its straight, smooth surface elicited celebration but also disappointment, even mind-numbing boredom, for many. The tendency to look both forward and backwards in imagining ‘the road’ also contributes to imagery of roads that go nowhere, or around in circles. Ironically, while roads facilitated tourism in many regions, allowing travellers to ‘discover’ more of Australia, with road and tourism development came a growing desire to get ‘off the beaten track’. The popularity of four-wheel-drive motoring from the 1980s, which enabled travellers to search for adventure, discovery, challenge and engagement with landscape off the road rather than on it, partly reflects the yearning for ‘authentic’, ‘undiscovered’ or ‘natural’ territory, which MacCannell and Erik Cohen see as an integral trait among modern tourists.4 The idea that ‘undiscovered’ territory still exists in Australia makes the country a prime destination for adventure and off-the-beaten-track tourism. Yet participants seek to differentiate themselves and their journeys from the touristic, identifying as travellers rather than tourists, and viewing their experiences as more authentic than others. Even among those staying ‘on the road’, physical challenges and a sense of doing things the hard way are an important part of the overland journey. Long-term travellers touring the outback in caravans and motorhomes claimed a desire to test themselves in difficult environments as a major motivation. 5 Travellers’ search for adventure and challenge further testifies to the continuing power and endurance of the frontier ethos in Australia. The pioneering trope pervades popular culture and tourism more broadly, as demonstrated by fi lms such as Crocodile Dundee (1986, 1988, 2001) and Baz Luhrmann’s Australia (2008), and in the popularity of tourism sites such as the Stockman’s Hall of Fame at Longreach in outback Queensland, which opened during the Australian bicentennial in 1988. Laurajane Smith’s recent research into visitors’ responses reveals that many considered the ‘effort’ entailed in travelling to the Hall – driving over long distances and witnessing the changing landscape, which many still regarded as the ‘real Australia’ – to be an essential part of the experience. The road journey itself strengthened their own understanding of and identification with the pioneer legend celebrated in the Hall’s exhibits.6 Thus, the road and road tourism is not necessarily simply a means to an end, or an end in itself, but can play an important part in the overall tourism experience. In the mid- to late 20th century, the coastal road trip – ‘travelling North’ – figured largely in the national imagination as another significant destination, an alternative to the ‘real’ Australia of outback or rural regions. Once again, the quest for undiscovered territory by surfers and

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others on road trip safaris contributed to the development of tourism in coastal locations. Going ‘North’ was also promoted and imagined as a route to freedom, escape, self-discovery and transformation. By the late 20th century, travellers were just as likely to see their journey as an individualistic quest rather than one linked to collective national identity. Liminality is a central concept in travel and tourism, describing a suspended state of being, between departure and return, where transition or transformation is possible. Road tourism, like the road genre, exemplifies that concept in that the road trip is often motivated by the desire for escape – from home or another place, routine, work or personal circumstances. Long-distance overland travel on or off the road offers ample time and space for contemplation and potential transformation through contact with landscape and people. While travellers occupied the liminal space of the road, they entered into new communities and conventions. As the road trip became another form of mass tourism, groups such as grey nomads, backpackers, four-wheel-drive enthusiasts, bikers and truckers emerged as sub-communities of the road. The increasing disjunction between nature and technology which accompanied modernity contributed to the transformation of the Australian road from romantic bush tracks to a much darker vision in fictional representations across a century. As roads encroached around and across the continent in response to the demands of modern motor transport, anxiety over the destructive potential of that new technology followed. Imagery of roadkill – both animal and human – escalated in literature and fi lm, from C.J. Dennis’s ‘The Joy Ride’ to Judith Wright’s ‘Sanctuary’, to Wake in Fright, Long Weekend, The Cars That Ate Paris and Mad Max, as a comment on the way in which death and trauma are accepted by society as a ‘normal’ part of road culture. The overdependence upon and failure of technology – cars breaking down, accidents, becoming lost, or hitchhiking – often leaves victims prey to murderers and other dangers haunting the increasingly violent and chaotic space of the Australian road. By the third fi lm of the Mad Max series, ‘the road’ has disappeared altogether – the world as we know it, annihilated by technology, has returned, full circle, to a ‘trackless’ desert. Memory and forgetting are integral to the process of culturally ‘constructing’ roads. The Birdsville Track, Stuart Highway and Great Ocean Road have become iconic tourist routes. Each reveal a history of contested meanings, a struggle between past and present, in which progressive national narratives, especially those exemplifying the bush, pioneering and Anzac mythologies, overwrite and obfuscate other less comforting stories – particularly those of Aboriginal peoples – embodied in the routes. Yet the reality is more complex. Aboriginal tracks and meanings were not entirely obliterated. Their routes and journeys continued, intersecting with those of Europeans, whose roads and vehicles they appropriated and adapted to suit their own cultural purposes – a story which is ongoing.

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Similarly, the stark opposition between Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of relating to the road and landscape, which is often depicted in creative representations, especially fi lm and novels, is also perhaps more complex in reality. The year 2017 marked 30 years since the publication of Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines, which demonstrated the interweaving both of literary genres – novel and travel narrative – and Aboriginal and European perspectives in imagining the road. European roads are physically and temporally vastly different from Aboriginal songlines, but they do elicit richly described stories of people and place, including their own ‘creation ancestors’. Travellers’ accounts discussed in the foregoing chapters and recent qualitative research in tourism show that non-Indigenous travellers can experience deep emotional and spiritual connections to country, especially through journeys in outback landscapes. Seasoned four-wheel-drive travellers in the Australian desert, who were interviewed by Narayanan and Macbeth, experienced a shift in consciousness whereby the concept of living with the land resonated strongly. Some spoke of the desert as a teacher, requiring travellers to surrender and learn from their experiences rather than trying to dominate the landscape. Many of the four-wheel-drive clubs to which these travellers belonged were also concerned with environmental and ecological care and ethics.7 Since The Songlines was fi rst published in 1987, further steps have been taken on the road towards reconciliation between Indigenous and nonIndigenous Australians, but this is also an ongoing journey. Ultimately, the road is not a static space, but is continually constructed and reconstructed through a dynamic process of interaction between its physical environment, material fabric and design, travellers’ journeys and cultural representations, creating a space of multi-layered, intersecting stories and meanings across time. For many historic roads and routes, tourism is the most recent phase in their evolution, and is the result of changing economic, social, technological and cultural contexts. Recognising and incorporating tangible and intangible elements, Indigenous and European stories, which contribute to roads and routes’ cultural significance, can only enhance their interpretation and understanding as vital components of the nation’s heritage and important tourism resources. Epilogue: From Highway One to Global Highway One

While the Australian road has led towards the Centre, ‘North’ or around in circles, perhaps it might also – in the words of Jack Kerouac’s anti-hero, Dean Moriarty – ‘lead to the whole world’.8 Some of Australia’s most culturally significant roads may lie beyond Australia’s border; perhaps they are not ‘roads’ at all. Despite, or perhaps because of their geographic isolation, Australians have a strong and long-held desire to see ‘the road’ as extending to the world beyond. When Henry Dutton and

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Murray Aunger became the first motorists to complete a transcontinental crossing in 1908, the Australian Motorist magazine saw the feat as ‘opening up possibilities of a grand motor car route linking Northern and Southern Australia … and a shortened route to Europe’.9 The overland route between Australia and England via South-East Asia, the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East – popularised in the 1960s and 1970s as the ‘Hippie Trail’ – is a route of immense cultural significance for Australians. More broadly, the trail represented an important stage in the development of global backpacker tourism and Australian tourism to Asia. Likewise, the Kokoda Track in Papua New Guinea has become a pilgrimage route since the mid-1990s for Australians wanting to connect with the rejuvenated enthusiasm for the Anzac legend by walking in the footsteps of the WWII ‘diggers’. The track has been described as ‘almost an extension of Australia’; former Prime Minister, Paul Keating proclaimed in 1992, that ‘This was the place where … the depth and soul of the Australian nation was confirmed’.10 Kokoda trekking exemplifies the emerging trend in extreme and adventure tourism, and the Australian desire for doing things the hard way. On the Kokoda Track, intense physical and emotional suffering becomes a means of connecting with personal and national heritage and identity.11 In the last few years, another Australian pilgrimage route has emerged, following the WWI battlefields of the Western Front, on which the fi rst AIF fought. The Commonwealth’s Department of Veterans’ Affairs devised a self-drive ‘Australian Remembrance Trail’ to commemorate the centenary of WWI in 2014. The trail encompasses 12 sites in France and Belgium, including Ypres, Fromelles, Bullecourt, Pozieres, VillersBretonneux and Le Hamel. Audiocasts can be downloaded at each location, and new memorials have been constructed along the trail.12 The centenary of AIF victories at places such as Villers-Bretonneux in 2018 will only add to the significance of this pilgrimage route for Australian tourists. The road beyond the border beckons further scholarly exploration. For the Australian and global heritage community, identifying, understanding and interpreting roads and routes as important elements of cultural heritage, and as tourism resources, is itself an ongoing process which has only just begun. This book hopefully takes a further step on that journey. Notes – Are We There Yet? Conclusions on the Road (1) Paterson, A.B. (1917a) Pioneers. In A.B. Paterson (ed.) Saltbush Bill, J. P. and Other Verses. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, pp. 59–60. (2) Henry Reynolds’ The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia, fi rst published in 1981, documents forms of Aboriginal resistance and frontier warfare. (3) MacCannell, D. (1989) The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Schocken Books, p. 3.

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(4) MacCannell, The Tourist, p. 3; Cohen, E. (2004) Contemporary Tourism: Diversity and Change. Oxford: Elsevier, p. 321. (5) White, N.R. and White, P.B. (2004) Travel as transition: Identity and place. Annals of Tourism Research 31 (1), 200–218. (6) Smith, L. (2012) A pilgrimage of masculinity: The Stockman’s Hall of Fame and Outback Heritage Centre. Australian Historical Studies 43 (3), 472–482. (7) Narayanan, Y. and Macbeth, J. (2009) Deep in the desert: Merging the desert and the spiritual through 4WD tourism. Tourism Geographies 11 (3), 369–389. (8) Dean Moriarty tells Sal Paradise, ‘You and I, Sal, we’d dig the whole world with a car like this because, man, the road must eventually lead to the whole world’ (Kerouac, J. (1972 [1957]) On the Road. London: Penguin, p. 230). (9) Australian Motorist, September 1908, p. 19. (10) Jensen, E. (2009) Kokoda Track still a testing ground. Sydney Morning Herald, News Review, 17–18 October, p. 3. (11) Kerr, R. (2018) On the trail of the new frontier: Doing things the hard way in Australian overland travel. In E. Waterton and H. Saul (eds) Affective Geographies of Transformation, Exploration and Adventure: Rethinking Frontiers. Abingdon, OX and New York: Routledge, pp. 191–194. (12) Spirit of Remembrance website at http://www.battlefield-tours.com.au/html/ australian-remembrance-trail.html (accessed 10 May 2017).

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Published travel narratives Bachman, B. (1989) Off the Road Again. Melbourne: Lothian. Barker, A. (1990) An Illustrated Treasury of Australian Epic Journeys. South Melbourne: Macmillan Australia. Birtles, F. (1935) Battle Fronts of Outback. Sydney: Angus & Robertson. Bowden, T. (2002) Penelope Bungles to Broome. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Bryson, B. (2000) Down Under. London: Doubleday. Burton, J.L. (1918) Across Australia in Seven Days – J.L. Burton’s Story of his Record Drive on a Hupmobile Shod with Barnet Glass ‘Boomerang’ Tyres. Sydney: Marchant’s Patent Highlight. 264

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Clune, F. (1947) Roaming around Australia. Melbourne: Hawthorn Press. Condon, S. (1996) Sean & David’s Long Drive. Melbourne: Lonely Planet. Conigrave, C.P. (1937) Around Australia in a Pontiac. Sydney: The author. Crake, E.M. (c.1998) The Highway of Haunting Hilarity. Perth: The author. Davison, F.D. and Nicholls, B. (1935) Blue Coast Caravan. Sydney: Angus & Robertson. Dorney, M. (1928) An Adventurous Honeymoon: The First Motor Honeymoon Around Australia. Brisbane: Read Press. Ellis, R. (1976) Bush Safari. Adelaide: Rigby. Ericksen, R. (1973) West of Centre: A Journey of Discovery into the Heartland of Australia. Ringwood, Vic: Penguin. Evans, W. (1975) Diary of a Welsh Swagman 1869–1894. South Melbourne: Sun Books. Farwell, G. (1949) Traveller’s Tracks. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Farwell, G. (1950) Land of Mirage: The Story of Men, Cattle and Camels on the Birdsville Track. Melbourne: Cassell & Company; London: Orion. Farwell, G. (1978) Around Australia on Highway 1. Adelaide: Rigby. Hatfield, W. (1936) Australia through the Windscreen. Sydney: Angus & Robertson. Hill, E. (1991/2016 [1937]) The Great Australian Loneliness: A Classic Journey Around and Across Australia (North Ryde, NSW: Angus & Robertson; Sydney: ETT Imprint). Holmes, E.L. (1900) A Record of the Pioneer Trip of the Thomson Motor Car Driven by H. Thomson (the Inventor), Accompanied by E.L. Holmes. Melbourne: Thomson Motor Car. Horwitz, T (1987) One for the Road: A Hitchhiker’s Outback. Sydney: Harper & Row (Australasia). Idriess, I.L. (1951) Across the Nullarbor: A Modern Argosy. Sydney: Angus & Robertson. Jensen, S. and Parker, J. (eds) (2005 [c.1952]) In Search of the Birdsville Track: An Artist in the Outback, by Noelle Sandwith. Canberra: National Museum of Australia Press. Kaesler, G.C. (Pop) (c.1929) The Beginning of Motor Caravanning in Australia. Nuriootpa, SA: G.C. Kaesler. Least Heat Moon [Trogdon], W. (1982) Blue Highways: A Journey into America. New York: Ballantine Books. Lockwood, D. (1964) Up the Track. Adelaide: Rigby. McGirr, M. (2005) Bypass: The Story of a Road. Sydney: Picador. Muecke, S. (1997) No Road (Bitumen all the Way). Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Arts Centre Press. Murif, J.J. (1897) From Ocean to Ocean, Across a Continent on a Bicycle, an Account of a Solitary Ride from Adelaide to Port Darwin. Melbourne: George Robertson. Plowman, R.B. (1935) The Boundary Rider. Sydney: Angus & Robertson. Ratcliffe, F. (1976) Flying Fox and Drifting Sand. Sydney: Angus & Robertson. Rees, C. and Rees, L. (1953) Spinifex Walkabout: Hitch-hiking in Remote North Australia. Sydney & London: Australasian Publishing Company in association with George G. Harrap & Co. Smith, E.C.T. (1908) Two Men in a Car: One Thousand Eight Hundred and Sixty Five Miles by Motor by One of the Two (Bound volume of newspaper clippings. ML: M 692.2/10. Steinbeck, J. (1962) Travels with Charley: In Search of America. London: Heinemann. Wilson, R. (1991) Around Australia on Highway 1. Sydney: Weldon.

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Brady, E.J. (1911b) The King’s Caravan: Across Australia in a Wagon. London: Edward Arnold. Brereton, J.Le G. (1928) Swags Up! London: J.M. Dent. Carey, G. and Lette, K. (1979) Puberty Blues. Carlton, Vic: McPhee Gribble. Chatwin, B. (1988) The Songlines. London: Picador. Cohen, B. (2002) Hardly Beach Weather. Sydney: Harper Collins. Cook, K. (1961) Wake in Fright. London: Michael Joseph. Dennis, C.J. (1918) Backblock Ballads and Later Verses. Sydney: Angus & Robertson. Drewe, R. (2008) The Bodysurfers. In D. Falconer (ed.) Penguin Book of the Road (pp. 266–286). Camberwell, Vic: Viking. Esson, L. (1920) Dead Timber and Other Plays. London: Hendersons. Falconer, D. (ed.) (2008) The Penguin Book of the Road. Camberwell, Vic: Viking. Flanagan, R. (2015 [1994]) Death of a River Guide. Ringwood, Vic: McPhee Gribble; North Sydney: Vintage Books. Gaunt, M. (1916) Ends of the Earth: Stories. London: T. Werner Laurie. Gay, W. (1911) The Complete Poetical Works of William Gay. Melbourne: Thomas C. Lothian. Gilmore, M. (1922) Hound of the Road. Sydney: Angus & Robertson. Hay, W. (2008) An Australian Rip Van Winkle. In D. Falconer (ed.) Penguin Book of the Road (pp. 137–175). Camberwell, Vic: Viking. Jacobs, P. (1998) Going Inland. South Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Arts Centre Press. Jinks, C. (2004) The Road. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin. Kerouac, J. (1972 [1957]) On the Road. London: Penguin. Kirwan, Sir J. (1936) My Life’s Adventure. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode. Lawson, H. (1891) ‘Freedom on the wallaby’, Worker, 16 May, p. 8. See https://trove.nla. gov.au/newspaper/article/70863379. Lawson, H. (1900) Verses Popular and Humorous. Sydney: Angus & Robertson. Lawson, H. (1906) When I Was King and Other Verses. Sydney: Angus & Robertson. Lawson, H. (1910) The Rising of the Court and Other Sketches in Prose and Verse. Sydney: Angus & Robertson. Lawson, H. (1912) In the Days When the World Was Wide (revised edn). Sydney: Angus & Robertson. Lawson, H. (1913) Triangles of Life and Other Stories. Melbourne: Lothian. Lawson, H. (1924 [1907]) The Romance of the Swag. Sydney: Angus & Robertson. Malouf, D. (2008) Lone Pine. In D. Falconer (ed.) Penguin Book of the Road (pp. 354– 369). Camberwell, Vic: Viking. Mitchell, T. (2008) The Search for Mr Cunningham. In D. Falconer (ed.) Penguin Book of the Road (pp. 71–94). Camberwell, Vic: Viking. Murray, L. (2006) Collected Poems. Melbourne: Black Inc. Niland, D. (2009 [1955]) The Shiralee. Camberwell, Vic: Penguin Books Australia. Paterson, A.B. (1902) Rio Grande’s Last Race and Other Verses. Melbourne: Angus & Robertson. Paterson, A.B. (1906) An Outback Marriage: A Story of Australian Life. Sydney: Angus & Robertson. Paterson, A.B. (1917a) Saltbush Bill, J.P. and Other Verses. Sydney: Angus & Robertson. Paterson, A.B. (1917b) Three Elephant Power. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Paterson, A.B. (1990) A Vision Splendid: The Complete Poetry of A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson. North Ryde, NSW: Angus & Robertson. Penton, B. (1936) Inheritors. Sydney: Angus & Robertson. Rudd, S. (Arthur Hoey Davis) (1903) Our New Selection. Sydney: Bulletin Newspaper Co. Spielvogel, N.F. (c.1914) The Gumsucker at Home. Melbourne: George Robertson. Stewart, D. (1952) The Birdsville Track … a Verse Commentary for a Film. The Bulletin, 22 October, pp. 18–19. Wels, B. (1993) Finwood & Lisa. St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press.

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Whitman, W. (1977) The Portable Walt Whitman. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Williamson, D. (1993 [1980]) Travelling North. In D. Williamson (ed.) Collected Plays, Vol. II (pp. 187–249). Sydney: Currency Press. Winton, T. (2001) Dirt Music. Sydney: Pan Macmillan Australia. Wright, J. (1994) Collected Poems 1942–1985. Sydney: Angus & Robertson.

Other published material Anon. (1918) The Great ANZAC Highway: Victoria’s Memorial to Her Soldiers Welding Practical Patriotism to National Service. Land & Transport 2 (13), 11–14. Bean, C.E.W. (1962 [1910]) On the Wool Track. Sydney: Angus & Robertson. Broadbent, G.R. (c.1933) Broadbent’s Offi cial Motor Guide: Melbourne to Adelaide, Incorporating Princes’ Highway and Other Routes (6th edn). Melbourne: G.R. Broadbent. Bushnell, H. (1864) Work and Play. London: Alexander Strahan. Calder, W. (1925) Report on His Investigation of Road Problems in Europe and America During 1924. Melbourne: Country Roads Board. CEDA and AHURI (Committee for Economic Development of Australia and Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (1998) Pacifi c Highway: The Future of the Nation – a Discussion Paper on the Current and Planned Improvements to the Pacific Highway. Information Paper No. 54. South Brisbane: CEDA). Commonwealth of Australia Gazette (2011) No. S53, 7 April. Cunningham, P. (1827) Two Years in New South Wales. London: H. Colburn. Evans, G. (1925) Assistant Surveyor, ‘Journal 1813–1814’. In F. Watson (ed.) Historical Records of Australia, Series 1, Vol. 8 (pp. 165–177). Sydney: Library Committee of the Commonwealth Parliament. Furnas, J.C. (1935) – And sudden death: The Reader’s Digest classic. Reader’s Digest, August. See http://www.rd.com/culture/and-sudden-death-readers-digest/. Hardman, W. (ed.) (1975 [1865]) The Journals of John McDouall Stuart During the Years 1858, 1859, 1860, 1861 & 1862, when he Fixed the Centre of the Continent and Successfully Crossed it from Sea to Sea (facsimile edn). Adelaide: Libraries Board of South Australia. Hyett, R. (1995) The Great Ocean Road: A Traveller’s Guide. Port Campbell, Vic: Great Ocean Publications. Lewis, D. (2005) Blazing Saddles. Sydney Morning Herald, 11 June, Travel section, p. 1. Macquarie, L. (1979) Journals of His Tours in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land 1810–1822. Sydney: Library of Australian History & Library Council of NSW. Morgan, J. (1996) The Life and Adventures of William Buckley, Thirty Two Years a Wanderer amongst the Aborigines (1852 reprint). Sydney: R. Schicht. NRMA (National Roads and Motorists’ Association) (c.1937) The Pacifi c Highway Sydney to Brisbane via North Coast of NSW. Sydney: Australian Guide Book Co. NRMA & NSW Government Tourist Bureau (c.1937) Gregory’s Prince’s Highway Motorists’ Road Guide Melbourne to Sydney Coastal Route. Sydney: Australian Guide Book Co. Outback Tourism SA (1994) Visitor’s Guide to Outback South Australia Featuring the Stuart Highway, Oodnadatta Track, Strzelecki Track, Birdsville Track, Desert Parks and More. Adelaide: Outback Tourism South Australia. Planbooktravel (2006) Great Ocean Road and Grampians, Australia’s Top Touring Regions (1st edn). Sydney: Gregory’s. South Australian Highways Department (1976) Report on the National Highway Linking Adelaide and Darwin, Port Augusta to Northern Territory Border. Prepared by a Steering Committee comprising representation from the Commonwealth Department

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of Transport, the South Australian Highways Department and the Commonwealth Bureau of Roads. Adelaide: Government Printer. Stewart, D. (1952) Films for Birdsville. The Bulletin, 5 November, p. 35. Stone, D. (1991) Explore the Great Ocean Road: Along Australia’s Southern Touring Route Geelong to Mt Gambier. Lilydale, Vic: Australia Guides. SurfCoastShire (2014) Acknowledging and Celebrating Aboriginal Heritage in the Surf Coast Shire. See https://www.surfcoast.vic.gov.au/fi les/.../04...culture...heritage/ aboriginal_heritage.pdf. Tench, W. (1961) Sydney’s First Four Years. Sydney and London: Angus & Robertson. Terry, M. (1941) The New Road Link with Darwin. Australasian Engineer 41 (297), 13. Tourists’ Guides (1927) The Tourists’ Road Guide for South Australia. Adelaide: W.K. Thomas. Warner, J.K. (1923) Warner’s Road Guide Coolgardie – Pt. Augusta (Two Routes) together with Information Relating to ‘The Grand Tour’ (Perth to Brisbane). Perth: W.A. Motorist Print. White, J. (1962) Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales. Sydney: Angus & Robertson.

Films Barry, I. (1989) Bodysurfer, TV mini-series. John Sexton Productions in association with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Benedek, L. (1953) The Wild One. Stanley Kramer Productions. Bennett, B. (1987) Backlash. Mermaid Beach Productions. Bennett, B. (1994) Spider & Rose. Dendy Films. Bennett, B. (1997) Kiss or Kill. Australian Film Finance Corporation, Bennett Productions. Burstall, T. (1976) End Play. Hexagon Productions. Cameron, K. (1977) Out of It. Michael Jacob. Clarke, P., Carroll, N. and Appel, G. (2009) Bombora: The Story of Australian Surfing, TV documentary. Sydney: Screen Australia, Australian Broadcasting Commission. Eggleston, C. (1978) Long Weekend. Australian Film Commission. Elliott, S. (1994) The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Polygram Filmed Entertainment. Ford, J. (1956) The Searchers. Warner Bros. Frankland, R. (2009) Stone Bros. ScreenWest. Franklin, R. (1981) Roadgames. Essaness Pictures. Fraser, C. (1977) Summer City. Avalon Films. Harbutt, S. (1974) Stone. Hedon Productions. Heyer, J. (1954) The Back of Beyond. Shell Film Unit, Australia. Hopper, D. (1969) Easy Rider. Columbia Pictures. Kazantzidis, S. (1997) True Love and Chaos. Westside Film & Television. Kotcheff, T. (1971) Wake in Fright. NLT Productions. Ledwidge, R. (2007) Gone. Universal. McLachlan, D. (1993) Deadly Chase. Driven Mad Production. McLean, G. (2005) Wolf Creek. Australian Film Finance Corporation. Miller, G. (1979) Mad Max. Kennedy Miller Productions. Miller, G. (1981) Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. Kennedy Miller Productions. Miller, G. (2015) Mad Max: Fury Road. Kennedy Miller Productions. Miller, G. and Ogilvie, G. (1985) Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. Kennedy Miller Productions. Murphy, D. (2009) Charlie & Boots. Instinct Entertainment. Norman, L. (1957) The Shiralee. Ealing Films. Noyce, P. (1977) Backroads. Australian Film Commission. Roeg, N. (1971) Walkabout. Si Litvinoff Film Production.

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Schultz, C. (1987) Travelling North. Australian Film Commission. Spielberg, S. (1971) Duel. Universal. Storm, E. (1979) In Search of Anna. Australian Film Commission. Tilse, T. (2007) Murder in the Outback, TV movie. Film Finance. Watt, H. (1946) The Overlanders. Ealing Studios. Weir, P. (1974) The Cars That Ate Paris. Australian Film Development Corporation. Zinneman, F. (1960) The Sundowners. Warner Bros.

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Bishop, P., Duruz, J. and Mayne, A. (2008) In the middle of nowhere: Journeys with The Ghan. In A. Mayne (ed.) Beyond the Black Stump (pp. 25–56). Kent Town, SA: Wakefield Press. Blainey, G. (2001) The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia’s History (revised edn). Sydney: Macmillan. Blair, S. (ed.) (2013) Connecting cultures and continents: The heritage of routes and journeys. Special issue of Historic Environment 25 (3). Blair, S., Brazil, S.-J. and Truscott, M. (eds) (2002) Making tracks. From point to pathway: The heritage of routes and journeys. Special issue of Historic Environment 16 (2). Bliss, C.S. (1972) Autos Across America: A Bibliography of Transcontinental Automobile Travel: 1903–1940. Los Angeles, CA: Dawson’s Book Shop. Bode, K. (2011) ‘We’re not truckin’ around’: On and off -road in Samuel Wagan Watson’s Smoke Encrypted Whispers. Humanities Research 17 (2), 109–119. Bonney, A. (1995) Victory in the Pacifi c: Fiftieth Anniversary Commemorations in the Northern Territory. Research paper. Darwin: Northern Territory Library. Bonython, E. (1971) Where the Seasons Come and Go. Melbourne: Hawthorn Press. Bowles, R. (2005) Dead Centre: The Inside Story of the Peter Falconio Mystery. Scoresby, Vic: Five Mile Press. Brady, M. (1999) The politics of space and mobility: Controlling the Ooldea/Yalata Aborigines, 1952–1982. Aboriginal History 23, 1–14. Brayley, N. and Obst, P.L. (2010) The Australian Grey Nomads – are they who we think they are? Enhancing formative research through the quantitative assessment of psychological constructs. Health Promotion Journal of Australia 21 (2), 138–142. Broomham, R. (1996) On the Road: The NRMA’s First Seventy-Five Years. St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Broomham, R. (2001) Vital Connections: A History of NSW Roads from 1788. Alexandria: Hale & Iremonger. Buckley, R. (2006) Adventure Tourism. Wallingford: CABI. Burnley, I. and Murphy, P. (2004) Sea Change: Movement from Metropolitan to Arcadian Australia. Sydney: UNSW Press. Burt, J. (1971) The Birdsville Track. Adelaide: Rigby. Caputo, R. (2009) Wake in Fright: An Interview with Ted Kotcheff. Senses of Cinema 51 (July). See http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2009/51/ted-kotcheff -interview/. Carment, D. (2001) A Past Displayed: Public History, Public Memory and Cultural Resource Management in Australia’s Northern Territory. Darwin: Northern Territory University. Carson, D., Waller, I. and Scott, N. (eds) (2002) Drive Tourism: Up the Wall and Round the Bend. Altona, VIC: Common Ground Publishing. Carter, P. (1987) The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History. London: Faber & Faber. Cecil, K.L. (1990) The Great Ocean Road. Anglesea, Vic: Anglesea & District Historical Society. Cecil, K.L. and Carr, R.V. (1988) The Roads to Lorne: The Story of Communication between Geelong and Lorne Including that via the ANZAC’s Highway. Anglesea, Vic: Anglesea & District Historical Society. Clark, D. (2004) Big Things: Australia’s Amazing Roadside Attractions. Camberwell, Vic: Penguin. Clark, I.D. (1995) Scars in the Landscape: A Register of Massacre Sites in Western Victoria, 1803–1859. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. Clark, J. (ed.) (2007) Roadside Memorials: A Multidisciplinary Approach. Armidale: EMU Press.

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Davison, G., Hirst, J. and Macintyre, S. (eds) (2001) The Oxford Companion to Australian History (revised edn). South Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Dedek, P. (2007) Hip to the Trip: A Cultural History of Route 66. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Dettlebach, C.G. (1976) In the Driver’s Seat: The Automobile in American Literature and Popular Culture. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Diamond, M. (c.1990) From Bulldust to Beef Roads and Beyond: Main Roads – the First 50 Years. Brisbane: Queensland Department of Main Roads. Dobre, C. and Dobre, P. (2003) The Strzelecki, Birdsville and Oodnadatta Tracks in Outback Australia. Happy Valley, SA: Oz Scapes. Donovan, V. and Wall, C. (eds) (2004) Making Connections: A Journey along Central Australian Aboriginal Trading Routes. Brisbane: Arts Queensland. Drew, P. (1994) The Coast Dwellers: Australians Living on the Edge. Ringwood, Vic: Penguin Books. Dutton, G. (1985) Sun, Sea, Surf and Sand: The Myth of the Beach. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Edmonds, L. (1997) The Vital Link: A History of Main Roads Western Australia 1926– 1996. Perth: University of Western Australia Press. Falconer, D. (1997) ‘We don’t need to know the way home’: The disappearance of the road in the ‘Mad Max’ trilogy. In S. Cohan and I.R. Hark (eds) The Road Movie Book (pp. 249–270). London: Routledge. Falconer, D. (2009) ‘The poetry of the Earth is never dead’: Australia’s road writing. Special issue of Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, pp. 1–16. See http://openjournals.library.usyd.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/article/ view/10156/10054. Faragher, J.M. (1998) Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner, ‘The Signifi cance of the Frontier in American History’ and other Essays. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Featherstone, M. (2005) Automobilities: An introduction. In M. Featherstone, N. Thrift and J. Urry (eds) Automobilities (pp. 1–24). London: Sage. Featherstone, M., Thrift, N. and Urry, J. (eds) (2005) Automobilities. London: Sage. Federal Office of Road Safety (1998) The History of Road Fatalities in Australia. Monograph 23. See http://www.tac.vic.gov.au. Feldman, F. (2006) Harleys as freedom machines: Myth or fantasy? In B.E. Rollin, C.M. Gray and K. Mommer (eds) Harley-Davidson and Philosophy (pp. 89–99). Chicago, IL: Open Court. Ferber, H. (1995) Stagecoach to Birdsville. Kenthurst, NSW: Kangaroo Press. Fiske, J., Hodge, B. and Turner, G. (1987) Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Popular Culture. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Fitzpatrick, J. (1980) The Bicycle and the Bush: Man and Machine in Rural Australia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ford, C. (2014) Sydney Beaches: A History. Sydney: NewSouth. Foucault, M. (1986) Of other spaces (trans. J. Miskowiek). Diacritics 16 (1), 22–27. Frederick, U. and Stefanoff, L. (eds) (2011a) Cruising Country: Automobilities in Nonurban Australia. Special issue of Humanities Research 17 (2). Frederick, U. and Stefanoff, L. (2011b) Emerging perspectives on automobilities in nonurban Australia: A context for cruising country. Humanities Research 17 (2), 1–16. Frew, E. and White, L. (eds) (2011) Tourism and National Identities: An International Perspective. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Fuller, B. (2003) The Ghan: The Story of the Alice Springs Railway. Sydney: New Holland, Australia. Gibson, R. (1987) On ‘The Back of Beyond’: Interview with Tom O’Regan, Brian Shoesmith and Albert Moran. Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and Culture 1 (1), 1–6.

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Gibson, R. (1992) South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Gibson, R. (2002) Seven Versions of an Australian Badland. St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press. Goldstein, J. (2006) What can Marx and Hegel tell us about social divisions among bikers? In B.E. Rollin, C.M. Gray and K. Mommer (eds) Harley-Davidson and Philosophy (pp. 47–59). Chicago, IL: Open Court. Goodlet, K. (2013) Blue Mountains Journeys. Hazlebrook, NSW: Goodlet. Greenwood, J. (2011) Driving through history: The car, the Open Road, and the making of history tourism in Australia, 1920–1940. Journal of Tourism History 3 (1), 21–37. Gregory, J.S. (2018 [1986]) Morrison, George Ernest (Chinese) (1862–1920). Australian Dictionary of Biography. Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National University. See http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/morrison-george-ernestchinese-7663/text13405. Griffith Institute for Tourism Research (2015) Gold Coast Tourism Industry Report Year Ending 30 June 2015 (pp. 20–21). Griffith, Qld: Griffith Institute for Tourism, Griffith University. See http://invest.moregoldcoast.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/ 2015/09/Gold-Coast-Tourism-Industry-Report-June-2015.pdf. Grossberg, L., Nelson, C. and Treichler, P.A. (eds) (1992) Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge. Grossman, J.R. (ed.) (1994) The Frontier in American Culture: Essays by Richard White and Patricia Nelson Limerick. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hall, L. (2006) The ‘zest of adventure’ in Australian overland narratives, 1920–2000. Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change 4 (2), 85–95. Harris, C. (2002) Culture and geography: South Australia’s Mound Springs as trade and communication routes. Historic Environment 16 (2), 8–11. Harris, H. (2006) Desert training for whites: Australian road movies. Journal of Australian Studies 86, 99–110. Haynes, R. (1998) Seeking the Centre: The Australian Desert in Literature, Art and Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hercus, L.A. (1977) Tales of Nadu-Dagali (Rib-Bone Billy). Aboriginal History 1 (Part 1), 53–76. Hercus, L.A. (1981) Afghan stories from the north-east of South Australia. Aboriginal History 5 (Part 1), 39–79. Hercus, L. and Sutton, P. (eds) (1986) This is What Happened: Historical Narratives by Aborigines. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. Hirst, J.B. (1978) The pioneer legend. Historical Studies 18 (71), 316–337. Historical Research, Austral Archaeology, Leader-Elliott, L. and Iwanicki, I. (2002) Heritage of the Birdsville and Strzelecki Tracks. Adelaide: Department for Environment and Heritage. Hokanson, D. (1988) The Lincoln Highway: Main Street Across America. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press. Horne, G. and Aiston, G. (1924) Savage Life in Central Australia. London: MacMillan. Hoskins, I. (2013) Coast: A New History of the New South Wales Edge. Sydney: NewSouth. Hubbard, T. (ed.) (2007) Corrugations, the Romance and Reality of Historic Roads. Special issue of Historic Environment 20 (1). Humphreys, J.R. (1967) The Lost Towns and Roads of America. New York: Harper & Row. Hunt, L. (ed.) (1989) The New Cultural History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Huntsman, L. (2001) Sand in Our Souls: The Beach in Australian History. Carlton: Melbourne University Press.

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Theses Badger, I.J. (2006) Swank or ‘wheels’: How Australians regarded horse-drawn vehicles 1788–1940. PhD thesis, La Trobe University. Biber, K. (2000) ‘A certain look in the eye’: Masculinity in Australian cinema from 1970. PhD thesis, University of Sydney. Bonnin, M. (1980) A study of Australian descriptive travel writing, 1929–1945. PhD thesis, University of Queensland. Carfrae, M. (1994) Roads to heaven: The American road genre in fi lm and literature 1945–1992. MPhil thesis, University of Sydney. Fetherstonhaugh, T.J. (2002) The journal, ‘Walkabout’ and Outback Australia 1930s–1950s: A romantic rapprochement with the landscape in the face of modernity. PhD thesis, Murdoch University. Hall, L. (2005) The long way home: A history of motor touring in Australia, 1925–2004. PhD thesis, University of Sydney. Karskens, G. (1986) The grandest improvement in the country: An historical and archaeological study of the Great North Road, NSW, 1825–1836. MA thesis, University of Sydney. Kerr, R. (2012) On ‘the road’: A cultural history – imagining, experiencing and representing ‘the road’ in Australia 1890–2011. PhD thesis, University of Sydney. Kerwin, D. (2006) Aboriginal dreaming tracks or trading paths: The common ways. PhD thesis, Griffith University. Lewis, J. (1999) Shadows on the landscape: Memorial aspects of the Great Ocean Road. Masters of Tourism and the Visual Arts thesis, University of Melbourne. Lindsey, K. (2006) Drawing a line: The colonial genesis of the Hume Highway. MA thesis, Australian Centre, University of Melbourne. Yabsley, L. (2005) I still call a trailer home: A history of grey nomads. BA Hons thesis, University of Sydney.

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Websites ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) 70.2 Radio (2007) Another side of the Canning Stock Route (Transcript). PM Report, 29 August. See http://www.abc.net. au/pm/content/2007/s2018935.htm (accessed May 2008). ABC 70.2 Radio (2015) History of roadhouses in Australia. Overnights, 13 May. See http://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/overnights/history-of-roadhouses-in-australia/ 7725586 (accessed 24 March 2017). ABC TV News (2007) Art tells forgotten side of stock route history, 30 August. See http:// www.abc.net.au/news/2007-08-29/art-tells-forgotten-side-of-stock-route-history/ 654614 (accessed May 2008). Australian Government Department of Environment and Energy. See http://www.environment.gov.au/heritage/about/national (accessed October 2018) Australian Literary and Historical Texts Database, hosted by University of Sydney Library. See http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/oztexts/ozlit.html (accessed 30 July 2010). Big Banana Fun Park, Coff s Harbour. See http://www.bigbanana.com/park-info/history/ (accessed 16 September 2016). Canning Stock Route Project. See http://www.canningstockrouteproject.com/about/ (accessed 16 December 2016). Engineers Australia. See http://www.engineersaustralia.org.au/ (accessed June 2010). Great Ocean Road Renewal Program. See http://www.gorcc.com.au/projects/255/ (accessed 15 March 2017). ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites) International Scientifi c Committee on Cultural Routes (CIIC). See http://www.icomos-ciic.org/INDEX_ ingl.htm (accessed October 2007). International Movie Database (IMDb). See http://www.imdb.com (accessed May 2011). National Film and Sound Archive. See https://www.nfsa.gov.au/collection/curated/ keating-speech-redfern-address (accessed 15 August 2018). Ozroads. See http://www.ozroads.com.au/NationalSystem/highway1.htm (accessed 19 June 2007). South Australian Department for Environment and Water. See https://www.environment. sa.gov.au/our-places/heritage (accessed August 2018). Stuart Highway Fence by Susan Dugdale & Associates. See http://www.architecture.com. au/awards_search?option=showaward&entryno=2009001756 (accessed December 2010). Tourism Australia. See http://www.australia.com/en-in/places/sa/outback-cattle-drive. html (accessed 22 February 2017). Tourism Information Distributors Australia. See http://www.exploringaustralia.com.au/ stuart.php (accessed May 2010).

Index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures. Aboriginal people, 144, 193, 255–256, 260–261; and cars, 216–217, 221n50; concept of ‘road’, 15–16, 214, 215, 226–227, 229, 234, 240, 255; connection to land, 126, 134, 207; encounters with colonists, 16, 17, 18, 19, 25–26, 123–124; and evolution of civil rights, 206–207, 209–210, 218–219; in film, 126–127, 206, 207–209, 215–216; ignored in history, 128–129, 233, 235, 242, 248; in literature, 122, 131–132, 134, 145, 148–149, 210–212, 214, 217–218; Pilkington, Doris Garimara, 215; presence and knowledge, 15–17, 27, 35, 226–227, 240–242, 244, 245; songlines, 5, 15–16, 27, 38n3, 217–218, 241, 255; and travel, 15, 122; travellers engage with, 88, 207, 213. See also Birdsville Track: settler encroachment along accidents and road safety, 57, 114, 171, 185, 185–186, 189, 200; in literature and film, 183–184, 186–192 accommodation, 106–108, 118, 166, 175–176, 178; mentioned, 65, 99, 103–104, 245. See also camping; caravans and caravanning; Queensland: Surfers Paradise; swagmen and sundowners adventure tourism, 5, 12n19, 167, 262; by four-wheel-drive, 64, 66–67, 218, 259 Adventures of Priscilla, The (Elliott), 10, 89–90 Afghans, 32, 230–231, 231, 233, 235–236 America, 12n18, 52, 71n92, 87, 108–109, 171, 186; comparisons to

Australia, 4, 12n13, 28, 62–63, 64, 161; complexity of shared culture with Australia, 90–92; culture of road, 3–4, 11n4, 141, 155–159; influence of travel writing and film, 79, 95n66, 137, 139n48, 141, 155–158; inspires political activism, 205–206, 219; road genre and Australia, 137, 143, 157–158; Route 66, 92, 223, 249, 250n1; travel trends influence Australia, 74–75, 106, 150–153; ‘West’ and ‘Outback’ mythologised, 73, 77–79, 258 American Motorist, 74 Anzac legend, 223, 247, 248, 249, 262; and Bean, 34, 100, 245 Anzacs, 34, 100, 139n41, 245–248, 262 Aspinall, Clara, 30 Atkinson, Lee, 67 Augé, Marc, 64 Aunger, Murray, 47, 48, 262 Australian Automobile Association, 9, 175 Australian Legend, The (Ward), 33, 85 Australian Motorist, 9, 70n33, 170–171, 186, 246; celebrates pioneering motorists, 62, 63; compares to American counterpart, 74–75; promotes caravanning and camping, 82, 151, 152, 153, 154, 167; promotes motoring, 49–51, 50, 75, 76–77; mentioned, 47, 128, 152, 169, 262 Australian National Travel Association, 9, 78, 100–101 ‘Australian Remembrance Trail’ (France and Belgium), 262 Australian Rip Van Winkle, An (Hays), 124 automobile clubs. See clubs 281

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automobiles, 4, 12n13, 52, 57, 69n26, 106, 114, 184; Aboriginal people and, 216–217; and early motor touring, 46, 46–51, 62, 64, 74–76, 102, 127–130; four-wheel-drives, 64, 65–68; as ‘freedom-machines’, 109, 150–151, 173, 223. See also caravans and caravanning; truckies; trucks ‘automobilities’, 10 Back of Beyond, The (Heyer), 8, 85, 86, 125, 135, 137, 194; popularises lore of Birdsville Track, 233–234 Bachman, Bill, (and wife Sally), 66, 131–132, 243 Backlash (Bennett), 201n26, 208–209 backpackers, 5, 7, 122, 169, 239, 260, 262 Backroads (Noyce), 96n92, 207–208 badlands, 2, 8; motoring sows seeds of, 183–189; originate in landscape, 192–194, 256; as violent space, 195–200 Badlands (Malick), 192 ‘Bailed Up’ (Roberts), 31, 31 Barkly Highway, 57, 59; and Barkly Tableland, 83 Bathurst, 20–21, 23, 24–25, 26, 31, 46 Baudrillard, Jean, 3–4, 211 beach culture, 6, 98–101, 101, 106–108, 110, 117–118, 247–248; in literature, 116. See also Queensland: Surfers Paradise; surfers and surfing Bean, Charles: and Anzac, 34, 100, 245; On the Wool Track, 34, 77 Bell, Marion, 49, 127–128 Beneath Clouds (Sen), 215–216 Bennett, Bill: Backlash, 208–209. See also Spider & Rose Better Country, The (Sharp), 79 Beyond Thunderdome (Miller and Olgilvie). See Mad Max series Biber, Katherine, 137 bicycles and cycling, 47, 102, 159, 193, 196; impact of, 42–43, 44–45, 166; resentment of, 53–54; utilitarian use, 32, 34 Big Banana, The, 111, 111, 178. See also roadside attractions bikers and motorcycles, 158, 169–170, 180, 181n18, 181n21, 219n5; in film, 139n48, 141, 191, 205–206, 260; mentioned, 92, 192, 165

Birdsville Track, 65, 125, 194, 223, 202n51, 225; and Aboriginal people, 226–227, 228–229, 230; constructed heritage of, 232–235, 251n43, 258, 260; physical nature of, 224–226, 226, 231–232, 233; settler encroachment along, 227–231, 231. See also Tom Kruse Birtles, Dora: The Overlanders, 54, 56. See also Watt, Harry Birtles, Francis, 45, 47, 62 Blainey, Geoffrey, 4, 12n18, 209 Blaxland, Gregory, 19–20, 25 Blue Highways. See Least Heat Moon, William Blue Mountains 19–20, 23, 25, 26, 36–37. See also New South Wales Bodysurfers, The (Drewe), 116, 197 Bowden, Tim, 66, 195, 213 Brady, Edwin (E.J.): ‘Comrades’, 144; King’s Caravan, 35, 53, 194; ‘Far and Wide’, 144 Brewster, C., 62 Broadbent, George, 45, 247 Broadbent, H.F., 58, 80 ‘Brothers and Sisters’ (Wright), 136 Bruce Highway, 192, 195, 196. See also National Highway 1 Bryson, Bill, 73, 248 ‘Bulahdelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle, The’ (L. Murray), 114. See also Murray, Les Bulletin (Sydney), 185, 194 bullocks and bullock drivers, 23, 24, 27, 175, 194; and camels, 32, 230; travel described, 29, 30, 31; writers extol, 33, 35, 54 Burchill, Dora, 80 Burke, Robert O’Hara, 26, 128, 228, 239 Burma Shave, 91–92, 92, 186 Burning Truck, The (L. Murray), 187–188. See also Murray, Les ‘bush legend’, 33–36, 60, 83–84, 232–233, 245, 256 bushrangers, 24, 30–31, 31, 142–143 ‘By-Pass’ (Wright), 190. See also Wright, Judith Byron Bay. See New South Wales Calder, William, 52 camaraderie, 166–172, 180n7

Index

camels, 32, 230–232, 236–237. See also Afghans Cameron, Ken, 115. See also Out of It camping, 66, 151, 173–174, 180; in literature, 188–189, 197. See also swagmen and sundowners; caravans and caravanning Canning Stock Route Project, 218–219 car ownership, 12n13, 57, 98, 106 caravans and caravanning, 5, 106, 107, 161, 174, 257, 259; appeal to grey nomads, 131, 171–172; camaraderie of, 167–168, 180; generate spiritual transformation, 159–160; modify dynamics of road, 150–155; as new phase in motoring, 63, 76, 82; mentioned, 66, 111, 114, 117, 211 Caro, Jane, 68 Cars that Ate Paris, The (Weir), 8, 96n92, 183, 189–190, 191, 201n26, 260 Cattle Carters, The, 91 cattle industry, 23, 27, 227–229, 237; in literature and film, 33, 54–56 ‘Cave Man, The’ (Leason), 185, 185 Central Australia, 26, 32, 38n3, 76, 176; Aboriginal people and, 15, 217–218, 241, 193; landscape of 80, 89, 160, 193; Stuart’s route/highway, 27, 87, 236, 236 Charlie & Boots (Murphy), 116, 165, 201n26 Chatwin, Bruce: The Songlines, 38n3, 217–218, 261 Chauvel, Charles: Jedda, 206 Christie, Stella, 127 ‘Clancy of the Overflow’ (Paterson), 33. See also Paterson, Banjo Clark, William, 62, 68n4, 71n92 Clarke, Marcus, 25 Clarsen, Georgine, 81, 127, 130, 221n50 clubs, 44, 99–100, 105, 181n21; automobile, 48–49, 66–67, 167, 181n18, 261 Clune, Frank, 78, 129 coach travel, 29–31, 36–37, 102, 175, 231. See also Cobb & Co. Cobb & Co., 29, 30, 37, 54, 87, 102 Cohen, Bernard: Hardly Beach Weather, 132, 212–213 Cohen, Erik, 259

283

Cole, E.J.: The Squatter’s Son, 143 Cole, Emily, 160–161 ‘Comrades’ (Brady), 144. See also Brady, Edwin (E.J.) Condon, Sean, 65, 89, 91–92, 132, 158, 169, 192 Conigrave, C. Price, 60, 69n26, 128–129, 129 convicts, 16–17, 22–23, 244; become bushrangers, 24, 142; build roads, 18, 20, 24 ‘Convoy’ (McCall), 171 Cook, Kenneth, 88, 133. See also Wake in Fright (Cook, novel); Wake in Fright (Kotcheff, film) corduroy road, 29, 40n68, 47 Country Roads Board (Victoria), 52, 102–103, 246 Cox, William, 20 Crake, Edith, 58, 59, 167, 173–174 Cronin, Bernard, 146–147 ‘cry of the exile’, 144–145. See also settler colonialism cultural routes, 8, 12n22, 13n23, 224; and Aboriginal peoples, 15, 240–242, 255–256 Cunningham, Richard, 123–124 Cutler, John C., 74 Davison, Frank Dalby, 53, 78, 103, 154–155, 173 Deadly Chase (McLachlan), 198, 201n26 Death of a River Guide (Flanagan), 122, 210–211 Dedek, Peter, 223, 250n1 de Heer, Rolf: The Tracker, 215 Dennis, C.J.: ‘The Joy Ride’, 184, 260; ‘An Old Master’, 35 Depression, Great, 52, 146, 152–153, 154–155, 156, 161, 223 Dharma Bums, The (Kerouac), 157. See also Kerouac, Jack Dirt Music (Winton), 192, 220n30 Dorney, Muriel, 57, 78, 173 Drewe, Robert: The Bodysurfers, 116, 197 drovers, 166, 170, 193, 228, 258; idealised, 33, 84, 85, 232; provoke nostalgia, 54–55, 86; in film 55–56, 88, 135. See also Birdsville Track Duel (Spielberg), 198

284

Roads, Tourism and Cultural History

Dumaresq, William, 26 Dutton, George, 229 Dutton, Henry, 47, 48 Easy Rider (Hopper), 3, 92, 141, 155, 157, 158, 205 Eggleston, Colin: Long Weekend, 116, 188–189. See also Long Weekend (Eggleston) Ellis, Rex, 65, 207 End Play (Burstall), 198 Esson, Louis, 77 Eubank, Victor, 62 Evans, George, 20, 25 Ewers, John, 91 explorers and exploration, 3, 6, 16, 87, 137, 212, 218; become legends, 34, 238–239, 256; in bush: 25, 26, 123–124; expeditions: 18, 19–20, 244; routes become roads, 26–27, 236; travelers identify with, 42–43, 60–62, 61, 68, 68n4, 128, 257 Eyre Highway, 57, 58, 60, 65, 83, 86–87, 238. See also National Highway 1 Eyre, John, 26–27, 60, 239 Falconer, Delia, 123, 124, 135 Falconio, Peter, 1, 199, 200 ‘Far and Wide’ (Brady), 144. See also Brady, Edwin (E.J.) Farwell, George, 54–55, 78, 87; writes about Birdsville Track, 85, 125, 226, 231, 232–234 Finwood and Lisa (Wels), 116–117, 118 Flanagan, Richard: Death of a River Guide, 122, 210–211 food and drink, 15, 108, 152, 155, 173–174; and ‘bush hospitality’, 32, 166, 172–173; in 20th century, 64, 89, 176, 176, 177–178 Ford, John, 90. See also The Searchers four-wheel drives. See automobiles Frankland, Richard: Stone Bros., 215–216 Franklin, Richard: Roadgames, 90–91, 198 Fraser, Christopher, 110. See also Summer City (Fraser) ‘Freedom on the Wallaby’ (Lawson), 146. See also Lawson, Henry frontier thesis. See Turner, Frederick Jackson

Furnas, J.C., 186 Fury Road (Miller). See Mad Max series Gaunt, Frank, 45 Gaunt, Mary: ‘A Good Samaritan’, 29; ‘Sweetbriar in the Desert’, 148 Gay, William: ‘The Song’, 183–184 Geertz, Clifford, 11 Gibson, Ross, 192–193, 195, 196 Giffin, J., 62 Gilmore, Mary: Hound of the Road, 145 Goff, Richard, 83 Going Inland (Jacobs), 131–132, 145–146, 195–196, 197, 211–212, 213, 220–221n30 gold, 29–31, 34 Goldstein, Jonathan, 158 Gone (Ledwidge), 199 Good Roads movement, 44, 63, ‘Good Samaritan, A’ (Gaunt), 29. See also Gaunt, Mary Grapes of Wrath, The (Steinbeck), 156, 168, 223. See also Steinbeck, John Great Northern Highway, 51, 103 Great Ocean Road, 8, 52–53, 77, 223, 242–245, 243, 246; constructed heritage of, 244, 247–250, 260; as memorial, 245–247 Great Western Highway (Road), 20, 23, 24–25, 52 grey nomads, 5, 65, 131, 168, 171–172, 180; in literature, 197, 220n30; mentioned, 7, 122, 165, 169, 239, 260 ‘Hairy Man, The’ (Lawson), 26. See also Lawson, Henry Hall, Laina, 131 Hall, Stuart, 90 Harbutt, Sandy, 205–206. Hardly Beach Weather (Cohen), 132, 212–213 Harkins, Maurice, 175 Hatfield, William, 51, 57, 62, 82, 172; perceptions of landscape 55, 80, 193 Hawkins, Elizabeth, 25 Hays, William: An Australian Rip Van Winkle, 124 Heyer, John, 85, 233–234. See also Back of Beyond Highway 1. See National Highway 1 Hill, Ernestine, 80, 193, 194, 232

Index

‘Hippie Trail’, 262 Hirst, John, 34 ‘History Wars’, 8, 209–210, reaction to in film and books, 210–211 hitchhikers and hitchhiking, 154–155, 157, 158, 198, 260; crimes against, 196, 199; in film and literature, 79, 117, 134, 192, 198–199, 207–208; Leslie and Coralee Rees, 58, 60, 84, 160 Holden (car manufacturer), 57, 110, 130, 165 Holmes, E.L., 46–47 Hopper, Dennis, 3, 92, 141, 205. See also Easy Rider Horwitz, Tony, 89, 91, 157, 158 Hound of the Road (Gilmore), 145 Howard, John, 210, 218 Howell, Kathleen, 127 Hume Highway, 27, 61, 61, 159, 177, 199, 212; in literature, 132, 212–213 Humphreys, J.R., 79 Hurley, Frank, 51, 80 ICOMOS, 12n22, 13n23, 224 Idriess, Ion, 78, 83, 159–160, 167, 175 Indigenous people. See Aboriginal people Ingamells, Rex, 80 Inheritors (Penton), 29, 34 In Search of Anna (Storm), 117 International Scientific Committee on Cultural Routes (CIIC), 12n22, 224 Jacobs, Pat, 131–132, 212, 220n30. See also Going Inland (Jacobs) Jedda (Chauvel), 206 Jenolan Caves, 36–37, 37 Jinks, Catherine: The Road, 214 Johnson, R.G., 74 Jones, Lloyd, 83 Jones, William J., 155 ‘Joy Ride, The’ (Dennis), 184, 260. See also Dennis, C.J. Kaesler, G.C., 151, 152 Kangaroo (Lawrence), 118 Kahanamoku, Duke, 100 Karskens, Grace, 17, 142 Keating, Paul, 209, 210, 220n19, 262 Kemp, Jeffrey, 91 Kent, Palmer, 49

285

Kerouac, Jack, 79, 139–140n48, 164n61, 261, 263n8; establishes new road genre, 141, 161, 155–157, 158; mentioned, 3, 137, 197. See also On the Road (Kerouac) King’s Caravan (Brady), 35, 53, 194 Kirwan, John, 29 Kokoka Track, 262 Kotcheff, Ted: Wake in Fright, 88, 96n78, 133. See also Wake in Fright (Kotcheff, film) Kruse, Tom, 8, 85, 86, 125, 126, 134, 135, 233–234, 233. See also Birdsville Track Lalor, Myles, 229, 234 landscape, 68, 79, 82, 83, 91–92, 213, 244; and Aboriginal people, 15–16, 126, 134, 193, 213, 227, 229, 241, 255–256; as adversary, 47, 131, 256; colonists describe, 18, 21, 25, 26; in film, 55–56, 88, 89, 125–126, 133, 133, 134, 195–196; immensity of, 55, 67, 80, 89, 133; in literature, 56, 131–132, 212, 217–218; monotony of, 83, 88–89; and motorists, 53, 55, 57–59, 66, 67, 76, 88–89; spiritual effect of, 42, 79–81, 160, 261; ‘weird melancholy’ of, 25, 193–95, 256 Lansden (Landsen), Gordon, 214, 215 Lawrence, D.H.: Kangaroo, 118 Lawson, Henry, 26, 29, 37, 165, 180n2, 187; immortalises bushmen, 33, 34, 35, 146, 148. See also specific titles of Lawson’s work Lawson, William, 19–20 ‘Lay of the Motor Car, The’ (Paterson), 184. See also Paterson, Banjo Leader-Elliott, Lyn, 235, 242 Leason, Percy: ‘The Cave Man’, 185, 185 Least Heat Moon, William, 79, 138n16, 159 Leed, Eric, 59–60 Lees, Joanne, 1, 199 Lefebvre, Henri, 10 Le Gay Brereton, John: ‘Swags Up!’, 147 Leichhardt, Ludwig, 26 Lewis, Meriwether, 62, 68n4, 71n92 liminality, concept of, 7, 141–142, 161, 162n4, 180, 260 Lincoln Highway, 74, 87, 246

286

Roads, Tourism and Cultural History

Lindsey, Kiera, 212 Lockwood, Douglas, 58, 59, 173, 177, 198, 238 ‘Lone Pine’ (Malouf), 197 Long Weekend (Eggleston), 116, 188–189, 195, 260 Lost Towns and Roads of America, The (Humphreys), 79 Luhrmann, Baz, 88, 259 MacCannell, Dean, 258, 259 Mack, Eric, 83–84 Macquarie, Lachlan, 18–20, 21 Macquarie’s Obelisk, 19, 20 Mad Max series, 10, 96n92, 98, 115, 137, 139n48, 201n26; violence of, 8, 190–191, 192, 195, 206, 260 Mad Max 2. See Mad Max series Malick, Terrance: Badlands, 192 Malouf, David: ‘Lone Pine’, 197 Mansbridge, C.A.S., 84, 151–152, 177 maps, 45, 212, 217, 239, 242, 255–56; in figures, 28, 104, 105, 129, 225, 236, 243 masculinity, 88, 90, 149, 100, 206 McCall, C.W.: ‘Convoy’, 171 McConnell, 62 McCormack, William, 52 McGirr, Michael, 159 McGregor, Craig, 108 Meredith, Louisa Anne, 24–25 Miller, George, 191. See also Mad Max series Mitchell, Thomas, 26, 123–124 ‘mobilities’ studies, 10, 93n11 Model T Ford, 47–48, 102 modernity, 43, 53–56, 77–79, 87, 123, 135, 258–59. See also nostalgia Morris, Peter, 131 Morrison, Alastair, 89, 195 motels. See accommodation Motor Car Journal (London), 49 motorcyclists, motorcycling. See bikers and motorcycles Muecke, Stephen: No Road (bitumen all the way), 16 Murder in the Outback (Tilse), 199 Murdoch, Bradley John, 1, 199 Murif, Jerome, 42–43, 43, 166, 193. See also bicycles and cycling Murphy, Joseph, 155

Murray, ‘Gelignite Jack’, 130 Murray, Les, 114, 187–188, 190 Narayanan, Y. and J. Macbeth, 81, 159, 261 national identity, 6, 141, 179, 255, 260; factors that define, 33, 43, 68, 73–78 National Highway 1 (National Route 1), 86–87, 96n73, 114, 122, 130, 130–132, 237; basis of, 26–28, 28 National Roads and Motorists’ Association (NRMA), 10, 106, 107, 111, 128, 171, 175; travel guides, 103, 104 Native Cat (tjilpa), 15, 241; in The Songlines, 218 New England Highway, 52, 103, 104, 114 New South Wales, 17–24, 28–29, 30–31, 38n12, 123–124, 160, 199; Byron Bay, 99, 102, 109, 118, 124; and civil rights, 206–207, 209, 218; Coffs Harbour, 111, 111, 114, 118, 178; early tourism, 21–22, 22, 36–37, 37; in literature, 26, 29, 115, 117, 132, 143, 208–209, 212; in road guides, 103–105, 104, 105; travel narratives, 21, 24–25, 26, 30, 34, 49, 154–155. See also Hume Highway Newlyn, Frank, 160 Niland, D’Arcy, 85. See also The Shiralee (Niland) Nissan Patrol Club of South Australia, 67. See also clubs No Road (bitumen all the way) (Muecke), 16 Northern Territory, 57, 76, 83, 213; crime, 1, 198, 199, 200; heritage of, 239–240, 242; in literature, 55–56, 131–132, 217– 218; travel narratives, 42, 47, 59, 80, 86; Stuart Highway, 235–239; mentioned, 27, 50–51, 81, 155, 172, 177 nostalgia, 4, 43, 135, 249, 258–259; travellers express, 58–59, 86, 167; writers express, 33, 34, 35, 53–55, 86, 116. See also modernity Noyce, Phillip: Backroads, 207; Rabbit Proof Fence, 215 Nullarbor, 59, 65, 83, 90–91, 167, 173, 193; in film, 195, 198–199, 202n52; route across, 27, 57. See also Eyre Highway

Index

oil companies, 51, 64, 81, 128, 177. See also Shell Oil Company ‘Old Master, An’ (Dennis), 35. See also Dennis, C.J. ‘Old Stone Chimney’ (Lawson), 148. See also Lawson, Henry On the Road (Kerouac), 3, 79, 137, 139–140n48, 141, 148, 155–157, 161 On the Wool Track (Bean), 34, 77 Onyx, J. and R. Leonard, 172 Open Road (NRMA). See National Roads and Motorists’ Association O’Regan, Tom, 191 Our New Selection (Rudd), 194 Out of It (Cameron), 115, 117, 201n26 Overland Telegraph Line, 27, 34, 42, 166, 236–237, 238, 239, 242 Overlanders, The (Birtles, novel), 54, 56 Overlanders, The (Watt, film), 55–56 Pacific Highway, 53, 102–103, 104, 105, 113–114, 115–116, 118. See also National Highway 1; roadside attractions Page family, 194, 202n51 Palmer, Sidney, 160, 168 Palmer, Vance, 77 Paterson, Banjo, 33, 34, 53–54, 99, 144, 146, 184. See also specific titles of Paterson’s works Penton, Brian, 29, 34 Phillip, Arthur, 16, 17 Picnic at Hanging Rock (Weir), 195, 202n53 Pilkington, Doris Garimara: Rabbit Proof Fence, 215 ‘pioneer legend’, 34–36, 60, 68, 83–84, 232–233, 245, 256, 259 ‘Pioneers’ (Paterson), 34, 144. See also Paterson, Banjo Pioneer Tours, 62, 81, 82 Plowman, R.B. (Bruce), 229, 232 ‘Portrait of the Artist as a New World Driver’ (L. Murray), 190. See also Murray, Les Princes Highway, 103–105, 105, 151. See also National Highway 1 Queensland, 29, 34–35, 45, 51, 111, 112, 235; becomes holiday destination, 101–104, 104, 105–106; crime, 196,

287

200; in film and literature, 29, 34–35, 54–55, 115, 116; outback, 193, 194, 228, 259; Surfers Paradise, 98, 105–106, 108, 112–113, 113; in travel narratives, 49, 55, 84; mentioned, 23, 26, 66, 85, 98, 109, 174. See also Birdsville Track; Kruse, Tom Rabbit Proof Fence (Noyce, film), 215 Rabbit Proof Fence (Pilkington, novel), 215 race relations, 8, 204–205, 206–209, 213–214; and national memory, 209–213; and emerging Indigenous voices, 215–219 railways, 29, 32, 55; ‘Ghan’ (Great Northern Railway), 231, 237; sensory experience of, 58, 74, 75, 75; and tourism, 36–37, 101–102, 175 Reader’s Digest, 186 Redex Around-Australia Reliability Trials, 129–130 Rees, Leslie, 60–61; and wife Coralee, 51, 58, 59, 80, 84, 160 resorts, 36–37, 45; seaside, 99, 102, 103–105, 106, 117–118, 245, 247. See also Queensland: Surfers Paradise Reynolds, Henry, 126 Roadgames (Franklin), 90, 198, 201n26 roadhouses, 64, 91, 170, 175, 176–177, 234 road safety. See accidents and road safety roads, 17–20, 23–24, 26–27, 28, 29–30, 33; Aboriginal concept of, 15–16, 122, 214, 215, 226–227, 229, 241, 255; as ‘civilising’ influence, 2, 6, 18–19, 35, 256; conditions of, 24, 29, 30, 31, 44, 46–47, 48, 51, 125, 232; improvements to, 23–24, 52, 57–59, 66, 130–131, 237; ‘rituals’ of, 42, 68n4, 92, 92, 168–169; sensory experience of, 29, 42, 44, 45, 53, 55, 58; for tourism, 21–22, 22, 36–37, 37, 52–53, 103, 113–114, 242–243, 245. See also names of individual roads and highways roadside attractions, 110–111, 111, 165, 178–180, 178, 182n59, 257 Road, The (Jinks), 214 road trains, 54, 57, 86, 171, 234, 237, 258 Roberts, Tom: ‘Bailed Up’, 31, 31

288

Roads, Tourism and Cultural History

Robertson, Jean, 127 Roeg, Nicholas: Walkabout, 126, 207 ‘Roll Up at Talbragar’ (Lawson), 34. See also Lawson, Henry Romance of the Swag (Lawson), 33. See also Lawson, Henry Royalauto Journal (Victoria), 198 Rudd, Kevin, 218 Rudd, Steele: Our New Selection, 194 ‘Sanctuary’ (Wright), 186–187, 188, 190, 260 Sandford, Gladys, 49, 51, 69n26, 127 Saunderson, William, 167 Saunier, R.P., 50 sea change, 6, 98, 114, 118 Searchers, The (Ford), 90, 137 ‘See America First’, 74 ‘See Australia First’, 74–75, 75 Sen, Ivan: Beneath Clouds, 215 Serle, Geoffrey, 144 settler colonialism, 5–6, 16, 35, 41n97, 214, 256–257; questioning legitimacy of, 124–125, 126, 137, 142, 146; and recolonising Australia, 81, 82, 127, 129. See also Aboriginal people: and evolution of civil rights Shaffer, Marguerite, 92–93, 156, 157 Sharp, Dallas Lore: The Better Country, 79 Shell Oil Company, 61, 91, 128. See also oil companies; tourism promotion Shiralee, The (Niland, novel), 10, 85–86, 88, 135–136, 148–149, 188 Shiralee, The (Norman, film). See The Shiralee (Niland, novel) Simpson Desert, 65, 66, 67, 224, 241 Smith, Edwin Charles Temple (E.C.T.), 49 Smith, Laurajane, 259 Smoke Encrypted Whispers (Watson), 214 Soldene, Emily, 30 ‘Song, The’ (Gay), 183–184 ‘Song of the Old Bullock Driver’ (Lawson), 35. See also Lawson, Henry Songlines, The (Chatwin), 38n3, 217–218, 261 South Australia, 42, 47, 60, 83, 166; Birdsville Track, 224–233 passim; in literature and film, 124, 194, 195,

212; Stuart Highway, 236, 237, 238; tourism and heritage in, 234–235; mentioned, 5, 27, 29, 50–51, 151, 178. See also Kruse, Tom South Head Road, 21–22, 22 Spangler, Jason, 156 spatial history, 10 Spider & Rose (Bennett), 191, 201n26. See also Bennett, Bill Spielberg, Steven: Duel, 198 Spielvogel, Nathan, 36 Squatter’s Son, The (Cole), 143 Stanger, Sophia, 24, 31, 36, 39n46 Stead, Christina, 146 Steinbeck, John, 79, 84, 156, 223 Stewart, Douglas, 194 Stockwell, Stephen, 179 Stone (Harbutt), 201n26, 205–206 Stone Bros. (Frankland), 215–216 Storm, Ebsen: In Search of Anna, 117 Stotz, Gertrude, 216–217 Stuart, John McDouall, 26–27, 42, 68n4, 236, 236, 237, 239, 241 Stuart Highway (North-South Road), 5, 26–27, 173, 236, 238, 240, 259; and Aboriginal people, 15, 240–242; cultural heritage of, 15, 223, 235–240, 249–250, 260; in film and fiction, 55–56, 197; motorists describe, 58–59, 66, 86, 89, 167; violence on, 1, 195, 198, 199; and WWII, 56, 57 Summer City (Fraser), 110, 117, 201n26 Sundowners, The (Zinneman), 135–136, 148–150 Sunset Magazine, 62 surfers and surfing, 100–101, 108–110, 157–158, 248, 249. See also beach culture Surfers Paradise. See under Queensland swagmen and sundowners, 32–33, 32, 146–148, 147, 154–155, 165–166 ‘Swags Up!’ (Le Gay Brereton), 147 ‘Sweetbriar in the Desert’ (Gaunt), 148. See also Gaunt, Mary Sydney Gazette, 19 Sydney Morning Herald, 34, 100 Tamworth Four-Wheel Drive Club, 66–67. See also clubs Tasmania, 29, 49, 86–87, 179; in literature, 122, 210–211

Index

Tench, Watkin, 18 terra nullius, 16, 38n9 Thomson, Herbert, 46–47 Tickner, John and Elaine, 172 tjilpa (Native Cat), 15, 241; in The Songlines, 218 tourism promotion, 5, 45, 61, 100–101, 101, 112, 113; heritage and, 234–235, 238, 239–240, 242, 247–249, 258; road guides as, 103–105, 104, 105. See also Australian Motorist; oil companies; Shell Oil Company tourist routes. See under roads Tracker, The (de Heer), 215 Travelling North (Schultz, film), 115 Travelling North (Williamson, play), 115, 117 Travels with Charley (Steinbeck), 79 Tritton, ‘Duke’, 147, 166 truckies, 170–171, 176, 177, 231–232; in film and literature, 134–135, 198. See also trucks trucks, 55, 80; in literature, 187–188, 231–232. See also Kruse, Tom; truckies True Love & Chaos (Kazantzidis), 198–199, 202n52 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 4, 78 Turner, Huldah and Joe, 58, 155, 160, 168, 171, 174 Turner, Victor, 162n4, 166 Uluru (Ayers Rock), 15, 80, 89, 131 United States of America. See America Urry, John, 10, 93n11, 162n4 Victoria, 13n25, 29–30, 52–53, 61, 105, 176; in film, 115, 116, 117, 165, 198, 202n53; Great Ocean Road, 242–250; travel in, 36, 37, 46, 48–49; mentioned, 45, 47, 62, 99, 104, 178, 185. See also Princes Highway Voss (White), 26 Wake in Fright (Cook, novel), 10, 88, 133, 135, 136, 188; 195, 206, 260 Wake in Fright (Kotcheff, film), 10, 88, 96n78, 133, 133,135; mentioned, 195, 206, 260 Walkabout (magazine), 9–10, 61, 78, 91 Walkabout (Roeg), 126, 207

289

Walker, Frank, 45 wallaby track, 7, 32, 32–33, 146, 154, 165, 258. See also swagmen and sundowners Ward, Russel, 33, 77, 85, 145 Warner, J.K., 76, 82 Waterhouse, Richard, 166 water transport, 17–18, 28–29, 31, 101, 102 Watson, Samuel Wagan: Smoke Encrypted Whispers, 214 Watt, Harry: The Overlanders, 55–56. See also Birtles, Dora Weir, Peter: Picnic at Hanging Rock, 195, 202n53. See also The Cars that Ate Paris (Weir) Wels, Barbara, 116–117. See also Finwood and Lisa (Wels) Wentworth, William Charles, 19–20 West (American), 6, 62, 71n92, 73, 74, 78–89, 223, 258 Western (film genre), 90, 91, 135, 143, 205, 208, 219n5; as forerunner to road genre, 4, 35 Western Australia, 33, 34, 91, 130–131, 218; in travel narratives, 29, 51, 58, 60–61, 80, 82, 172; mentioned, 22, 27, 45, 83, 132, 178 White, John, 17 White, Naomi and Peter, 159 White, Patrick: Voss, 26 Whitman, Walt, 141, 95n66 Wild One, The (Benedek), 3, 137, 139n48, 155, 191 Willey, Keith, 86, 167, 236 Williams, Margaret, 143, 162n13 Williams, Raymond, 10 Williamson, David, 115. See also Travelling North (Williamson, play) Wills, William John, 26, 128, 228, 239 Windschuttle, Keith, 210, 220n22 Winton, Tim: Dirt Music, 192, 220n30 Wolf Creek (McLean), 8, 10, 188, 195, 199–200, 201n26 women, 44, 49, 127–128, 151, 164n61, 204; portrayed in literature and film, 110, 117, 149, 156 Woodburn, Kathleen, 59, 237 wool industry, 20, 23, 27, 28, 31–32, 230; celebrated by writers, 33–34, 77; sheep stations, 228–229

290

Roads, Tourism and Cultural History

World War I, 8, 34, 262; and concept of memorial road, 52–53, 245–247 World War II, 56, 57, 64, 82–83, 237; in film, 55–56 Wright, Judith, 136, 186–187, 188, 190, 260

Wright, Tony, 177 writers, 49, 77–79, 83–85, 88–89, 91, 217, 232; American, 79, 95n66. See also names of individual writers Young, Diana, 217