The drive north

It’s 670 miles to Warwick
I’ve got a full tank of gas
Half a pack of chewing gum
It’s light, and I’m wearing contact lenses.

Hit it.

SO began the trip north. Cold Chisel’s Bow River was the first Random Shyte song as the little black Polo began its journey from Bruce, ACT to Warwick, Queensland. For the first time in around 20 years I’d be heading north via the city of Dubbo and the Newell Highway through central New South Wales, before turning right at the border town of Goondiwindi and heading to Mum’s new place in the Darling Downs city of Warwick.

Before leaving the ACT there were a few trip firsts. After Bow River were my first two introductions to the Hamilton musical soundtrack after a friend’s recommendation; throughout the drive I began to see what all the hype was about as the songs randomly inserted themselves in amongst the rest of my Random Shyte. After that Hamilton introduction was Paul Kelly’s Every Fucking City, a very popular song from about the time I started travelling the world. Favourite lines?

“And they’re playing La Vida Loca once again. And I can’t believe I’m dancing to this crap but I’m a chance here.”

Let’s face it, we’ve all been there.

Before leaving the ACT there was even time for my first “oh for fuck’s sake mate” as someone did something stupid. But one jurisdiction down, two to go.

What the people need is a way to make them smile

So sang the Doobie Brothers as I drove into the town of Yass. To help break the trip up I’d decided to post a pic from each town I stopped in with the song playing from my Random Shyte Spotify playlist as I drove in. This had the benefit of breaking up a rather long journey into manageable portions, while also keeping my mind occupied while approaching the next stop. Having Listen to the Music as that first song seemed pretty apt then.

Yass itself is a pretty little town just off the Hume Highway, about 60km north of Canberra. Once upon a time travellers driving from Sydney to Melbourne along the highway had to pass through town, before a 1994 bypass kept most of the traffic out of town. The Sydney to Melbourne railway never went through town though. Locals wanted it to, the NSW Government didn’t, so the compromise was a tramway from the Yass Junction station to the centre of Yass itself. Today there’s a large railway bridge over the Yass River and the Yass Railway Museum at the city centre station, but otherwise it’s a reminder of people’s ability to come up with creative solutions to problems that probably shouldn’t exist in the first place.

I drove out to Yass Junction as well, which is kind of arm’s length from the town itself, before heading to the large service area on the Hume to try grab a cheeky takeaway McDonald’s coffee before heading north. That McDonald’s had a brief level of notoriety about the time I first moved down to Canberra: as was the then format the sign had the golden M then the place name, which here meant a sign saying “M Yass”.

Alas — or probably fortunately — the queue for the drive-through was a bit long for mediocre coffee, so I skipped forward to Boorowa. Instead of coffee to keep my brain occupied I had Split Enz Message to My Girl play followed by Queen’s Somebody To Love, which quite frankly felt arse about. If you’re sending a message to your girl but don’t have somebody to love then there’s going to be a lot of confusion and hurt floating around and just a big pile of mess really.

Para bailar la bamba

To dance La Bamba? The lyrics suggest you need a little bit of grace for me and you, although I can vouch that a bit of enthusiasm works just as well if you’re drunk enough. This particular version was the Playing For Change one, which according to Wikipedia is “a multimedia music project featuring musicians and singers from across the globe”. They’ll generally get musicians and singers from around the globe to play/sing a part of a popular song then combine them into something really quite special. 10/10 can highly recommend.

This was the first time I’d ever actually come to Boorowa and stopped for a look. Our family has been doing the trek from Queensland to Canberra since at least 1983, and given Dad’s pathological hatred of going anywhere near Sydney, we generally came and left through this route. It became embedded in my mind back in 2001 when I moved to Canberra as a young adult to study Sports Media at the University of Canberra, beginning my journey off the beaten path and into… well, who knows what?

So many things stick out from the journey from Brisbane to Canberra. The first was being so lost in thought at a Brisbane service station before I’d even started that I didn’t realise the tank was overflowing and now spilling everywhere. I can remember the radio losing Brisbane’s Triple M FM station as I passed over Cunningham’s Gap east of Warwick, and my nervousness as I saw Telstra Tower for the first time as an adult and realised that this was my new home, a city where I knew precisely no-one.

Since then I’d taken plenty of different routes between the two cities — sometimes via the coastal Pacific Highway, sometimes via the New England Highway (although that is off the table until there’s someone in the car with me), and sometimes via whatever random roads Google Maps insists you should travel down, even if said road is a rough gravel trap and you’re in a pretty little Polo. I can remember only once taking this particular route from Canberra to Brisbane twenty years beforehand so didn’t know what exactly to expect.

Boorowa itself is a pretty enough little brick town on the Boorowa River. The Courthouse is striking and worth a look, while the War Memorial is a fetching brick building guarded by an old machine gun on the northern edge of town. I got my caffeine fix with a lovely little coffee at the Marsden Street General Store on Marsden Street, the kind of café/general store that seems to have sprung up in country towns around Australia over the last little while and is a welcome addition to both categories.

It was all in all a solid little stop — for those not travelling to or from Brisbane it’s a nice place and one that one of my brothers reckons he could live in one day.

But he does say that about a lot of country towns.

Cause I’m as free as a bird now, and this bird you cannot change

There’s a certain amount of poignancy that Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Free Bird was the Random Shyte playing as I entered Cowra. This is in large part due to the events in Cowra during World War II.

Cowra was the home of a large prisoner of war (POW) camp during World War II, with over 4,000 inmates from Italy, Korea, Taiwan and Japan. In the early morning of 5 August, 1944, over 1,100 Japanese POWs began their breakout attempt, overpowering the guards with nearly 360 prisoners escaping. A number of escapees committed or attempted suicide, with 231 Japanese and 4 Australian soldiers killed as a result of the breakout. In a sign that enmity between two groups of people can fade with time, Cowra today has Australia’s only Japanese war cemetery, as well as the Cowra Japanese Garden and Cultural Centre.

I didn’t have time to go into the Japanese Garden as I was already behind schedule after stopping in Yass and Boorowa. Having left Canberra at midday and knowing I’d be stopping for pics and sleep I’d set myself a goal of arriving in Warwick at 6am the following morning. Having headed up the Bellevue Hill Reserve Lookout I discovered that an unmarked road was not in fact the road to the very top, but rather an alternative back down to the bottom. After making my way back up the hill I found a striking view out over the town, with the striking brick Cowra Hospital prominent.

From there it was onto the site of the Cowra POW Camp — although very little still exists from the 1940s — and then onto Canowindra and everything else on my mind.

Shout, shout, let it all out. These are the things I can do without.

Not that much can get solved travelling between Cowra and Canowindra. There was barely enough time to get past a couple of slow-moving vehicles before Tears for Fears’ classic Shout came on as I drove into the southern edge of town.

Canowindra (pronounced ke-NOWN-dra) is probably better known for that silent “i” than just about anything else. Or at least it was in my mind. I’d only ever stopped here once, on that first trip down to Canberra, where I’d filled up at one of the local service stations. The lady there was a chatty local who lamented how people in cities never knew their neighbours. I nodded and agreed it was sad, and haven’t known any of my neighbours pretty much ever since.

Mind you there’s been a fair few of them.

Pulling into Canowindra’s Gaskill Street bumped everything else about the town down a notch though. Gaskill Street is about as perfect a country town street as you’d want to find, curving around with two-tiered buildings with gabled verandas lining each side. If Bill Bryson had been looking for Amalgam in Australia (The Lost Continent), then surely he would have settled on Canowindra as its town centre.

There was another surprise too. Tearing myself from Gaskill Street I headed down to the Swinging Bridge, a small suspension bridge over the Belubula River. Full after a year’s worth of solid rains, the late afternoon sun gave everything a peaceful feel.

Hang on, late afternoon sun? I left Canberra at midday, it was now after 4pm, and I’d travelled about 200km. Might be time to pull finger and get moving then — but not before a victory lap up Gaskill Street.

Come on, come one, turn the radio on, it’s Friday night and I won’t be long

Well, that’s about right. Sia’s Cheap Thrills came on as I entered Wellington, which if nothing else would prove that there was actually some modern music in amongst the Random Shyte. Also pretty apt, as we’d entered twilight and the amount of time I was willing to spend in each town had gone down considerably.

Driving out from Canowindra I’d firstly been distracted by a giant peg — or at least looking for one — that’s apparently on the road out. Despite keeping one eye on the road, another for the giant peg and another for any rouge roos with an urgent need to inspect my windscreen at 100km/h, I couldn’t find the peg.

Another of life’s disappointments really.

The setting sun provided some stunning colours as I headed north to Molong and Wellington. This is a good thing, as by now I’d entered into my own head and began second-guessing everything I’d ever done and ever will do.

“Don’t you wish you’d done that thing back in the day? What are you going to do about this other thing? How are you going to deal with that? Any chance of you actually making a decision at any point and resolving this? Why can’t you fi oooh, that’s a pretty sunset. What a beautiful orange in the sky, contrasting so wonderfully with the green, rolling hills of the central New South Wales. And look now as the orange slowly turns pink as the sun sets further down beyond the horizon.”

“What were we talking about again?”

Pulling into Wellington I had some plans, if only to keep my sanity for the rest of the drive. One was to write this story, so instead of worrying about life I’d be worrying about what to include in the story. The life stuff has a plan as well, although like most plans it will unlikely survive any kind of contact with the real world. It did at least put that part of the brain at relative ease for the rest of the drive. The final plan was to try and see all the planets of the virtual solar system between Dubbo and Coonabarabran, billboards with planet replicas on them set up to be to scale. Dubbo had Pluto, with Mercury and the Sun being about 40km west of Coonabarabran. I wasn’t sure if I’d make it that far, but it would keep me interested for a little while anyway.

Finally in Wellington itself I decided to go with the music and have some cheap thrills: a lactose-free iced coffee and choc-mint Kit Kat from the only Woolworths in Australia that doesn’t have self-serve checkouts. Or maybe that’s just a country thing?

Anyway, time to get to Dubbo.

Well I started out down a dirty road, started out all alone

So much for modern music. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ Learning to Fly became Dubbo’s theme as I drove in through the newer eastern estates, bound for Macquarie Street.

Now I’ve been through Dubbo many multiples of times. We’d drive through when travelling between Brisbane and Canberra, and again when travelling between Brisbane and Mildura for family visits. This generally meant sticking to the highways though, including any hotels that we stayed in should Dad decide that 15 hours straight in a car with a wife and four young boys wasn’t his idea of a good time.

It was a pleasant surprise then to discover that Dubbo’s main street is rather fetching. Not quite at Canowindra status, but definitely an attractive, tree-lined street with enough older buildings to make it worth the detour. I wandered up and down the street for about half an hour, taking pics of some of the more attractive buildings, much to the bemusement of the locals.

If I wasn’t trying to make an arbitrary deadline I’d probably have stopped for the night and potentially checked out the Old Dubbo Gaol and the Western Plains Zoo too. Instead, my final Dubbo sight was a poorly-lit billboard in a car park by the river that had a whole bunch of stars on it, with the word “Pluto” next to one of them.

Good thing I was learning to fly then, as I was about to cruise through the solar system.

I pulled into Nazareth, was feelin’ about half past dead

Not sure that Gilgandra, New South Wales has ever been compared to Nazareth, Anywhere, but Playing For Change were singing The Weight as I pulled into town, so there you go.

I was really only interested in the one place here, which was the Cooee March Memorial Park at the southern edge of town. The park gets its name from the Cooee marchers in World War I. At the start of the war Australians were generally flush with enthusiasm to go and defend the British Empire, with a number of marches beginning in country towns and ending in the respective state capitals. In Gilgandra 26 men left on 10 October 1915, with 263 recruits eventually making it to Sydney a little over a month later. The name came from the bush cry of coo-ee the marchers used to attract recruits as they made their way to Sydney.

Gilgandra is also home to one of the Neptune billboards for the virtual solar system. This was thankfully also in the Cooee March Memorial Park, so I didn’t have to go looking and find myself lost down some dirt road while banjos played in the distance. While taking the pics I noticed that the sky behind the billboard was already dotted with stars — a great sign for my scheduled star stop up the road at Coonabarabran.

A quick blockie around the centre of town to confirm that there’s not much in the centre of Gilgandra, and it was time to take some star pics.

And oh, my dreams, it’s never quite as it seems, never quite as it seems

Coonabarabran is famous for a couple of things. First up there’s the name, which Wikipedia says may come from Indigenous words for “inquisitive person”, someone’s name, or “excrement”. If it’s the latter, then it’s a shame because Coona is definitely not a shit town.

The other thing the town’s famous for is its skies. The nearby Warrumbungle National Park was designated a Dark Sky Park in 2016 for the lack of nearby light pollution, and after stopping at Uranus and Saturn on the way in I eagerly headed out to Jupiter just west of town. All I could do after pulling up at the billboard was get out of the car and stand in awe at the scene around me. On a clear, cold night, every part of the sky was dotted with hundreds and thousands of stars. To the north was a slight valley with hills in the distance, framing an almost perfect viewing area above. The Milky Way (or another galaxy, I have no clue about astronomy) rose above the hills, with a small house about 200m away providing a subtle reminder that this wasn’t completely untouched wilderness. It was as beautiful a night sky as I’ve seen in many a year, and I had it to myself.

There was clearly no need to head up to the Siding Spring Observatory and the other solar system billboards. Instead I pulled out my DSLR camera and tripod and began to see if I could capture something — anything! — of this scene. The camera has both WIFI and NFC connections to the phone, and while I hadn’t been able to get the NFC working for a long time, the WIFI was generally pretty good.

WAS generally pretty good. As if in protest at the fact I’d been taking night pics with my phone, the camera’s WIFI decided to act more like a cat or a toddler. First it would connect, then when I went to open the app on the phone, disconnect. Back to the camera, turn it off and on again, back to WIFI, then onto the phone, connection!, no, wait, back off again, off and on again, WIFI, fuck it, I’m pressing the shutter.

After what felt like ages I finally managed to get some pics using the house as a small reference point. It’s always tricky in these lighting conditions to get everything perfect — too much ISO and the pictures come out grainy; too much exposure time and the stars are blurry as they move imperceptibly across the sky. I took a few that I thought came out nicely on the camera, then packed up and headed back into town. They seemed ok on the computer but didn’t quite come out on the phone as I’d hoped or dreamed.

But as The Cranberries sang in Dreams, it’s never quite as it seems.

It’s nights like these when you know that you’re alive, nights like these when you know that you got fire

Or nights like these when you’re trying to stay alive, nights like these when you need a fire. It was about halfway between Coonabarabran and Narrabri that half a day’s work and nearly 12 hours solid driving finally caught up with me.

That particular stretch of road runs through the middle of the Pilliga Nature Reserve, which is apparently the largest remaining native forest on the Australian continent. I’d always just seen it as an unusually forested stretch of the Newell, so it’s nice to find something that pre-dates European settlement.

Not that any of this really mattered now. Taking the night pics at Coonabarabran switched the trip mission from pictures to arrival. I still had over 500km to drive before getting to Mum’s, and with towns now further and further apart there’d be less and less chances to break up the journey for pics. There was also the post-mission accomplished comedown after Coona, so it didn’t hugely surprise me that I needed to pull over and have a sleep on the way up to Narrabri.

It then didn’t surprise me that I couldn’t get straight to sleep. When you’re grabbing large coffees every few hours there’s generally enough caffeine floating around your system to wake the dead, so there wasn’t actually all that much time in the land of nod. Thirty minutes of my eyes closed seemed to do the trick though and it was a relatively easy drive into Narrabri.

As fate would have it Narrabri is actually mentioned in a song on the Random Shyte playlist. Ian Moss’ Tucker’s Daughter mentions “the plains out of Narrabri” in the first verse, so I’d been hoping that would come on as I drove into town. Instead it was The Cat Empire’s Days Like These, which describes all-night parties as part of the last few verses. Had they based the song on this night in Narrabri then it likely wouldn’t have been anywhere near as good — everyone was tucked up in bed, no doubt looking forward to the weekend.

Heaven knows we sure had some fun boy, what a kick just a buddy and me

On then to Moree. It was now early Saturday morning, and although Moree has a string of heritage-listed sites I was more interested in getting to Warwick than stopping in for pics.

I did stop for one pic along the way though. Even though you couldn’t actually see the plains out of Narrabri, I did briefly pull off the highway for a quick stop, photo, and social media story with Tucker’s Daughter playing.

What can I say? I was tired, bored, and it seemed mildly amusing at the time.

Moree doesn’t have the greatest reputation for night safety, something brought home when I stopped at a service station near the airport. Three women were cleaning inside, with a sign on the door saying that only two customers were allowed in at any one time for safety reasons. Eyes hanging out of my head, I ordered the jumbo coffee, used the loo, then headed back to the car.

No fun with a buddy, just a kick from a jumbo coffee.

One last time, let’s take a break tonight

Out of Moree and into rest stop number two. The kilometres are passing much too slowly, so around 40km out of town I pull over for another snooze. On waking I’m again treated to a star-filled sky, albeit with the rumbling of nearby road trains coming past in either direction about 50 metres from where I’m parked.

Now it’s just a battle to keep going. I’m keeping an eye out on the little shields to my left that signify how far to the next stop, willing them downwards as I approach Boggabilla and the Queensland border.

Boggabilla — or more accurately, the service station south of Boggabilla — is another of those places with an outsized influence on my mind. Memory tells me that we always used to stop there on drives as kids; I definitely remember stopping there late one night on a drive between Brisbane and Canberra in 2013. That particular drive stands out in the memory banks as it was the night of Ashton Agar’s test debut, an innings of 98 that I followed on ABC Radio from the Centenary Highway in Brisbane to somewhere along the Cunningham Highway. My disbelief kept growing as Agar’s partnership with Philip Hughes kept growing, before an outfield catch stopped him from becoming the first ever Test centurion batting at number 11. After arriving in Canberra around lunch that day I somehow ended up on ABC Canberra talking about the Ashes with a Tour de France fan. That somehow turned into a couple of phone interviews about the Ashes with ABC Canberra after I’d gone back to Brisbane.

How does life get to those points? The ones where it’s something like 3am on a Saturday morning on the road between Moree and Boggabilla and you’re remembering travelling the opposite way to catch up with friends and ended up on local radio talking about something you followed on a sister station over 1000km away.

It covers the time though, and before too long I’m approaching the Queensland border. Back in the day I can remember my late grandfather telling us about how his car always made a noise whenever it crossed the border back into Queensland. With the cast of Hamilton singing One Last Time I cross the border back into Queensland, whereupon the car makes a little “whoo-hoo” sound.

I swear it was definitely the car. But this was my one last time to take a break tonight.

Rivers of blood, running red, I got a broken heart and a broken head

Turns out that wasn’t my one last time for a break. After getting through Yelarbon I found myself needing to sleep yet again, this time nodding off almost instantly and sleeping for about 45 minutes.

Now it’s 4.30am, which oddly enough is the time I’d normally be up on a Saturday morning. I’m normally at rowing training at 6am three or four times a week, and like to get up earlier and have an unhurried start to the day (organising things the night before not really being my forte even though I could then make up later). This is both a blessing and a curse — a blessing because I no longer drink ridiculous amounts on a Friday night, but also a curse because I often have to leave things early so I’m not too drunk/tired to row. The benefits far outweigh any inconveniences though, so I’m generally happy to do this.

The rowing group chat comes to life about 40km outside of Warwick. A couple of lads aren’t feeling great so they’ve pulled out, while another couple are unsurprisingly going to be late. They’ve got a big session in the big boat planned, followed up by the big coffees at the local café afterwards that are deemed failures if they don’t last for at least three hours.

But that’s in their future, not mine this time. I climb over the last hill to see Warwick spread out in front of me. Amazingly, despite driving for 670 miles, stopping for photos and coffees and sleeps and whatever else, I’m arriving in town at my 6am target time.

I pull up out the front of Mum’s new place and am greeted by Mum and a deafening dachshund din as their three small dogs — and every other bloody dog in the neighbourhood — make enough noise to wake the dead.

Not that they’ll wake me. It’s becoming light again, I’m still wearing contact lenses, but all I want to do is lay flat for a few hours. Mum asks how the drive was?

Bit of Icehouse really — Nothing Too Serious.

And that, my friends, is my last piece of Random Shyte for this trip.

The Random Shyte songs:

Yass: The Doobie Brothers, Listen To The Music
Boorowa: Playing For Change, La Bamba
Cowra: Lynyrd Skynyrd, Free Bird
Canowindra: Tears For Fears, Shout
Wellington: Sia, Cheap Thrills
Dubbo: Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, Learning To Fly
Gilgandra: Playing For Change, The Weight
Coonabarabran: The Cranberries, Dreams
Narrabri: Cat Empire, Days Like These
Moree: George Michael, Freedom ‘90
Goondiwindi: Hamilton, One Last Time
Warwick: Icehouse, Nothing Too Serious