Country roads, take us home
A hilarious (if painful) 1970s family holiday yielded some solid life lessons.
The year is 1976. I am 10 years old and I live an idyllic life in the eastern suburbs of Sydney near a pristine white sandy beach. Abba’s Arrival album has just been released and I’m quietly confident that I will be getting it for Christmas in a few weeks. It’s nothing but blue skies for me. Summer is almost here and ahead of me is six weeks of school holidays, street cricket, riding my bike, swimming until the sun goes down and driving the rest of the family crazy by playing my new album on repeat.
But then my dad drops a bombshell: we’re going on a summer holiday. We never go on summer holidays because we don’t need to. Everything we could ever want out of summer is right on our doorstep.
Our family holiday is always in May — an annual two-week pilgrimage to the Gold Coast, where it always rains for at least one of them. My parents honeymooned on the Gold Coast and I think they were always trying to relive a calmer time when they were unencumbered by five children.
“We’re going to Mildura!” my father proudly announced one night at the dinner table. “Where’s that?” “Why?” “What’s the beach like?” “Is there a record player?” “How are we getting there?” All of them rational questions.
“It’s down on the Victorian border. You have relatives there. It’s a river. No. And we’re going to drive there. I think it should only take a couple of days and we’re going to leave Paul (the youngest who was three years old at the time) in Moss Vale with Aunty Gwen. He’s too young for a trip like this.” He then returned to his meal. Discussion over.
The truth is we didn’t have relatives in Mildura. My father had an old friend who owned a pub there and the pair of them thought it would be fun to do a life swap.
His family would get a taste of life in the big city and the five of us would learn some valuable, and to his mind, much-needed life lessons. Dad said he was going to show us the real Australia, which we already thought we were living in, while attempting to run a pub.
Not that my father had any idea what he was talking about — he was born, raised and buried in the eastern suburbs of Sydney. The closest he ever got to country living was when his private school went camping. My mother, on the other hand, did have a country upbringing and seemed to be as reluctant to revisit it as her children were.
The plan was to head off on Boxing Day. Christmas night we went to bed in the clothes we’d be travelling in and were then shaken awake at 4am to get a head start on the traffic. Three hours later we said goodbye to Paul. His distress when he realised he was being abandoned was a portent for what was to come.
My mother’s chief role in the driving portion of the holiday was as navigator, and at that she firmly failed. We missed turn-offs with such regularity that my father took over the job and drove angrily with the rapidly deteriorating map spread out over the dashboard. We took shortcuts that went nowhere then had to backtrack. We pulled over to the side of the highway so one of us could go to the toilet and then the car got bogged in mud.
We were bored out of our minds and we fought the entire way.
We drove into a heatwave which followed us for the rest of the trip and although the car had airconditioning my father refused to turn it on.
If one of us wound down the window for a burst of fresh air, after a minute or two my father would comment that the open window was affecting the car’s aerodynamics. Truly. It’s probably worth noting that my mother was a constant smoker.
Somewhere in the middle of the Hay Plain, with the heat beating down on the car and the cabin filled with smoke, from my position in the middle of the back seat, I projectile vomited all over the occupants of the front seat, the dashboard and the map.
We eventually arrived in Mildura in the middle of the night and went straight to bed, but no one would be getting much sleep.
Soon my younger brother started screaming and thrashing about in bed saying that there were spiders everywhere.
My father ran into the room, switched on the light and when he couldn’t find any spiders reasoned that my brother must be hallucinating from heat stroke. So, Andrew was placed in the bath and cold water gently poured over his head while the rest of us stood and watched in horror until he calmed down.
The terror would continue the next morning when we attempted to seek respite from the heat and go for a swim. In a river.
The water was brown, and you couldn’t see the bottom which felt creepily squishy underfoot.
As soon as we got in the water, we wanted out. And then we needed to hose the silt off our bodies before we were allowed back in the house. Even the water in the taps was brown and my brothers and I vowed to only drink soft drink (which is free when you’re running a pub) for the rest of the trip.
If my father showed us anything on this trip it was that you can’t prescribe what life is going to teach you.
We packed up and left three weeks ahead of schedule and meandered our way back to Sydney along a different route.
That return trip was one without an agenda and one of the best we ever had. We’d pull up at a roadside hotel without a reservation then spend a couple of days exploring that town before we moved on to the next.
Our mother gave us a tour of the many places she lived in as a child and we had great fun searching for her old houses (she often wasn’t entirely sure she was correct). We arrived back in Sydney feeling like we’d had a real holiday. And if the aim was to teach a bunch of spoilt, city-dwelling kids some indispensable life skills then I came away with two of them.
I learnt that when it comes to travel it’s good to have a plan but it’s also good to be flexible.
I also learnt, at the age of 10, how to pull a beer and tap a keg.
David Meagher is the editor of The Australian’s Wish magazine.
