“Our hands were up high, butting the breeze, and the grin was wide on all of us at the exhilarating freedom of the road”

The open road: there’s nothing like it. Picture: Guy Williment

So to a feast of the open window – and do you open up your own car to the world as you’re driving, particularly in the bush? Less and less so, for a lot of us it seems, in our hermetically sealed pods; there is less and less of the elbow out the window and the fingers drumming the roof and the dog leaning ecstatically into the air. Less and less of the smell of the sky and of taking a moment to breathe it all in, deep, because the god of air-conditioning has roared and seen to all that.

At city traffic lights the sealed-up cabins surround us, shut away from the smells of the ground and trees and sky – who’s in there? It often seems like it’s just me now with the windows down, a touch eccentrically, plus a tradie or two; their talkback or music a brief hello before we’re all zooming off. But the vibe in that pause is relaxed and friendly, open to the day and the people around us rather than hived off. An open car window feels intrinsically Australian, along with squinting into the sun and walking barefoot.

Recently we’ve driven from the smell of suburbia’s mown grass into the cram of the gum trees then the wide rolling yellow of the plains. Thick, rain-sodden green dropped away to grass-bleached wan as we headed further and further inland, from a biblical to a stretched to a landing sky. I was taking two boys, aged 10 and 19, to their injured brother, far away, as medicine for them all, and there was one rule on the road trip: windows down boys, wherever possible.

Soon their hands were swimming through the air like two gleeful duck bills. Meanwhile my palm was up high, butting the breeze, and the grin was wide on all of us at the sudden, exhilarating freedom of the road; there wasn’t an “are we there yet” once. Songs were chosen in rotating turn for the playlist, our tastes completely different. The boys were told that the only way to listen to iconic highway anthems like Wide Open Road and Under the Milky Way was with the windows wide open, and for my sins I got Eminem and Beastie Boys in return.

The road trip is a ritual of an Aussie childhood and it was about bloody time in these parts. The 10-year-old had never seen a cattle grid and so we stopped and examined the ingenuity of one on the way – his mum had been remiss with the Aussie education and Covid hadn’t helped. We learnt the land through those open windows. A death whiff somewhere near the side of the road. Fertiliser’s fresh stench. The difference between the smell of the sheep and the cattle truck. The sudden coolness of a rushing creek.

Then came the wash of softness across the sky as night fell in and the earth opened up as if in ecstasy at the coming dark. The land opening out to the night is my favourite smell in the world. Clarification: the Australian land opening up to the dark. And it’s closely followed by the smell of our dawns. To slip wholeheartedly into these scents is a goal as I age; to set myself up for them, to always have them close. That sweetness of the air of the Aussie bush from a window open to the sky – how could anyone who was exiled from it not long for it?

An open window feels healing. Recalibrating. As does being out on the open road, not sure where you’re going, experiencing the heft of the day, the seasons, the light. My favourite place is to go where I’ve never been, windows down, on a road trip into the unknown; it feels like a fresh breeze through your life, clearing it out. Those dogs smiling euphorically out the car window with their faces leaning into the breeze – yeah, they’ve got it right.