The wide open road: will we ever look at it the same way again?

In 1990, my cousin and I hitchhiked from Adelaide up the Stuart Highway to Darwin. I was 19, Josie was 21. Our intention was to catch a flight to Kupang, Timor, and then make our way in eight weeks across the islands to Bali, where we’d find a flight back to Darwin, hitch back down the highway again and return to Melbourne in time for the uni semester to begin.

We did all of it, and for a young person who’d spent most of her life living in small rural towns it was a mixture of shock and awe. On our own and with just enough money to scrape by on, the trip raised in me the possibility of a bigger life.

Margaret Hickey and the brown Valiant that took her “down to Perth, up to Broome and across to Darwin”, circa 1990.

The next long university break, we flew to Perth, hitchhiked to Kalgoorlie, and then tried to make our way up north to the town of Leinster and across to Geraldton. Miners told us it was possible, but it was a stupid plan. We waited eight hours on the side of the road, smoking rollies when we didn’t normally smoke and drinking all our water plus a bottle of Erin Cream. We’d endured a dust storm and an ants’ nest before a man pulled up amazed and said: “What the hell are you doing out here?”

An hour beforehand, as red dirt blew hard in our faces, Josie turned to me, spitting out dirt, and asked: “So Margaret, where do you see yourself in five years?”

Afterward, we made our way back down to Perth, up to Broome and across to Darwin – the ride in a brown Valiant with three blokes we’d met in the backpackers’. Windows down, Pink Floyd blaring, we drank cask wine and sped with wild abandon across glorious Kimberley skies.

Down the Stuart again and back to university. Repeat the following semester break and the next and - when we’d graduated - overseas.

Out of all our adventures and mishaps and laughs, I keep coming back to the hitchhiking. Sitting there, on the side of the road with my cousin, sometimes for hours in the hot sun, waiting. What did we talk about on those long days? I don’t remember being bored.

We sometimes made up dances for each other and performed them in the middle of the road. We sang a lot from the Jesus Christ Superstar movie, “What’s the buzz, tell me what’s happening, what’s the buzz ...” and we talked - about life, about the future, about families and about nothing at all. Sometimes I would tell stories and Josie would listen, nodding her head. She might ask a question about a character or say what she liked about the plot. Sometimes the stories went on for weeks – today I have no idea what they were about.

The people we hitched with were mostly good. We favoured lifts with truckies, because they had a place to be and deadlines to meet. Young, single men were OK, more than two men were generally not. Older people in caravans rarely picked us up and to this day I have an aversion to the motorhome. The lifts we enjoyed most were with older women. These were rare, but oh, it felt so safe and relaxed to be with ladies who could be our mothers, who admonished us for hitchhiking and then let us sleep in the back seat. No need to be upbeat, engaging and funny all the time with them.

“You girls shouldn’t be out here doing this,” they’d scold. “Haven’t you heard about what’s happening on the east coast?”

Ivan Milat targeted backpackers and hitchhikers.

What was happening on the east coast was Ivan Milat. His name wasn’t known at the time, but soon it would be. We weren’t oblivious to the danger, not completely. We agreed that if a murderer held one of us to ransom in trying to take both of us, the free one could run. We’d see the fading posters of missing girls glued to telephone poles outside road stations and agreed they could be us. In my dreams, sometimes they were.

We once hitchhiked for two enjoyable days with the son of the prime minister. He never told us this, we only found out when we saw him on a book cover after he’d dropped us off. We also hitched with a young man from a roadhouse north of Port Augusta to Coober Pedy who barely said a word. It was creepy, but we weren’t overly worried. He was not much older than us, skinny and very pale.

This lift was on the Stuart, that highway that cuts the nation in two. There’s something about that road. Its long stretches, salt plains and low shrubs that in the night look just like people crouching. It’s hot out there on the Stuart in January, the sides of the road become soft and oozy, the air shimmers and shifts. When you’re hours south of Coober Pedy, it’s about as remote as you can get on a major Australian road. It can feel desolate, desperate even.

The young man driving us in his ute didn’t speak to us as night fell. We felt for our pocket-knives, nudged each other and asked bright questions; but still he wouldn’t open his mouth.

At one point, when it was completely dark, the man pulled over and stopped, lifted our packs out of the tray and threw them out. We got out of the vehicle and stood on the side of the road. I remember pulling on the thread of my denim shorts and thinking, we have not passed one car and not one car has passed us.

“One of you has to root me or give me 70 bucks each,” he said, his first words.

We were dumbfounded. Said no to both. We didn’t have 70 bucks and no, just no. The ugliness of it. I felt sick.

There was a pause. I looked to Josie - do we run? - she shook her head.

Without a word, the man got in the ute and drove off. We stood there, packs at our feet, wondering what to do. Hide in the bush? Just wait there?

That’s the thing about hitching, it’s mostly waiting. Waiting and then deciding whether to get in or not. Weighing up the odds.

The man came back. We saw his headlights way up the road, we heard his engine, we saw him do a U-turn and wind his window down.

“I was only joking,” he said. “Get in.”

I’m almost 50 now, married with three teenage sons. They’re cooped up at home in lockdown, schooled from their bedrooms, spending too much time on screen, and the oldest doesn’t think he’ll go to university this year because he expects it to be more of the same. They are too jaded for their age.

Cutters End by Margaret Hickey.Credit:

My debut crime novel, Cutters End, has just been released. It’s a fiction, but it’s inspired by my early hitchhiking days. I don’t know if my boys will travel as I did, if they’ll get the chance to take to the open road with a backpack and few plans. I hope they do.

These last few weeks I’ve been thinking about my travels with Josie, how naive we were and how that lent us freedom but made us reckless too.

Because here’s the thing - when the young man said “I was only joking. Get in,” we did. We got back in.

The true story of those backpackers who went missing on the east coast wasn’t known then, but it soon would be. Nothing bad happened to my cousin and me. The man dropped us off at the backpackers’ and we never saw him again. We had a great laugh about the $70 in the pub that night, it became fodder for years to come.

But there was a greyness unfurling. Something had been stripped away.

One more lift like that, we said, and then we get the bus.

Cutters End by Margaret Hickey is out now, published by Penguin Random House.