It seems like I spent a fair amount of my childhood holidays in the car. We were forever travelling south to visit the family in Melbourne, or heading the other direction to visit cousins in Brisbane. It seemed like, wherever we were living, we were the ones on the move, and summer holidays often seemed to stretch out into endless kilometres along highways, with the green signs telling us how far it was until the next country town. I remember we used to do bacon and eggs at rest areas, using an old portable stove that Dad had – we’d leave before dawn, drive for a couple of hours and then, when we woke up, we’d have breakfast. Then, we all piled back into the car – often with the dog – and headed off again. If you haven’t spent 12 hours of the day in the back of a car with no air conditioning, having a labrador drool over you in its attempts to stick its head out the window, you haven’t really experienced summer in Australia.
For some reason, though, while the coastal towns – Bega, Merimbula, The Entrance and all the others seem fixed in my memory, the inland towns are a bit more distant. I can’t recall ever spending a night at places like Tenterfield or Armidale. I’m sure we did, but they are blank holes in my memory.
So it was with a little bit of excitement that I approached our decision to drive up to Brisbane via the inland, along the New England highway. We were in no rush – having given ourselves two days to cover the almost 900km between Brisbane and Sydney. What I wasn’t prepared for was the simple beauty of the towns we drove through – admittedly, it was a perfect couple of days – warm, but not too hot, and with not a cloud in the sky. Perfect day for driving, and besides the inevitable speed cameras, driving was a real pleasure. There were times when it seemed like we were the only car on the road.
After the inevitable hairiness of the Putty Road, we headed through Singleton and then into New England. It seemed like every hour or so, we’d pass through another little town – a pub called ‘The Commercial’ or ‘The Royal’, and a cluster of federation cottages, maybe a general store and a park with a memorial to fallen soldiers. Not much more than that.
We stayed the night at Glen Innes, not far from Tamworth. A little village – more English than any place I think I’ve seen in Australia. We arrived at about 7:30 on a Wednesday night, and the place was absolutely dead. There was less than 3 people on the street, and I think we were the only ones in the Grand Central Hotel.