Rite to Roam

Miena, Tasmania - July 2025

I love the road. I love it so much that I get completely done over by it. Glad to get home, just as glad to leave again. It’s almost certainly a thing I inherited from my father, absolutely in a practical sense, but probably it’s in the DNA too. I’ve been thinking it’s a glorious thing to do, just as much as it is a curse. I feel it’s the most dangerous thing we do, as domesticated citizens of a blessed nation. I joke that I’m nearly killed a few times with each long journey, that’s it’s how I’ll probably go out. Hilarious. But, the vistas, the events, the destinations, the dance of other travelers shifting though a passing show of scenery and the immense quantity of thinking you get to indulge as it all happens is the reason. It isn’t just a means to an end. It’s life and it’s vital. In the early days of the Re-mains, we used to discuss how one’s car was like an office where you did your work. Mick Daley wrote the song, “Always Workin” around the idea that travelling by road was as valid a place of toil and a means of scheming up the future as any other way. And I couldn’t agree more. >>>> Keeping track of some really basic ruminations of the act of late, I can offer the following. Food; It’s always ham, cheese and tomato toasties for me. Fuel prices; Who sets that agenda and do the regions take turns? FM Radio; it’s jammed in 1987. AM radio; It’s still there. when something interesting is on that radio, it just fades away into static. Bathurst; It really is full of blokes in cars that think it’s all conrod straight. Roadkill; is there anything more depressing than an upturned, rigor-mortised wombat? Roads; Whose are the worst, NSW or Qld? Cause it aint the other states. Amber traffic lights in the ACT; you could certainly get rear-ended. so don’t stop. Driving in Adelaide; entitled, passive-aggressively fraught and over nothing. Qld; What indicators? The last 200km of a 1000 K day is much longer than the first 800. Black ice, frost and rain can be scary, but nothing is as scary as that 40km stretch on the M1 between Wyong and the top of the southern end of the Mooney Mooney Bridge - everything wrong can happen there and normally does… I hate that piece of road. 110 in this country is fast enough. Coffee; is part of the fuel system. AdBlue; IS NOT part of the fuel system - [pm me for details] - The road can take you on your journey to the stars, right in and right out of your mind.