In short, you go to South Australia. Well, not simply to South Australia. More precisely, the further from the Victorian border you get, the further from normality you go. I discovered this a few months ago when I had to make a quick road trip to Whyalla one weekend.
I left Melbourne at 3am Saturday and got back about 6pm Sunday. The first part of the trip took me though the simple, earthy realism of North-western Victoria. I crept past the turnoffs to this or that regional centre, stopping to refuel in (I think) St Arnaud. Appropriately, this part of the trip was accompanied by the down-home rhythms of Confederate Railroad.
The first hint that I might be reaching a different reality came in a far north-western town whose name escapes me. It took the form of a Lutheran Church (pictured). Lutheranism has never been a large denomination in Australia. If memory serves, its greatest concentration of followers were the German migrants who settled in a vast arc from the Barossa Valley in South Australia to Holbrook in New South Wales. The church seemed to be a sign that you were brushing up against a vaguely otherworldly world view. My iPod presumably thought so too, because I was soon rolling though the Wimmera with "Omaha" - Counting Crows vaguely mystical hymn to the American midwest - playing on the car stereo.
This change in perspective was underlined shortly after crossing into South Australia itself. My first stop was at a BP in Bordertown. This service station is a splendidly 1970s style building which seemed ever so slightly out of place. It also had the first hint of something faintly surreal outside: a truck on a truck. Specifically, a curtain-sided tray truck which had clearly hit something solid and come off second best. The road from there to Adelaide presented the second somewhat weird feature of South Australia: excavated road shoulders. I assume this is done elsewhere, but I've never seen it like this. Essentially, the gravel at the side of the road has been cut away. Where it would be there is about a foot and a half drop. This more or less guarantees that crossing the fog line will do unspeakable damage to the underside of your car before it rolls. I wasn’t on the road to Mordor but this lent a Fellowship of The Ring feel to the trip.
Let it not be said that South Australia isn't a pretty state. The rolling country from the border to Adelaide is a pleasure to drive though. And sight of Gulf St Vincent had me texting my wife in Melbourne "ocean in sight ... O the joy".
Thing got weird in Adelaide. For one thing, the road into the city takes you down a steep, steep road. How scary was this? I was so busy admiring the view that I didn't notice I was going straight on a bending road and almost into the side of a panel van. Entering the city itself I learnt the Google directions I’d carefully downloaded hadn't kept pace with the presence of street signing. I wasted an hour going up and down a series of main roads. Eventually I found myself in a suburban street, figuring out how to make my GPS work. This seemed like a further sign of leaving reality. I was moving from the public world of highways and thoroughfares and into the private, closed off world of industrial estates and suburban streets.
My GPS came online, which soon put me on the road for Port Augusta (I remember it saying something like “Port Augusta: continue straight for 300 miles”). This part of the drive began feeling like the moderately surreal passages of The Aunt’s Story. I found myself driving through a landscape that didn’t seem to have anything memorable about it. But every time I got ready to cast it in my mind as so much empty space, I drove though a town. These weren’t big towns, but they were towns nonetheless. In between times one would pass driveways, farmsheds and houses. None of which made it less bizarre when I refueled at a little place called Dublin. As best I recall this town consisted of a few houses, a BP, and at least one resident who looked like Patty the Daytime Hooker from My Name is Earl. Despite all of this, the service station had one of the largest ranges of American candy I've seen outside of the United States. It was truly breathtaking. I stared at it and wondered why it was there and who on earth its target market was.
Towards Port Augusta the landscape became more and more flattened, aside from the blue-purple Flinders Ranges to the right. Despite the steady stream of turnoffs - Wilmington, Port Pirie, Snowtown (now famous in the annals of Australian murder) - it was hard not to feel like the road was closing behind me. Each mile not only took me further and further from pretty Adelaide, but further and further into somewhere very different.
Port Augusta described itself as the Crossroads of Australia. The day was getting on by the time I reached it, and I didn't have time to stop and check it out. Spencer Gulf seems to extend a long way into the town, and it's a curious experience to see road signs for Alice Springs anywhere, even here.
The road between Port Augusta and Whyalla seems designed to tell you you're in a very different place. The road is somewhat higher than the surrounding terrain and all around it is low vegetation. I'm sure the local wildlife was there somewhere but I can’t say I saw it. Indeed, apart from the other cars on the road, I didn’t see any life that wasn't vegetation. None. No cattle, no sheep, no lizards, no kangaroos, no birds. I did, however, see the world’s most determined marriage proposal (photo herewith). When I got out of the car to photograph it my eyes start to burn in the atmosphere, so clearly our hero was crazy for his Chloe. I hope she said yes.
The same road took me past the turnoff for Iron Knob. All I could think was: Wow. Everyone's home town should sound like an S&M sex toy.
I got to Whyalla about 5:30pm. The town sits at the upper end of Spencer Gulf. My motel was close to an esplanade which looked out over the iron-blue water. There was a park with young people playing in it. Everything was very green, which seemed out of place for somewhere that calls itself "where the outback meets the sea". You didn’t need to drive too far from the built up areas before the trees got fewer and the low scrub again appeared. The town itself is built on rolling ground, sometimes disconcertingly so. The buildings had a kind of modest, self-aware pride. All in all, it was hard not to think of it as a kind of pocket St Kilda. I found what seemed to be the only fish-and-chip store still open and headed back to the Motel to have dinner and slough off a poem.
With this description, why is it a bad idea to get off the planet in Whyalla? And is it even possible to do so? In a town so closely affected by the world's events (World War Two, for example, generated the shipbuilding industry that created HMAS Whyalla (pictured), and that same industry was later destroyed by the rise of constructors in far-away Japan), it seems absurd to consider it a place to "get off the planet". But being there and having driven the long road from Adelaide gives a sense of removal from metropolitan life. If a reasonably secure job could be had, one could live here feeling substantially removed from the worlds problems. One would be safe and secure in a place where the town newspaper felt that a resident receiving a Nigerian-style scam letter constituted "news".
Why is this a prospect to be viewed with concern? Purely at an impressionistic level the place is unsettling. Its greenness and pocket-St-Kilda charm sit uncomfortably with its location and the terrain you drive through to get there.
The more serious worry is what living there could do to the soul. To borrow an idea from Clive James’ essay about Sydney, it runs the risk of making heaven seem just to close. One could readily find one’s desires becoming at once more sophisticated and less fulfilling (simultaneously achieving the prophesies of Fergus Hume’s Madge Frettlby and Francis Fukuyama’s vision of the End of History). In the end, one would risk being in the same position of Theodore Dalrymple’s underclass, in a life without much purpose.
All you can do once you’ve realized this is what I did at 3am the next day. Pack your bags, brew up some coffee, fire up the car and the GPS and put on some Kenny Chesney, and begin the long, long drive back to Melbourne.
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