Lost Highway: Just Another Day on the Hume
by Dominic Pettman

The Hume Highway. "Sesame Street," to the truckies who eat speed the size of golf-balls and relieve themselves into empty wine flagons. A barren landscape for the soul; an asphalt illusion of progress for Sisyphus and his family in their Subaru. Crows pick indiscriminately at blown-out tyres and flyblown roadkill. Dreams are made here, although if you turn the sprinklers off, everything becomes a desert . . . No . . . Wait a minute . . . that's Los Angeles . . . I'll start again.

The Hume Highway. This stretch of road which links Melbourne to Sydney is Australia's main artery, linking the two pumping hearts of this wide brown land. Every Christmas I drive up to my home-town of Canberra to visit the family. The last few years I have driven my trusty red 1984 Mazda 323 station wagon, which has been my companion on the surreal journey through that ribbon of memories extending off into the summer haze.

This year my trip took place on a particularly hot day, the mercury somewhere in the mid- 30s. Once I negotiated the city proper, I felt the subtle change in my psyche as Sydney Road flowed into the Hume, and I knew I was on my way. The first hour or so was a breeze, but when you're flying solo, boredom soon kicks in. I started to play games with my imagination in order to keep myself occupied, pretending I was inside an X-Wing Fighter and every overtaking car was a Tie-Fighter sent by Darth Vader to destroy me. As these hapless people pulled back in front of me I would let them have it with my laser cannons. However I soon became self-conscious referring to myself out-loud as "gold leader" and making explosion noises. My thoughts wandered ahead and I found myself speculating if those cars which tried to drive right into Parliament House a few years ago happened to be just normal people driving up the Hume. Perhaps they snapped somewhere along the way and continued under the delusion that Parliament House was the Death Star, and they had to complete their mission.

After a couple of hours, nature called, and I stopped at one of those toilet blocks off the highway that look like they've been designed by Ivan Milat. Sure enough a car pulled up behind me and a suspicious man followed me into the urinal. I left quick smart and he immediately followed, tailgating me a while and then whizzing off. I consider it a close call; he could have been some psychopathic pervert, or even worse, an off-duty policeman. Another lost soul on the Hume.

The scenery is less-than-spectacular on this highway, so I started to entertain myself by imagining that Albury - my first scheduled pitstop - as a lost paradise designed by Maxfield Parish (who, incidentally, had paintings commissioned by Mazda). This oasis would boast hanging gardens, bright orange peacocks and hundreds of water-nymphs to pour that cool fresh liquid into my gold goblet. When I actually arrived in Albury I was prepared to savour the ironic contrast of my luxurious fantasies with the banal actuality of a small rural town.

The first thing I saw was an old, fat man sitting on a bench watching everyone with a pair of binoculars - even if they were only 5 feet away. No one seemed to care. I refreshed myself with a turkey sandwich and coffee at Cafe Gryphon, which is like a broken-off piece of Brunswick St., but I went there anyway. I sat and watched the water-nymphs sidle by, for indeed Albury is far from babe-free; in fact it actively flouts the small town/one spunk rule. Perhaps the mad scientist who creates beautiful women lives here, and funnels them into Melbourne via Prahran nightclubs. I was beginning to understand the man on the bench, and this scared me. Another victim of the Hume. I hotfooted it back to the car past yet another gaggle of nubians. Perhaps I was hallucinating, but they don't usually kick in 'till Yass.

To recover from this assault on my prejudices, I slipped Kyuss into the stereo and turned it up full. This music was forged in the desert and is perfect for high-octane driving. I immediately felt myself fusing with the car so that we became one machinic projectile tearing forward into the future, like a flaming arrow shot by some glistening new god; a cyborg centaur. The effect, however, was ruined somewhat when I was overtaken by four old ladies in a Toyota Corolla on their way to a lawn bowling tournament in Cowra. The Hume now bypasses most of those small towns which Norman Rockwell would have lived in if he was Australian. Now the only social pockets which punctuate the journey are service-stations and McDonalds. Indeed, the latter has become so important to the state's economy that they are now part of the official government signs, so they don't
even need their own billboards - Gundagai 115 km, McDonalds 120 km. Kids must
wonder why the mayor of this hamlet looks like a clown.

I pulled in at Holbrook, which has some tenuous link to someone who invented the submarine. In honour of this, they have built a ruddy great submarine in a dirt park. I wandered around it, while a guy who looked a lot like German film director Werner Herzog muttered to himself about the metaphoric potency of such a monument. A young skateboarder who was doing ollies off its hull said, "it's just a wasta-money heapa shit, mister." I silently agreed, before driving on.

I passed the turn-off to Howlong, which is only five minutes before Justalittlefurther. The heat was really starting to boil my brain, since I don't have any air-conditioning. I tried to open a fun-size Snickers bar with my teeth and succeeded in splattering the windscreen with liquid chocolate. The scene resembled something like a Cadbury sponsored Tarantino movie.
Trucks with "100km Limit" written on them hurtled past me and I was going 110.

Time for another rejuvenating detour, this time through Gundagai.

I always like to have a toasted sandwich at the Niagara Cafe, despite the fact that last year it was over-run with bikees in Swastika T-shirts. This place is like stepping into a time warp. They still have a sign up which says, "Celebrating the 50 year anniversary of P.M. 'John Curtin's' Visit - 1942-1992" (although why "John Curtin" is in exclamation marks is anybody's guess; perhaps it was an impersonator). I then checked into the Hardware-slash- Music shop, which proudly displayed Dire Strait's Brothers in Arms in the "Just In" section. A quick top up at the If-You-Have-To-Ask service station, and I was back in the mainline.
I passed the old boomerang factory, which had closed down since the government opened the doors to cheap Taiwanese imports. Who could forget the Boomerang blockades of '83? Everybody new that decision would come back to haunt them. I bypassed Snake Gully and Helga's Hellhouse due to too many bad memories associated with coach trips I was forced to take before I got my Japanese chariot.

Half-an-hour out of Gundagai and my stereo started chewing my tapes, perhaps due to the over-exertion in the extreme heat. The radio still worked, however, and I tuned into Triple J. I soon realized that the only thing more annoying that Triple J, is Triple J fading in and out behind parched hillocks. So I turned it off, whistled to myself, and tried to stretch my aching shoulders as I skimmed over the rippling mirages towards my destination.

A few kilometres past Yass I picked up distinguished Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami hitchhiking. This was a happy coincidence because I have been meaning to ask him how his translations of American noir writer Raymond Chandler influenced his own prose style, and how he responds to being categorized in the new "internationalist" genre. His response was as considered and eloquent as I had expected, and just when I was about to ask where he would like to be dropped off he turned into an apple my girlfriend had given me this morning as I left. Nevertheless, I felt I had gained a valuable insight into his work.

As my accelerator foot began to cramp up, and my eye-lids began to droop, I spied the Telecom tower poking its hypothermic head over the mountain tops. Canberra was just ahead, so I pulled down the sunshade, closed my eyes and let the force flow through me.

The death star was really in for it.