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Great Southern Land
By farseeker | April 8, 2009
Whilst we await the 2nd installment of Kris’s musings about the economy, I wish to share some interesting things about my last week.
See, my wife, myself, my brother and his girlfriend recently made an (almost) 3000km trek across the country to visit my parents in Adelaide.
Now, my car is just a normal car. A normal 3.8L V6, a normal manual gearbox, and most importantly, a normal stereo. On the way down the stereo played a collection of CDs, and on the way back it was tuned to JJJ (gotta love JJJ – 1400km each way and only about 20 minutes where we couldn’t get their signal).
When you get about 100km from a town called Hay on the Wimmera Highway, two things happen. 1) The road ups itself to 110kph and 2) the land plains out. It’s flat. Incredibly flat.
Now, most families these days, in their Ford Territories and their Audi’s and their Statesmans would probably have popped on a DVD for the kids as soon as they hit the M5 out of Sydney and just kept the DVDs flowing until they made their stop for the day. It goes without saying that back when I was a kid this would have been a distant dream – but even more so, when our PARENTS were kids, that trip would have been slow, uncomfortable (no aircon, smaller cars), harsh (leafspring suspension and 13″ wheels), and exceptionally dangerous (back then, no lines on the roads, and often no sealed surface).
Oh how technology has changed the way we travel. Today even bothering to drive 3000km rather than catch a 90 minute plane ride would (and has) boggle the minds of many people. Rather than cross-ply rubber we have steel belted radials. Rather than a AM radio (if you were lucky) we have CD Players, iPods, and DVD players. We’ve got synchromesh gearboxes (actually, most people have automatic transmissions), cruise control, and (when it gets hairy) ABS and traction control.
And all of this is fantastic. Except for one thing. The DVD players. Take a moment to look at these pictures (I don’t have any better ones right now, I stole these from my wife’s facebook page – trust me, there’s better ones):
There are so many beautiful places to see in the flat desert that is the Wimmera. The Hume highway is pretty boring, but when you turn off after Gundagai it’s beautiful. The salt pans, the dust storms, the harvesting. The arid landscape, the ochre colours, and the pounding white lines down the middle of the black tarmac. Putting your foot down in 3rd gear when you’re already doing 120 to get past a road train (a big truck with either two over-length trailers or at least three normal trailers – think of a B-Double and then make it a longer).
That’s what this great country is all about. And when you go and chuck a DVD player in the back seat, your kids will miss it. All of it. Sure, it shuts them up for a few hours, but when I was a kid we would do drives like that all the time, three of us jammed in the back seat. Sure, there’s moments when our parents probably wanted to leave us on the side of the road (and it sure as hell was too expensive to fly back then). But it left an unmistakable impression on me, and now as a young adult, I really appreciate all those days spent in the back of Dads falcons driving to exotic-sounding places (like The Daintree, Cairns, Flinders Ranges, etc). I know my wife (who has never driven anywhere like this before, let alone flown there) is really appreciating it.
Please, don’t pack your kids into the car with a DVD when there’s so many beautiful scenes to be watched out the window.
Topics: Evironment | No Comments »