Backseat Drivers

A Hume Highway road trip with some opinionated voices of the past

By Craig Cormick

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

— Oscar Wilde

Published by Merino Press

2015

12 Giffen Close

Canberra ACT 2615

ISBN  978-0-646-96661-8

© Craig Cormick 2016

All the incidents in this book are true. Except for the ones that are less true than others.

Where the Journey Begins

The story starts at Botany Bay, where I find my first passenger on my road trip between Sydney and Melbourne. It’s a mostly muggy and overcast Australia Day morning and I have driven along Captain Cook Drive, on the southern end of the Bay to where Cook first set foot on Australian soil. Well he stepped onto a rock actually, about ten metres or so off shore, and the first person from Cook’s ship to step out on it was 17-year-old able seaman Isaac Smith - who happened to be Cook’s wife’s cousin. We could go into a long rant about it being the first act of nepotism in European-Australian history on the east coast of Australia, but let’s try not to get too distracted this early on.

The southern end of the Bay is national park, with paved walking tracks around the foreshore where people can walk and ponder their heritage at various monuments. More people have chosen to go to Sydney Harbour today though, just like the First Fleet when they arrived here in 1788, staying a short while at Botany Bay and then deciding it would be a better place to party on the Harbour. There are hundreds of thousands of them crammed around Sydney Harbour today, watching the tall ship regattas and the fly-overs and parachute displays, celebrating Australia Day, but there are only a few dozen down here at Botany Bay.

Most are family groups, with eskies and pop up gazebos to ward off the rain rather than the perfect sunshine that Australia Day advertisements tend to promise. One family is playing cricket on the grass. Another is sitting by the placid water and fishing, ignoring the huge tankers anchored in the bay by the oil refinery wharf in front of them. A few have Australian flags with them. Some of the families are Pacific Islanders. Occasional planes roar overhead from Sydney’s Mascot Airport across the Bay. I wander down the paved path, past a sign stating Fires in Authorised Fireplaces only (which is subtitled in Arabic of all languages), and stand at that point where Cook – or young Isaac Smith – first came ashore. There is one young Pacific Islander standing out on that landing rock fishing. That’s a neat irony, I think. It would be better if he was indigenous of course, but what do you do but tell the story as you see it. I wonder in fact where all Sydney’s indigenous people are spending today. Invasion Day as many term it. Somewhere that’s not here it seems.

There is a plaque out on the landing rock, but strangely it is turned out to sea so you have to wade out to read it, or be in a boat. However there is a huge plinth behind me on the grass that has a metal plaque attached to it that can easily be read. It says: “Captain Cook landed here 28th April A.D. 1770. This monument was erected A.D. 1870 by the Honourable Thomas Holt M.L.C. Victoria Regina, the Earl of Belmore, Governor &c”. Cook would like it, I think. Particularly as it’s bigger and grander than the monument to Joseph Banks a little further down the path. Nearby on the wooden jetty there are panels telling the stories of the landing and one says that the first memorial here was actually a plaque fixed to the cliff face behind me in 1821, that was commissioned by the Philosophical Society of Australia as their first act, and gave equal billing to Cook and Banks, honouring their “pursuit of knowledge” rather than the founding of a nation.

Further inside the National Park there is a visitor’s centre that retells the story of Cook’s landing in a little theatre, many times a day. It makes a big point of telling that when Cook landed he was opposed by two men of the Gweagal people, who threw spears and stones at them. ‘Fuck off our land!’ is the general interpretation given. Cook responded by having a warning shot fired towards them, and then shot one of them in the leg. But there’s another story about Cook’s landing I’m more interested in at the moment.

When he sailed into Botany Bay (which he’d first called Stingray Bay) on 29 April 1770, he wrote:

“Saw, as we came in, on both points of the bay, several of the Natives and a few hutts; Men, Women, and Children on the S. Shore abreast of the Ship, to which place I went in the Boats in hopes of speaking with them, accompanied by Mr. Banks, Dr. Solander, and Tupia. As we approached the Shore they all made off, except 2 Men, who seem’d resolved to oppose our landing. As soon as I saw this I order’d the boats to lay upon their Oars, in order to speak to them; but this was to little purpose.”

But Joseph Banks told it a little differently. He wrote in his journal that when the Endeavour sailed into Botany Bay they saw two men fishing on the rocks and also a woman and several children on the beach gathering fire wood. The men paid the ship no attention at all, and when the woman looked up at them, it was as if she looked right through them. As if Cook and his ship didn’t exist. Or was it just that the Europeans didn’t understand the way that the locals were regarding them?

That’s contrast enough to ponder, but there’s another interpretation of the story that we don’t have – the stories of the men and women standing on the shore. Those who looked through him and those who threw spears at him when he landed. What about their stories? The voices that are rarely heard between the noise and clamour of the huge figures in history. Well hold that thought, because we’ll be coming back to it later.

Anyway, so there I am, standing on the foreshore of Botany Bay, pondering what Australia Day might mean to these families and individuals around me and I see him sitting in the shelter hut behind me. He’s looking damp and miserable like he’s been rained on. At first I presume he’s a character actor, or one of Sydney’s many eccentric street people, but it’s clear he’s slept out all night by the shore here.

He sees me looking at him and beckons me to come closer. ‘Hello,’ he says with that forced smile that beggars and peddlers give you before they hit you for something.

‘Can I help you?’ I ask.

His face lights up. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I need a lift.’

‘Where to?’ I ask.

‘Just down the road a bit.’

I shrug. ‘Okay.’

He climbs to his feet, stretching and groaning a little and joins me on the path. I look around to see what any of the picnicking families might make of this man dressed like Captain Cook here, but nobody seems interested. They look through him like he doesn’t exist.

‘I saw you admiring my obelisk,’ he says.

‘Yes. It’s a nice obelisk. As obelisks go.’

‘Did you notice that Banks hasn’t got an obelisk,’ he says. ‘More of a stone seat with a plinth.’

I look at him carefully, then ask, ‘What’s that other monument further down the path. That looks like an obelisk?’

‘That’s just a very tall plinth,’ he says. ‘It’s for Daniel Solander the Swedish Scientist on the voyage. And the flag pole with the small plaque beyond that is for Forby Sutherland, a seaman who died of tuberculosis and was buried thereabouts.’

‘That must have impressed the locals,’ I say sarcastically.

He shrugs. ‘They didn’t seem too happy to see us in general.’

We walk back up the path and go to my car. There are a few more families arriving now, setting up picnic blankets and getting out their sports gear, glancing up at the grey skies optimistically. It begins to drizzle.

We climb into the car and I immediately notice the damp musty smell of the day follows us into the car. Then I realise that it’s this Cook fellow. He’s damp and a bit smelly. I wind down my window a little.

‘Where to?’ I ask him.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Cronulla first,’ I say.

‘And then?’

‘Well all the way to Melbourne actually.’

‘Splendid!’ he says. ‘Just where I wanted to go to.’

I eye him carefully, wondering if I’ll just dump him somewhere after Cronulla. I turn the car around and drive back along Captain Cook Drive. As we go past a row of factories, Cook points at one street sign and laughs. It is Sir Joseph Banks Drive. ‘Call that a Drive?’ he asks. ‘It’s pitiful. Not even two kilometres long and it ends in a thin path that goes down to the cliffs. The path is longer than the Drive.’ He laughs again. ‘Do you know how long Captain Cook drive is?’ he asks me.

‘Pretty long.’

‘Over six nautical miles,’ he says proudly.

I’m now thinking of the manner I might dump him at Cronulla. We drive around the meandering curves of his Drive, where bush land grows unkempt up to the road’s edge and then we are back in the world of houses and suburbia, and heading along Elouera Road towards Cronulla. He is busily looking out the window like this is all new to him. ‘Do you come to Cronulla much?’ I ask him.

‘I haven’t been this way in years and years,’ he says.

I’m wondering if everyone who dresses up as a character from the past finds the need to smell like a character from the past too. He’s got this sort of a damp musty smell – but it could be the woollen naval uniform that he’s slept in, out in the rain, a few too many nights. I wind the window down and let glorious Cronulla beach air blow into the car. Even on rainy days Cronulla seems to be sunny.

I slow down and look at the Australian flags hanging from balconies that seem to increase in number the closer we get to Cronulla Central.

‘Are you looking for something?’Cook asks.

‘Yes, actually,’ I say. ‘I’m looking for traces of the past.’

He waits for me to explain that.

I sigh. I might as well come out and say it. ‘I’m writing a book, see. I’m doing this thing where I drive down the Hume Highway from Sydney to Melbourne looking at things that define Australianess from incidents in the past and how they might now seem in the present.’

‘Like a travel journal?’ he asks.

‘Something like that.’

He nods. ‘I can help. I’ve experience with that.’

I turn and give him a look. He smiles. He clearly doesn’t understand the look I’m giving him. We drive along past all the flats towards the beach and turn into the car park at North Cronulla. It is near full and the park has families with young kids playing on the paths and playground equipment. There are small groups of young Ozzies setting up barbeques on the beach side of the car park and boisterously playing cricket. I say Ozzies as they leave you in no doubt as to their nationality with huge flags draped over the back of their pick-up trucks and vans. The gals wear board shorts and bikini tops and the guys are either bare-chested or wear T-shirts – the surfie uniforms worn all up and down the coast. Most have tattoos of some sort or other. Around the bicep, on the chest, on the shoulder blade. And most have the temporary Australian flag tattoos on their faces or chests too – guys and girls both. It might be just me, but these boisterous youngsters have a slightly menacing air to them.

‘If they had spears and clubs you’d want to fire a warning shot at them,’ says Cook. So clearly it’s not just me.

I turn and look up the hill. At the top, near the club house, is a large mob of teenagers. There are more barbeques set up there and a large plastic sheet has been pegged out on the grass for them to slide down. They look like they are in one of those Coke ads.

I pull out my note book and jot down a few notes.

‘The wind is about five knots coming from the South-East,’ says Cook.

‘Thank you,’ I mumble.

We hop back into the car and drive around the coast rode down into Cronulla South. And the flag-factor increases dramatically. There are barbeques happening out on balconies and people are walking up and down the footpaths and almost everyone is waving an Australian flag of some kind. In most places around the country people have these little flags sticking out of the car windows, about the size of an A4 sheet of paper, but in Cronulla the cars have full-sized flags on them. A few pick-up trucks have ‘Aussie Pride’ stamped across their rear windows. One car comes past us with eight flags waving from it. We see it come past again the other way shortly after, clearly doing laps.

It’s crowded near the beach, and we have trouble finding a parking spot. The crowds here are woven through with young yobbos and under-aged louts all with wild eyes. Three young dickheads strut past us with badly hand-written zinc messages on their bare tops, like it is war paint. On their chests in green or yellow zinc it says, AUSSIE, AUSSIE, AUSSIE . On the back, one of them has written OI, OI, OI, and the other two, who maybe had trouble with spelling that, have a rough southern cross.

Amongst the rest of the crowd of all ages and types, many walk around the rocks to see the free concert on today on the lawns by the Surf Club, where an Abba tribute band are playing. There are Ozzie flag T-shirts, Ozzie flag hats, Ozzie flag bikinis, Ozzie flags on prams, Ozzie flags as sarongs, Ozzie flag bags, Ozzie flag sunglasses, Ozzie flag caps, Ozzie flag waistbands, Ozzie flag devils horn headbands, Ozzie flag neckties, Ozzie flag sombreros and enough flags worn as capes to make you think you might be at a superhero convention. Most people smile and say, ‘Enjoy the day,’ when you stop and chat with them. This is clearly a family fun day, but there is a clear statement underlying it and I wonder what the mood will be like much later in the evening after the families with little kids have gone home and the young yobbos who have been drinking all day are still prowling around.

There has been a story in the media recently that a researcher from Western Australia University, Professor Fozdar, has done a study that shows that people who display the Australian flag also display more racist tendencies. It has been widely misinterpreted though, with either outrage or indignity, that it means that if you fly the flag you’re a racist. Which brings us of course to the reason for being in Cronulla – the race riots of 2005 - which the authorities went out of their way to claim were not racially motivated at all. Wikipedia, the source of all contemporary popular knowledge describes them as “sectarian clashes and mob violence”.

As ever, the truth is a little more elusive and has been interpreted slightly differently by different people. But the basic facts are that for some time there had been a growing resentment between the young yobbos of Cronulla and the young yobbos of Middle-Eastern origin who would drive into Cronulla on weekends to the beach. The complaint from the local yobbos was that the predominantly Lebanese yobbos would take up large areas of beach for soccer matches and would insult the local girls, leering at them and calling them Ozzie sluts and so on.

This eventually led to a violent confrontation on Sunday 4 December 2005, when two off-duty volunteer surf lifesavers were assaulted by a small group of Lebanese yobbos after both accused the other of the unforgivable act of staring at each other. According to reports, trying to capture the heat of the moment in the type of analytical detail needed for court cases, what began as a verbal exchange of insults quickly escalated into a pushing and punching match that then grew into an all out fight resulting in one of the lifesavers falling and striking his head.

The Lebanese yobbos might not have been aware of it fully at the time, but the locals at Cronulla regard their volunteer life savers as something very special, which was evident on this Australia Day to us, with the surf clubs clearly being central to the community feeling there. If they’d had a fight with some nuns or mothers with prams they probably wouldn’t have evoked such outrage.

And over the next week things got silly. Talkback radio went ballistic with racial vilification. Alan Jones of 2GB called for street marches and a community show of force against the “Middle Eastern grubs”. He was later found to have breached the Australian Communications and Media Authority’s Code of Conduct for comments likely to encourage violence or brutality. The idea of a community show of force was running hot though, and SMS messages were bouncing all around Cronulla and nearby suburbs, along the lines of:

"This Sunday every Fucking Aussie in the shire, get down to North Cronulla to help support Leb and wog bashing day...Bring your mates down and let's show them this is our beach and they're never welcome back"

It was another variation on - ‘Fuck off our land!’ Although I don’t suppose many of the crowd saw the irony nor the comparison with how local Gweagal people – undoubtedly yobbos too – responded to Cook’s transgressions and violence on their beaches at Botany Bay. On Sunday 11 December about 5,000 people, armed with Ozzie flags, gathered in and around North Cronulla beach waiting for the Lebanese invasion to arrive. It didn’t happen. Middle Eastern yobbos had radios and mobile phones too, after all. But about 1pm a lone unfortunate young man of “Middle Eastern appearance” was sighted on the beach and the crowd set upon him. He tried to hide in a local pub, but he was dragged out and beaten before being saved by police. Witnesses at the time say he shouted at the attacking crowds, “I’m going to blow youse all up!”

But the crowd was just getting warmed up now, and at about 1.45 two young Bangladeshi lads had the misfortune to pick that day to come to the beach. They were set upon with shouts of “Fuck of Lebs!” and narrowly escaped in a car. The police were doing what they could to calm the crowd, but beer bottles were being thrown at them, which history shows tends not to lead to good relations with people with guns.

As the day wore on more people who bore any slight resemblance to Lebanese yobbos were assaulted by Ozzie yobbos, including two at the train station, and three at a Nando’s restaurant. By the end of the day 16 people had been arrested and 26 people had to be treated for injuries, including two ambulance officers who were attacked with thrown beer bottles.

And still the violence wasn’t over. At around 8pm that evening, about 100 local yobbos of “Middle Eastern appearance” gathered at Punchbowl Park, about 20 kilometres inland from the beach and formed themselves into a convoy of about 40 cars. They drove down to Cronulla and attacked cars and lone individuals. Up to 100 cars were damaged, many with smashed windscreens, and when police intervened they were reported to have confiscated 40 iron bars and arrested another 14 people. In separate attacks a little further away from Cronulla two men were set upon by yobbos of “Middle Eastern appearance” and seriously stabbed.

Acts of violence and paranoia and hysteria and retaliation continued through the week. Guns were flashed to media cameras. 800 police officers were rallied to the area. A Church was burned down – even though its congregation was predominantly Tongan.  Molotov cocktails were confiscated by police. And shame of shame, a flag was torn down from the Brighton-le-Sands RSL club by a 16-year-old Lebanese immigrant, and along with his mates they spat on it, pissed on it and burned it.

By the time the dust had settled and the scars and cuts had started to scab over, 285 charges were laid against 104 people. Half were arrested as a result of the original Cronulla riot on 11 December and the other half from retaliatory riots. Charges made included malicious damage, possession or use of a prohibited weapon, assaulting police, rioting, resisting arrest, threatening violence and affray.

And of course things were never quite the same in Cronulla. And things were never quite the same for the Lebanese community too. One member of the Punchbowl community, Eiad Diyab, said on the ABC shortly after the riots:

“We knew always there was racism, but we never knew it was to this extent. I mean, all your life you've been – you've been raised to be Australian. I mean, you carry the Australian flag. When you go to sports events and all that, you're happy to be Australian and all that. And all of sudden people reject you. ‘Go home!’ They shout your names. Like, ‘Go home, you Middle Eastern Lebs,’ or whatever. ‘Go home.’” I mean, that's a shock to us. ‘Go home.’ I mean, like, you get cut inside your heart, you know. Like you feel like you're not part of society no more.”

‘We always planted the flag when claiming a new land,’ says Cook to me, ‘But we took it back to the ship afterwards. And we never ever dressed in it.’ He’s clearly observant. But how couldn’t you be when there are possibly more Ozzie flags per square metre here than anywhere except the factories in China that make most of them.

Flags evolved from heraldic crests or family banners, so adversaries in battle would know who to attack and who not to attack. From that they spread to become the banners of kings, and finally to define nation states. You could say that these days that use of a flag more accurately describe the state of the nation.

The Australian flag, that so many people wave so enthusiastically as if it were an extension of their arms, or a part of the Australian soil that has grown organically into a cloth design, was the result of a competition for an Australian flag, held at federation, in which over 32,000 entries were received. A panel of largely military representatives, with obviously close ties to Great Britain, chose the current design. They could just as well have chosen another.

But it is what the flag represents that’s the vital thing, of course, not just what imagery it has on it. It says, “I am Australian!” Which is also another way of saying, “You are not!”  Or perhaps sometimes it is saying, “I am incapable of articulating what my national identity is, or means, to me in any other way than wearing my flag as a cape like a young child playing super hero.”

We could dream up theories for years and many academics will, or we could actually just ask a yobbo with a flag draped around him or her at Cronulla (which I actually did) what it means to them, and watch them stare at you incredulously and say, ‘It’s Australia! Australia! Greatest country on earth!’ While one of his or her mates lets rip with a burst of our national Tourette’s syndrome, “Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!”

The official reaction to the Cronulla riots was interesting. The New South Wales Police Commissioner, Ken Moroney described them as “absolutely totally un-Australian”. Prime Minister John Howard, conscious of not having Australia seen as a racist country, went so far as to deny there were any racial undertones to the violence, stating it was primarily an issue of law and order. The leader of the opposition, Kim Beazely, agreed with him for once, stating it was all “simply criminal behaviour, that’s all there is to it”. Were the police and politicians referring to different events? Maybe not, when you consider the most concise summary of things I’ve ever seen, on the website merg.com.au, which put it like this:

“A group of dickheads decided to wail on another group of dickheads. ... the two groups of dickheads continued assaulting each other over the next few days, causing property damage, fighting, driving dangerously, and generally behaving like dickheads. And here’s the thing: Although there were two separate groups of dickheads, all of them were dickheads. Sure, some of them might have been bigger dickheads than others (cheers, Alan Jones), but they were all - at heart - just one big bunch of dickheads. And if that isn’t a sign of multiculturalism succeeding, I don’t know what is.”

Driving out of Cronulla the number flags hanging from balconies thins out. It is said that the contemporary Australian dream is to have a big house overlooking the water. I am lucky enough to have relatives in Sydney with one such slice of the Australian dream, overlooking Port Hacking Bay, south of Cronulla and Cook and I drop in to join their Australia Day barbeque. I’m very interested in hearing what their conversations are about – imagining that they are the types of conversations being had at family barbeques all across Sydney. Fortunately nobody asks me anything about this odd smelly bloke who I showed up with. But I imagine most family barbeques regularly get one odd smelly bloke showing up that nobody is sure who he came with.

The light speckles through the trees on the cliffs about us, showing the shallow cove below, where boats are tied up. This is glorious. The feeling is beyond easy description and verifies that Sydney really can be the best address in the world. For some.

The talk ranges across planned holidays and work and favourite recipes and pets and kids and absent family and funny memories and the nice neighbours and the neighbour who is a dickhead and favourite TV shows and recent movies and the quality of kids’ boyfriends or girlfriends – but never on what it mean to be Australian or the significance of Australia Day. But thinking back to that mantra expressed on Cronulla beach, ‘Enjoy the day!’, that’s what Australia Day seems to be about – celebrating those things that people hold dear to them in Australia. Family and friend and fishing and food and fireworks and even things that don’t’ start with an F. It’s a day for celebrating in crowds or small groups or just with family.

After a few nicely charred sausages and an uncharred glass of chardonnay we hop back into the car. ‘That was very pleasant,’ Cook says. ‘Are you getting the feeling of Australianness you’re looking for?’

‘We’ve only just begun,’ I say. ‘We’re off to Macquarie Fields next.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘Another world away.’

‘What happened there?’

‘Another riot.’

‘You have a thing about riots, don’t you.’

‘Social upheaval is a strong mark of what defines a nation,’ I tell him. And as we drive down the leafy streets I think I’ll let him travel with me a bit longer. Asking me questions is a good thing as it makes me articulate my thinking, and what is a book but an articulating of thoughts wrapped in the structure of a story?

We turn onto Henry Lawson Drive, which is even longer than Captain Cook Drive, though I decide not to mention that. The weather alternates between overcast and sunshine as we drive through the suburbs of Peakhurst and Padstow Heights. The road is soon running alongside the river and we can see small family picnics set up on the grassy areas, not interested in being a part of a noisy crowd. There is a repeated scene of a dad and his son standing by the river fishing, alone and together. Celebrating Australia Day in just being in each other’s company. They’ve all got their own stories too.

‘I need to pass water,’ says Cook.

‘Huh?’ I ask him, thinking that’s exactly what we’re doing, driving beside the river.

‘I need to take a piss,’ he says, jumping to more contemporary language. ‘It’s the wine.’

‘Do you know,’ I tell him. ‘We used to have a piss, rather than take a piss. It’s a bit close to taking the piss to my liking.’

‘I just need to piss,’ he says.

‘Okay,’ I say, ‘Let me just check something on the map.’ I wait until the next red light and then pull out my Sydney map and run my finger along the road. There is a red circle marked on it just ahead. ‘Perfect!’ I say. ‘There is a place I want to visit just ahead where you can go.’

‘Does it have a bathroom?’

‘And when did toilets become bathrooms?’ I ask him. ‘Yes it does. It’s a pub.’

‘Are we going to have another drink?’ he asks.

‘No. We’re looking for traces of the past again.’

‘Okay,’ says. ‘As long as I can pass water there.’

‘I’m sure that won’t be a problem.’

‘What happened there?’ he asks me.

‘A shoot out between to bikie gangs.’

‘Another riot?’ says Cook. ‘You don’t consider yourself just a little obsessed with violence and riots do you?’

‘It’s a part of Sydney’s history,’ I say.

‘So are the businesses and schools and houses and everything around us. Shouldn’t you be capturing them too?’

‘Yes, I should. But I’m not.’

‘Then aren’t you only capturing one element of Sydney’s past?’

He’s right. But I’m not going to admit it. ‘Did you notice that Henry Lawson Drive is twice as long as Captain Cook Drive?’ I tell him.

He turns and looks out the window in a huff. We drive in silence for a little bit and then I decide to share something with him. ‘Actually I’ve been trying to capture Sydney in a metaphor for some time. Let me try a few of them out on you.’

He shrugs.

‘Sydney is a brash early 40s, once-married person, who still wants to be in their 20s, obsessed with looking good and making a quick buck, full of stories of real estate value and house breakins, certain that any address in Sydney is the best address in the world.’

I watch him for a reaction, then try another. ‘Sydney is a monstrous beast, inured to the shambles of traffic and planning chaos and politics that eats it up from the inside, content that to have the harbour and the beaches makes up for any faults.’

He says nothing. ‘Sydney’s conundrum is that only people who live in Sydney will ever understand what it is like to live in Sydney.’

He looks at me, but still says nothing. I try another to get a reaction. ‘Sydney is the unabashed drunk who pops her tits out at a party. Sydney is trying to find an address on the Pacific Highway north of the Harbour Bridge, and finding the numbers are reset at every new suburb, as the city continually reinvents itself. Sydney, Sydney, Sydney, Sydney, Sydney, Sydney, Sydney, Sydney, Sydney. If you say it often enough it sheds all its complications and contradictions and just becomes a name.’

‘Banks was better for metaphors than me,’ he says and turns and looks back out the window.

We turn off Henry Lawson Drive onto Milperra Road and then onto Marigold Street and Beaconsfield Street. I drive slowly along, looking at the building numbers. I stop the car. There is a genteel pub there called the Mill Hotel, where the Viking Tavern should be. ‘The past is gone,’ I say, a little disappointed. ‘It’s been rebuilt.’

I drive into the car park and pull up next to a landscaped parking bay with shrubs and low concrete barriers. Cook stares at the pub. ‘It looks nice,’ he says.

‘It shouldn’t,’ I say. ‘It should be rough. This was the site of the Milperra Bikie Massacre.’

‘So we are in Milperra?’

‘No, actually we’re in Revesby. Milperra was the last suburb.’

He gives me an odd stare. ‘Maybe the Revesby Massacre just didn’t have the right ring to it,’ I say.

‘So what happened exactly?’ he asks.

‘Well, if I can remember all the details correctly, there was this bikie gang called the Comancheros and parts of the gang broke away and formed a rival gang called the Bandidos – which you have to admit seems a much cooler name for a bikie gang. I don’t think that was the actual cause of the rivalry, but there was no love lost between them. Well, there was a motorcycle swap meet planned for this Sunday, which just happened to be a Father’s Day, and the Comancheros and Bandidos showed up, itching for a fight. There’s this thing about bikies, they wear their club patch on their jackets and are immensely proud of it, and will pick a fight with anyone wearing another patch. Like ancient soldiers wearing their battle standards or flags. Well, they lined up on either side of the car park, just like they were ancient soldiers, and then charged at each other, screaming and waving knives and guns. When the police had arrived and dragged them apart, seven people were dead – including a fourteen year old girl bystander who had been shot in the face – and 28 bikies were wounded.’

‘Let me guess,’ says Cook. ‘It didn’t really solve things and the fighting continues, but no longer in pub car parks?’

I nod. ‘That’s right. They tend to do drive-by shootings more often now than gang fights. How did you know that?’

‘It was the same with Maoris and most of the violent natives we encountered in the Pacific,’ he says. ‘Though we used to more commonly call them savages. You’d have a large confrontation and people would be killed, but it didn’t really stop the violence and conflict.’

‘Clearly,’ I say, thinking of him being clubbed to death in Hawaii by the natives. ‘And of course we’re talking about bikies rather than savages,’ I say. Cook cocks an eyebrow at me. There was a great quote by the judge at the subsequent trial of those involved, that seems particularly relevant to today. He said, “As patriotism can lead to jingoism, and mateship can lead to cronyism, so bikie club loyalty can lead to bikie club war.”

We go into the pub. I pause to read the sign outside while Cook goes to find a bathroom. It says: “No patrons with bare feet or patches”. Clearly there is no tolerance rule for bikies, whether they are bare-footed or not.

Inside the foyer there is a nice water feature. Further in there is a duo playing in the outdoor beer garden. They are singing You shook me all night long, and nicely-dressed young people sit at the round tables drinking and listening to them. A group of four young women with long blonde hair, low tops and super high heels raise their eyes and give me the 1.5 second scrutiny for potential and then drop them quickly back to their drinks. I don’t think I passed. Thanks Gals, enjoy the day too.

There are even a few families with babies in prams and there is a play area for the kids. One of the back bars, the Sports Bar, has a much rougher looking crowd in there. Long hair and tatts. But no bikie leather jackets are in sight.

I scan behind the bar for any remnants of the Viking Tavern on display but I don’t see any. I don’t suppose a rusted machete or an old shotgun would be appropriate for such a family-oriented business. I wonder about asking any of the patrons what they think of this place being redeveloped and what they think of the bikie massacre, but it happened in 1984, almost 30 years ago, and many of them weren’t even born then.

I see Cook emerge from the toilets looking a little lost and I go over and lead him back to the car. ‘Feeling better?’ I ask him.

‘Much better.’

‘I’m going to ask him if there was a bath in the bathroom, but I see there is somebody sitting in my car. I’m sure I locked it. I look around quickly, wondering if he might be a bikie or somebody dangerous, but Cook’s face lights up. ‘Henry!’ he says. The guy in the car just gives a small nod or recognition.

‘You know this person?’ I ask him.

‘It’s Henry Lawson,’ he says, opening the car door and pumping his hand in a vigorous handshake. I just stand there regarding them both.

‘Henry Lawson?’ I say.

‘What’s that?’ the man says and cups a hand to his ear.

‘He’s a little deaf,’ says Cook.

‘What’s he doing here?’ I ask.

‘Pardon?’ he says.

‘What are you doing in my car?’ I ask, quite loudly.

‘They threw me out of the pub,’ he says dejectedly. ‘Refused to serve me. Said my credit was no good with them.’ He sniffs indignantly.

‘You can come with us,’ says Cook. ‘We’re going to Melbourne.’

‘Melbourne?’ says Lawson. ‘Splendid. I haven’t been there for ages.’

Cook hops into the car, sitting next to Lawson in the back seat. I just stand there a moment and then shrug. Well, if I’m serious about looking for elements of the Australian past and present I could do a lot worse than do it in the company of Captain Cook and Henry Lawson.

‘Could we stop for a drink?’ Lawson asks before we’ve even gone a kilometre.

‘Eventually,’ I say.

‘We’re looking for riots,’ says Cook. ‘He has a thing about riots.’

‘It’s not a thing,’ I say. ‘It’s an historical interest in facets of the past.’

‘Well there’s a nice pub at Liverpool,’ says Lawson. ‘Let’s go there and I’ll tell you about the Liverpool riots.’

‘What Liverpool riots?’ I ask him, looking up into the rear-view mirror.

‘During World War One,’ he says. ‘Troops went crazy for several days, drinking and rioting.’

I’m about to say, you weren’t alive during World War One, but realise how stupid it would sound telling him that considering he’s sitting here in the car with me. Instead I say, ‘Tell me about it.’

‘My throat’s feeling a bit parched for talking,’ he says.

I roll my eyes. ‘I’ll buy you a drink in Macquarie Fields,’ I say.

He smiles at that and settles back in his seat. We cross over onto the M5, merging with the traffic and after a short drive take the exit ramp onto the Hume Highway. Our first steps on the Hume. One of my quandaries has been which bit of the road to take for my research. There are at least three different possibilities. One is to take the modern Hume Highway or Freeway, and all its bypasses and zoom down to Melbourne the way the majority of people do. The second option is to try and take the Old Hume Highway, which meanders through lots of towns on its journey south. And the third, and my preferred options, is to attempt to follow the path that Hume and Hovell actually took back in 1824 when they trod the first journey from Sydney to Melbourne, which would provide an interesting mix of the Old Hume Highway, the new and many remote places as well, that modern travellers in their four-wheel drives and sedans would rarely see.

The Hume Highway was in fact known in New South Wales as the Great Southern Road until 1928, although to tell the truth it wasn’t actually that great. And in Victoria it was known as the Sydney Road. In the 1920s the Victorian shires that had been paying for the cost of maintaining the road that went past their towns requested that the Victorian Government be responsible for it, and it should be renamed the Federal Highway, as it was going to head towards Canberra which was soon to become the seat of Parliament. In 1928 the Victorian and New South Wales governments agreed to rename the entire highway the Hume Highway.

As we pass the suburb of Casula, Lawson says, ‘It was right here. Back in World War One they had all these military camps around Sydney where soldiers were trained. All the things to make them ready for the trenches, like parades and drilling. Well, in February 1916 some fool adjectival officer decided they needed a bit more drilling and their training session would be extended into the evening, making it over 24 hours of training. About 5,000 men refused to obey and decided a strike was in order to protest the poor conditions in the camps. They marched out of the camp towards the centre of Liverpool and were joined by men from other camps until there were about 15,000 of them. In practice for their behaviour in the Middle East they invaded pubs, drank them dry and then started vandalising buildings. Many of the soldiers commandeered trains and took them into the centre of Sydney where they continued their rampage, like an invading hoard, smashing windows and targeting any business with a foreign sounding name.’

‘This is starting to sound a little familiar,’ I say. ‘We might need to coin a term for describing certain elements in Australian history as the dickhead factor.’

‘Police and military guards were called in to try and stop the adjectival rioting and shots were exchanged, leading to the death of one soldier and the wounding of eight others. So it did end up as being good practice for the soldiers. The authorities court-martialled over a thousand men and hushed it all up, of course, and passed new and horrific laws.’

‘What? Conscription?’

‘No. Worse than that. It was adjectival inhumane. They introduced six pm closing of hotels!’

‘I’ve a better story,’ says Cook. ‘The First Fleet riots. Have you heard of them?’

I look up into the rear view mirror. These two are proving better value than I’d imagined. ‘Tell us about them.’

‘Well,’ says Cook. ‘You know how the First Fleet had planned to settle in Botany Bay, but when they got there they decided it would be better suited for a giant oil refinery and an airport and packed up and moved north to Sydney Harbour? Well, when they got there, they sat at anchor for a couple of days while deciding where to land exactly and scouting out the place and all the convicts were kept on the ships, looking longingly at dry land, wondering what kind of a place it was, but just wanting to be off the ships. They’d been stuck on them, in chains for eight months and since they were land-lubbers they really just wanted to be lubbing back on land again.

‘It took a few days before they were ready to disembark the convicts and things went smoothly enough, until they landed the women convicts on 6 February 1788. It took most of the day to get them ashore and they had a separate camp of tents and huts, with the intention that they should continue to be kept separate from the men. But as the darkness set in, that evening, bringing with it the promise of violent weather, both the convict men and sailors with barrels of grog made their way across to the women’s camp. And wild weather and wild women make for a dangerous combination.

‘The heaven’s opened up, with fierce bolts of lightning illuminating the sky, as if the almighty above was offended at the orgy taking place, and the surgeon of the ship Lady Penrhyn, Arthur Bowes Smith, wrote, “It is beyond my abilities to give a just description of the scene of debauchery and riot which continued through the night.” The official reaction was to ignore it and several officers decided not to even mention it in their journals.’

Lawson is grinning. ‘Those were the good old days of Australian settlement when the common currency was grog.”

‘You’d have been a pauper,’ says Cook, ‘Drinking whatever you earned.’ Lawson shrugs. That pretty much described him anyway, despite the efforts of friends to keep him off the grog throughout his life.

‘Here we are,’ I tell my passengers. ‘Macquarie Fields. Glenquarie to be precise.’ We drive down Canterbury Road, which is notably thinner and the verges less well kept than the roads leading here. We reach a roundabout and look across. There is a skateboard park on one side and a McDonald’s restaurant and shops on the other.

I drive through the roundabout slowly, looking carefully at the few kids in the skateboard park and then across at the shops that seem shut. I drive down the road a little further, my Bogan radar on high. There are some closely packed townhouses on the left and a school or something on the right, but the streets are largely empty. Where is everyone? We drive around and around. There are some ratty fibro houses with pulled apart cars on the lawn, but in general it is fairly neat and tidy suburb, like lower income outer suburbs all across Australia.

I wonder how many people who live here ever aspire to having a large house overlooking the water? And I wonder if that’s where all the people are today, gone into Cronulla with their flags, or sitting on the shores of Sydney Harbour, drinking and revelling, doing something of an imitation of those First Fleeters.

We circle back around and pull in at the McDonalds. It is small but neat. Inside it is a slow day here too, though I notice a lot of the customers are Pacific Islanders, and we see more police cars circling the shops than local cars, which must be a barometer of something interesting. I buy three Cokes from the extremely polite young man at the counter and take them to a small table by the front window.

‘What’s this?’ asks Lawson.

‘The drink I promised you.’

He sniffs it suspiciously and takes a sip. He pulls a face. ‘That’s not a drink,’ he says, then pulls a small flask out of his pocket and adds some to the Coke. ‘This is a drink.’ He lifts it to his lips, tastes it and nods his head. ‘Not bad.’

‘So tell us about this riot,’ says Cook. ‘Your turn for a story.’

‘Okay,’ I say. ‘This was in 2005, not that long ago. Another hot February day, which seems to be prime riot season in Sydney. It began with a group of young kids stealing a car and being chased by police through the suburb. The driver, Jesse Kelly crashed the stolen car into a tree, killing his two friends Dylan Raywood and Matthew Robertson. That was the spark for the trouble with locals spreading the story that the police had rammed the car causing it to crash. Added to this, there had been a riot by Aboriginal people in the Sydney suburb of Redfern in February the year before when police were chasing a young boy on a bike and he impaled himself on a railing while trying to escape them. The accusation was that the police had killed him. Same sort of thing here. Low income area with no love of the police and a belief in being harassed and bullied by them. Locals took the streets and attacked police cars also letting them know they should fuck off from their land, which resulted in hundreds of police being sent in, which really escalated things, with more locals attacking them, hurling petrol bombs and setting cars alight. Up to 300 locals were involved in riots over four days and nights, confronting the police riot squads and police dogs and helicopters.’

Cook and Lawson look out the window at the quiet streets.

‘I guess, like those other riots the causes were complex,’ I say. ‘Inequality and resentment and harassment and a frustrating need to lash out that is triggered by a single incident.’

‘Or it’s just your dickhead factor at play,’ says Cook. ‘It goes a long way to explaining what happened to me at Hawaii.’ I decide not to ask him if he or the Hawaiians were the dickheads.

‘So, where to next?’ asks Lawson.

‘Appin,’ I say.

‘What ‘appned in Appin?’ he asks. ‘Not another riot?’

‘No. I think we’re done with riots for the time being. We’re going to visit a man named Hume.’

We hop back into my car and I pass the map to Cook. ‘We’re here,’ I say, ‘And we need to get to here, down this road. See.’

He looks at the map and says, ‘Easy.’

So we’re driving south from Macquarie Fields, past suburbs that are marked out by clusters of Red Roosters, McDonalds, Pizza Huts and Aldis. I also notice that the further we drive from Sydney the taller the TV antennas get. We’re soon driving through semi-rural properties and the fast food places thin out. ‘Ah turn left here,’ says Cook. Then after a bit. ‘Now right.’ Then after another turn. ‘Straight ahead to Appin,’ he says and closes the map book.

We leave the last of the properties behind and are soon driving through very thickly-wooded bushland, with gum trees growing right up close to the trees. The road does a few winds and then narrows. Then it narrows again. I stop the car and ask Cook, ‘Could I see that map?’

He passes it across to me reluctantly. I study it for some moments and then figure out where we are. Along a one way road that is about to diminish into a track deep in the bush. I turn to him and say, ‘We’re here, see. How were you proposing we get to here?’ I stab the dot marked Appin.

Cook traces a line across the map, cutting through bush land and gorges. ‘We bear to starboard and there we are.’

‘So what road would that be along?’

He doesn’t have an answer for that. I sigh and turn the car around. Clearly navigating at sea is different to navigating on roads. I retrace our path back to the correct road and soon we are driving south again, past pastures and tall thin gums. We are about five or so kilometres out of Appin and are just passing a sign for a take-away food up ahead when I suddenly hit the brakes, jerking Cook into his seat belt and sending Henry Lawson flying between the front seats where he becomes wedged tight. Next time he’ll wear his seat belt, I think.

I hop out of the car and go over to the stone marker by the roadside. It takes Cook and Lawson a while to join me. ‘What is it?’ asks Cook. ‘It’s not a monument to Banks is it?’

‘No,’ I tell him. ‘This one is to Hume and Hovell.’

‘A human hovel?’ says Lawson. ‘Why would anyone build a moment to a human hovel?’

‘No. Hume and Hovell,’ I say. ‘Hamilton Hume and William Hovell.’

‘Who?’ Cook asks. And that sort of sums Hume and Hovell up. ‘Who?’ They pioneered an overland road from Sydney to Melbourne, the Hume Highway, the most travelled highway in Australia is named after them, but still most people have never heard of them.

The monument is a small plinth, with a plaque put there by the Royal Australian Historical Society, that reads:

“To commemorate the Hume and Hovell Expedition. Site of the Home of Hamilton Hume, starting point of the expedition to Port Phillip, October 2 1824. R.A.H.S.”

It is fenced off like a grave might be, and there are weeds growing all over the ground inside the fence. I consider chopping them down. Something to mark the beginning of our trek. But there are so bloody many of them.

‘Was there something important here?’ Lawson asks me.

‘This site was the home of Hamilton Hume,’ I tell him. ‘He and William Hovell, a completely mismatched pair, set off from here in 1824 with six convicts and walked all the way to Melbourne and back. And we’re following their footsteps.’

Both men are silent for a while, perhaps considering the two men, until Cook says, ‘My obelisk is much larger.’ Both men go and sit in the car. I stand there for a little, waiting for some kind of inspiration to strike me. Some kind of moment to happen. But it doesn’t

Another possible start to our journey could have been the start of the Hume Highway, which is at Governor Macquarie’s plinth in Macquarie Place – to which most people will say, “What?” and “Where?” It is a little hard to find, but down near Circular Quay in Sydney is a small park, nearly hidden by tall skyscrapers, and in one corner is a stone plinth that is a little less majestic than the nearby large anchor and canon from the First Fleet vessel the Sirius, and a little less eye-catching than the nearby statue of Thomas Sutcliffe, who pioneered refrigerated transport. But if you stop and check out the plinth, which very few busy office workers seem to have much time to do, you’ll find that carved into it are the words: “This obelisk was erected in Macquarie Place AD 1818 to record that all the Public Roads leading to the interior of the colony are measured from it. L. Macquarie Esq Governor.” And on the other side is a list of distances. Sydney to Bathurst is the furthermost, at 137 miles.

I look at the weeds growing around the plinth and then go and sit in the car with Cook and Lawson. ‘Next stop Appin,’ I say. ‘But we’re not actually stopping.’

Appin is nice little country town or village. Rural living within a commute of Sydney. We drive past a wedding function centre and see a hand-painted sign on a tree offering zumba classes. The Appin Hotel has a few Australian flags and Ozzie T-shirts draped on the veranda, perhaps for sale or perhaps for show. Lawson looks at it wistfully as we drive past and then we are back into bushland and pastures. Interestingly there were no fast food chain outlets to be seen.

Most of our knowledge of Hume and Hovell’s expedition comes from Hovell’s journal, which was rewritten as a more popular account by Dr William Bland, and published six years after their journey, in 1831, as Journey of Discovery to Port Phillip, though it reads like the journal has been converted to dot points for a very long and boring powerpoint presentation. Hume’s journal, if he kept one, has disappeared. Perhaps Hovell found it and hid it or got rid of it, because by the end of their journey the two men had set a precedent for fighting and arguing along the Hume Highway.

So a little bit of back story. We should start with the New South Wales Surveyor-General, John Oxley. He was a good scholar and gentleman, as leading surveyors were expected to be at the time, and had the right aristocratic connections, but he was a bit of a nob. Governor Macquarie had asked him to lead two expeditions into western New South Wales to check the lie of the land and report back, in well-written phrases, as to what he found. He undertook most of this rather well, leading some very well equipped parties out into the unknown and discovering some valuable land, but he tended to view everything he saw with English eyes, so the land he encountered was often described as arid or near desert. In fact on one expedition he stopped just short of the Murrumbidgee River, declaring the land ahead of him as desolate, melancholy and miserable, and that civilised men were unlikely to choose to visit it again and any land further south would be uninhabitable.

The land he was travelling though we know today as the Riverina, around Griffith and Leeton, which is some of the country’s best fruit growing land. Well, having returned to Sydney and put his signature on his report, he was not impressed when the new governor, Governor Brisbane, expressed interest in having the land between the Goulburn Plains and Bass Strait explored in more detail. As Oxley had already declared the land useless he did not support any expedition that might prove him wrong.

Hamilton Hume heard of the Governor’s idea and was keen to be involved, but as Oxley got into the Governor’s ear, Brisbane withdrew support for the expedition. Hume was keen to go, but lacked the funding and without government support he was reliant on private funding – which is where William Hovell comes in. He offered to pay half the costs and take part in it. Hume accepted.

So now a bit of back story to the back story, on their different natures. Hume was a ‘currency lad’ or born in the colony, to free settler parents, and from a young age had established himself as a capable bushman, taking part in explorations to the Southern Highlands, the Illawarra coast and the Bargo Brush. He was said to have an unerring sense of direction and a gift for making friends with Aboriginal tribes that many others lacked.

William Hovell, by comparison, was born in England and had spent much of youth at sea before obtaining a land grant at Narellan, near Camden. He had met a few men with capital and teamed up with them to make some easy money. One of their ventures was to trade goods in New Zealand, which became a financial disaster when Maoris attacked and seized their two ships. Hovell brought to the overland expedition his skills at navigation, and also provided a cart, a horse, two convicts, four bullocks and half the provisions for the expedition. Hume went into debt to provide his share. Governor Brisbane only contributed six packsaddles, six muskets, six blankets, two tarpaulins and one tent – which was on loan only. This led to it being described as “one of the most meanly equipped expeditions in Australian history”. They also had a “perambulator” which was basically a wheel on a stick, driven by the convict Claude Bossawa, to measure out the distance they were travelling.

Setting off to Appin, to join Hamilton Hume in October 1824, William Hovell wrote:

“At 1 PM Loaded the Cart with the provisions and all things necessary for our intended Journey, a Supply for 4 Months (viz) 640 lbs flour 200lbs Pork – 100 lbs. Sugar – 14 lbs Tea – 8 lbs Tobacco – 12 lbs Soap Salt – coffee - &c &c &c for Myself and three Men, together with a Musket and Ammunition for each man, this is exclusively for ourselves as Mr Hume has supply’d (as I understand) the same quantity. At 3 PM, started from home, for Mr Hume’s house in Appin, where we arrived at 7 – in the evening.”

The explorers set off the next day and immediately had to cross a river, as we did. The road takes a sudden and steep dip down sandstone cliffs to cross the Cataract River. The water here is very still, and the single lane concrete bridge is about 50 metres long. On the other side is another steep winding road up again. I can’t imagine how it would have been possible to get down the slopes and back up the other side with bullocks. The explorers actually crossed the river further down, where it joins with the Nepean River, which Bland described as:

“Sunday, Oct. 3. – At nine in the forenoon they ford the river, but not without much difficulty, from the steepness and loose sandy nature of the banks, as well as from the heavy lading of the carts.”

Now this is actually a bit of a problem, because Hovell’s journal states that they left Appin at 1 in the afternoon, on Sunday 3 October, and crossed the Cow Pasture River at about 4 in the afternoon. But in Bland’s account he says they left Appin on Saturday October 2, a day earlier, and halted for the night at on the Cow Pasture, or Nepean River, and the next day they crossed it in the morning.

This is not a good start to things, I think, and I hope it doesn’t set the pattern for things to come, having to try and decipher their journey from differing accounts. Once we’re back onto something like flat roads we pass pastures of cows and llamas and signs for different religious retreats. Buddhists, Christians and difficult to know what exactly. There are some very nice homes tucked away here, with a certain kit house look to them, while others are falling apart. We drive though the little township of Wilton, that has a shell station and an old Anglican church and a take away Pizza place and then were are back at the Hume Highway.

I turn right, driving northwards again and Cook says, ‘Uh, I’m pretty sure you should have turned left there.’

‘No, we’re going back a bit.’

‘We haven’t upset you have we?’ he asks.

‘What’s that?’ asks Lawson.

‘Not yet you haven’t,’ I say. ‘We need to go back a bit to drive along the old Hume Highway.’

‘Is that the way that these fellows Hume and Hovell went?’ Cook asks.

‘No, but it’s the old road that was named after them.’

Cook looks back at Lawson and gives a shrug. We drive back north about 25 kilometres, passing the sight of a horrific car crash two days before, where three people had been killed when a truck crossed over to the wrong side of the highway and crushed their car against the rail of the Menangle Bridge. The three unfortunate victims, who had been returning to Sydney after visiting a new-born in the family in Canberra, were so badly flattened when the truck crushed their car that police said it was initially impossible to even tell their ages or sex. A subsequent police investigation found evidence of tampering with the truck to allow it travel faster than the 100 km/hour limit, and the driver was arrested.

As the many informal memorials by the roadside attest, many people die or are seriously injured on the Hume Highway, each year. Over one five year period between 1998 and 2003, there were 37 people killed and another 827 injured on the Highway. In Victoria alone, between 2005 and 2009, there were 26 deaths on the Hume Highway and 443 injuries from crashes. But the stories behind each one are more horrific than the statistics. Head on collisions between cars and trucks. Cars skidding off the road. Motorbikes being clipped by cars. People falling asleep at the wheel and crossing over to the far lane. Young people killed. Whole families killed.

The headlines and quotes struggle to capture it:

“Police said the scene inside the car was beyond belief. “

“Debris littered the road.”

“Four young men killed in crash”

“Car spun underneath truck”

Car-nage is the only good word for it.

At Campbelltown, once the furthermost far reaches of European settlement, we turn right onto Narellan Road and then are soon on Camden Valley Way, which is one of the names of the Old Hume Highway here. The outer suburbs are all housing estates but then we reach the Nepean River, which is like a natural border of sorts. I stop the car.

‘What happened here?’ asks Cook.

‘We’re looking at a very historic bridge,’ I tell him. ‘The Stonecutter’s Bridge, formerly known as the Cowpastures Bridge.’ But it isn’t even marked as that. All the signs say is, “Upper Nepean Catchment”.

‘That’s a bit disappointing,’ I tell my two passengers. ‘There’s a real interesting story about this place.’

I wait for one of them to ask me to tell it, but neither does, so I say, ‘Back when the First Fleet landed they had quite a shortage of cattle and livestock. Several sheep were killed by lightning during an early thunderstorm, probably that one during the orgy and riot, and they weren’t having much luck with getting things to grow, so the cattle were worth their weight in gold. Anyway, this one convict, by the name of Cormick – or Corbett in some accounts – was in charge of the eight sacred cows and he let them wander away into the bush one day. He knew he was in trouble, of course, and he took to the bush too. But he didn’t have much luck in living off the land and eventually returned to the settlement where the furious authorities had him hanged.’

‘Was he your ancestor?’ asks Cook.

‘Well I don’t think so. He was dead so he couldn’t sire any children. But he was well hung.’

Neither seems to get the joke. ‘Okay. So then we fast-forward eight years and an expedition of explorers is out charting the country, and when they reach this area here they find the missing cattle, who have now been breeding and have increased their numbers to around 40. They were taken back to the colony and were the start of their cattle stocks and they call this area the Cowpastures. If that convict Cormick hadn’t let them run away they’d have undoubtedly been eaten during the early lean years.’

‘So what happened to the cattle?’ asks Lawson.

‘I guess they were eaten,’ I say. ‘But there were so many more to eat. They could have opened a McDonalds back then and served up beef burgers for everyone.’ I drive over the bridge and into Camden proper. It is also the birthplace of Australia’s wool industry, where ratbag and entrepreneur John Macarthur raised the first merino flocks that later came to dominate the country’s sheep herds. He was an interesting guy, Macarthur, who Governor King described as having “cunning, impudence, and pair of basilisk eyes”. He was perhaps a little too ill-tempered and arrogant and too willing to overthrow the Governor when occasion permitted, and pronounced a lunatic in his last years, but his ruthless self-aggrandisement and opportunism certainly set a trend for Sydney entrepreneurs to follow over the decades.

Camden is a very nice looking little town. We see the Camden Valley Inn is holding a bridal fare. There is also a nice and understated looking McDonalds on the main street. But there are very people out and about. Perhaps they’ve all gone to bed early after a long Australia Day holiday. We are on the opposite side of the highway from Campbelltown now and the place here is so different. Genteel and prosperous spring to mind as suitable adjectives. I can’t image the good folks of Camden ever rioting any February.

From Camden we drive south to Picton, crossing the Razorback, once considered a mighty steep hill, but nothing compared to the creek crossing south of Appin. Back in 1979 when the Old Hume Highway was the only Hume Highway a blockade of trucks occupied the Razorback, stopping the delivery of goods into Sydney to protest against unfair trucking taxes. It was the truck equivalent of a riot, I suppose. The road up the Razorback is slow and long – the sort that would wear out a bicyclist, even if he was in practice for the Tour de France. The other side is steeper and shorter, and it takes us into Picton. It’s another rural community, smaller than Camden but more gorgeous.

Formerly known as Stonequarry, Wilton and Jarvisfield, Picton was not settled until 1822, and several of the buildings here date back to the 19th Century.  The first exploration of the area was by ex-convict John Wilson in 1798, who was the first to sight and describe the koala and lyrebird. Interestingly, the first township at Picton was a private town. This would be a nice place to stop one trip, I’m thinking as Lawson points out the car window and says, ‘Look. The George IV pub. One of the oldest in Australia. I think you should stop and check it out.’

I keep driving. One trip yes, but not this trip. It’s starting to get late and the sun is close to setting. We drive on another 20 kilometres through the small townships of Tahmoor and Bargo. I’d forgotten how scenic the old Hume Highway could be. I haven’t driven through here since I first had my licence. I wonder if the bypassing of these small communities has actually allowed them to flourish, while smaller communities in rural areas have suffered as a result of being bypassed.

And then, suddenly, we are back at the New Hume Highway. Remembrance Drive. Highway 31. Racing along with all the trucks and family cars, zooming past long open pastures and empty fields, like highways the world over. The sun is getting very close to the horizon now and Lawson says he knows a good bridge we can doss down under that’s not too far ahead. I thank him for his thoughts but tell him I’ve got a motel booked for the night.

‘Don’t you mean a hotel?’ he asks.

‘No,’ I say. ‘A motel. It is another Americanism. A hotel for motorists. But really it’s just a hotel without a pub attached to it.’

I see him slump back into his seat in a sulk. Then I say, ‘I had actually been trying to book into a pioneer homestead, to get a sort of feel for things as pioneers might have experienced them. But the place I wanted to stay at was booked out for a quilting festival.’

‘It was probably another human hovel,’ says Lawson.

‘Have you noticed,’ says Cook, ‘that while a lot of these overpass roads have names, not all of them do. Who do you think we need to talk to have some of them named Cook’s Bridge or the like?’

‘I think that last one was actually called Lawson’s Way,’ says Lawson. Cook bends his head back to check. I sigh. All around us are cars full of people. All going somewhere and coming from somewhere and each will have a story. I wish them all safe travelling, and hope that none of them ever have their journeys cut short like the three people in the blue Ford that was crushed on the Menangle Bridge.

‘So where are we staying?’ Cook asks.

‘Somewhere very special,’ I tell him. We drive on for about 20 kilometres and then take the turn off to Mittagong, driving once more on the Old Hume Highway. We pass the monstrous Bunnings store and then I see our motel – the Poplars. I pull off the highway and park the car out front of reception. Cook looks around and asks, ‘So why is this so special?’

‘Well,’ I say, ‘For as long as I’ve been driving the Hume Highway, which is something like 30 years, I’ve been seeing this place here. It used to have a row of tall poplar trees out the front, though I don’t know where they’ve all gone, and I’ve always thought that one day I’ll have to stay here. So it’s sort of a link between the past and the present.’

‘Look, I think there’s a real hotel next door,’ says Lawson, pointing through the trees. ‘And I do believe it has more poplars than this place.’

‘We’re staying here,’ I say and get out of the car. They follow me into the reception where an old lady introduces herself to me as Nola and asks, ‘Just for the one person is it?’ I look at Cook and Lawson leaning over my shoulders and say, ‘Uh – yes. Just for myself.’ I take the key to my unit and then park my car rear towards the door as directed.

The room is small but pleasant. I carry in my few bags and lie down on the bed and switch on the TV, as you do when you get into an empty motel room, to fill the silence and strange spaces. I’m feeling quite tired and not particularly hungry after the afternoon barbeque. Cook and Lawson squeeze in either side of me. ‘Hands up who snores?’ I ask. Both Lawson and Cook put their hands up. Typical.

I go around the dial of the TV and discover why there were no indigenous people making a protest down at Botany Bay today, they’ve been in Canberra – rioting. The story is on almost every channel. A large demonstration to mark the 40th anniversary of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy on the lawns across the road from Old Parliament House turned ugly when people there learned that Prime Minister Julia Gillard, and opposition leader Tony Abbott, were at a restaurant less than 100 metres away, making an Australia Day presentation. A portion of the protestors marched over to the restaurant and surrounded it, banging on the glass and waving Aboriginal flags, and acting like dickheads. The Prime Ministerial security team had to hustle the politicians to safety, with Julia doing a Cinderella as she stumbled and left one shoe behind as she was half-carried into one of the cars. There is a related story of angry young Aborigines going to Parliament House to burn an Australian flag. And of course there is the obligatory outrage.

I watch it over and over and over on different channels and then finally switch the TV off.

‘So what have we learned about Australia today?’ I ask my companions, wondering what their take on the day and the places we’ve visited has been. But both are asleep. So I’m left with the writer’s dilemma of having no one to test my ideas out on but myself – which of course means no one to criticise my ideas as lame when I convince myself how good they are.

But my last thought before going to sleep is to look around for any motel stationery as, following the themes of the today, I just bet this turns out this is a part of the Flag Inn chain.

200 Kilometres. Into the Garden Centre Wilds of the Southern Highlands.

As it turns out only Lawson is a prodigious snorer. Cook’s problem is that he has restless legs, twitching and kicking all night long like he’s on some massive hike that he’s never been able to undertake while at sea. Like most of Australia we sleep in on the day after Australia Day and I’m back at reception, a little bit after the 10am check out. Nola is still at the desk, and so I ask her a few questions about the hotel business and living in Mittagong.

Nola tells me that she is from Horsham in Victoria. She is 67 years old and like elderly caravan park and motel owners across Australia, will still have to work for a few more years before she can even consider retiring. She’s been here at the Poplars for seven years, she says. They had a farm before this, but it went under. They moved to Portland in Victoria and she had to go back to nursing, and then they had a caravan park near Bairnsdale. The permanent residents were difficult there though. When the park fees went up they raised a petition and were always complaining about not being able to afford things, she says, but could always afford to buy a slab of beer at the end of the week.

But motels don’t have regulars, she says. Her and her husband had tried to get a motel closer to Horsham, but it was difficult. They were looking at one in Bendigo but it didn’t work out. But she’s very happy here, she says. They get to meet a lot of people and most of them are very friendly. Except some of the people from North Shore Sydney. They get up her nose because they feel they are so much better.

The location of the motel is good too, she says, it’s the first motel off the highway and just far enough out of Mittagong town that the young yobbos and trouble-makers don’t walk out to it. Other places closer to town have had burglaries, she says. Crime is quite a problem in the nearby townships of Moss Vale and also in Bowral I’m told. There have been murders and rapes there, and they call East Bowral little Beirut. Not that there are Muslims there of course, she says.

Nola also tells me that living in the village community hereabouts is a two-edge sword. It is very friendly and community-minded, but there is a strong anti-progress feeling. Anything that might change that village feel is rejected. But she believes in progress. They were trying to get a McDonald’s put in, but lots of the locals objected to it. Nola also tells me that running a motel suits her as she has an artificial leg, and when she is good she is very good, but when she isn’t she can go and have a sleep in the afternoon.

And finally I ask her about the poplars that used to be out the front of the Poplars Motel and she tells me that most of them had to be cut down. They had grown to over 90 feet tall and were interfering with the electricity lines.

I thank her very much for her time and her story, and I hope that next time I pass through she has retired and returned to Horsham. While there are endless lines of modern gypsies travelling up and down the Hume and other highways of Australia, experiencing the country, there is an army of people like Nola who do not travel, feeding them and providing accommodation as they pass through their towns and villages. For them their experience of the country is the variety of people who they meet and I’ve always found that even a ten minute conversation with a local is worth more than endless snapped photos or photo-shopped tourist brochures can ever provide an insight into.

Likewise, for all our fascination and fixations on the politics and personalities of extremes, the rioters and the outspoken and the historical icons, it is the quiet people like Nola who quietly capture a certain trait of Australianness that celebrities and sportspeople seem to lack.

I drive Lawson and Cook into Mittagong and we pass garden centre after garden centre, making it fairly obvious that the locals in the Southern Highlands put great store in their gardens. I imagine many of them battle all year round to keep their gardens under control as there is thick greenery all around most properties. We pull up outside the scenic tourist information centre and Lawson asks, ‘What’s in here?’ It’s a fair question, because it looks a bit like a garden centre.

‘Something very valuable,’ I tell him. ‘Information!’ The centre is very spacious, with rows and rows of brochures along one side of the room and examples of local produce for sale on the other. Jams and crafts. I amble up to the counter and one of the three ladies there smiles and asks if she can help me. I tell her I’m interested in knowing what’s to see in the area, but also in knowing a little bit about the area. She’s happy to help.

She tells me that it’s been very busy today, although it was quiet the week before, with people getting ready to go back to school and so on. It’s been a very busy summer overall she says, perhaps because it has been raining so often it has hardly been beach weather.

She also tells me that Australia Day in the area is all centred around the nearby village of Berrima. They have market stalls and a parade and also a citizenship ceremony, and they close off the old Hume Highway for it and thousands of people show up. She spreads open a map of the district to show my just how close the small townships are. The Old Hume Highway goes though Mittagong, then veers off and crosses under the New Hume Highway and then crosses back under it again and goes through Berrima before joining the New Hume Highway. But most people who drive through Mittagong continue on to Bowral and then Moss Vale before rejoining the New Hume Highway again. And nearby are the smaller townships of Exeter and Bundanoon and Tallong and Penrose and Wingello.

I tell her that I’ve never visited the smaller townships and ask if they have anything to see. She raises her eyebrows and passes me a brochure. It says “Bundanoon is Brigadoon”. I give her a please explain look and she says that for one day a year Bundanoon hosts a gathering of Scottish clans who do Scottish dancing and throw cabers and all things Scottish.

‘You mean that silly old movie Brigadoon?’ I ask. ‘Where these two guys wonder into this little Scottish village that only appears for one day every hundred years or something, and where everybody sings and dances this idyllic Scottish life and he falls in love and then, something happens and I drop off to sleep on the couch and don’t see how it ends?’

‘That’s it,’ she says. And she tells me that although she’s never seen the film herself she’s been to the festival and it’s a lot of fun. I look at the brochure. It says there will be between 12,000 and 16,000 people descending upon the small town in April to dress in kilts and either celebrate being Scottish or pretend they are Scottish for the weekend, with some 20 pipe bands and Scottish dancing demonstrations as well as caber tossing and haggis hurling. It doesn’t explain whether the haggis hurling is throwing it or throwing it up.

‘But if you’re interested you’ll need to book early,’ she says. ‘Accommodation disappears really quickly.’

I look back to the map of the region and see there is a familiar yellow M marked in the main street of Mittagong. I ask if there was any contention about that and she says it’s been there a long time and is family run, is small and very popular. Although, she adds, it was built on the grounds of a butterfly farm and maze that was a popular tourist attraction and people still come in asking where they could find them.

‘What do you tell them?’ I ask. ‘Would you like fries with that?’

She says she’ll use that next time and then tells me that there had been plans to build a larger McDonald’s in Moss Vale where the Illawarra Highway from Wollongong met the road through the highlands. It would have gotten a lot of traffic, she says, but it was too difficult. There were concerns about the traffic turning on and off the highway and there was also concern about the impact on local take-away businesses.

I then tell her I’m mostly interested in the history of the area and then she leans forward, as if conspiratorially and says that in that case I need to go and check out the new supermarket just up the road. When they were building it they uncovered the ruins of the old iron mines of the town. So they left it there and built over it.

So we drive down the road and go into the underground car park and there, under Aldi and Big W, is the Mittagong equivalent of Pompeii. It is all fenced off, but you can clearly see where each individual room had been and there are story plaques around the fence telling you what you’re looking at. The Fitz Roy Iron Works were the first iron making works in New South Wales at the time, which and been wholly dependent on imported iron and steel from England until then. The Iron Works were built close to iron ore deposits that had been found in 1833 and the works opened in 1848, continuing for just over 30 years until 1869.  Over the next 40 years various attempts to upgrade the works were undertaken, but they proved unsuccessful and the equipment was eventually scrapped from 1910 onwards. One of the plaques, headed “Dreams Shattered” says that the relics on the site are remnants of a grand dream of many pioneering men who “shared a vision: to extract the mineral wealth of iron ore from this land and compete with imported steel products from England”.

Big hooray for early capitalist entrepreneurs and miners. Gina Reinhardt would like the sentiment, although not every Australian might agree with her. It then says:

“The dreams and financial resources of many of the works’ pioneers were shattered when the bank finally foreclosed its loan to the company in 1869. Some of their stories are told in other parts of this site.”

Big boo to the banks. Gina Reinhardt would probably like that sentiment too and most every Australian (at least those who don’t work in a bank) would probably agree with her. The final paragraph says that the Fitz Roy Works left a legacy to the community, creating the 100 acre village of New Sheffield that was later renamed Mittagong.

I watch the local shoppers all rush past, either over-familiar with it all, or more interested in their consumer goods and supporting modern capitalist entrepreneurs and their bank accounts than stories of the past. And that makes me think of the two old-timers sitting in my car. I suppose they worry about becoming something like that, chained off and left in a dark basement somewhere for the occasional interested passer-by. Institutionalised history that people largely ignore.

The “village lifestyle” of the small towns of the Southern Highlands is something that many people pay a lot of money for, while others with not much money just call it “life”. But I’m not really sure if they are villages, or should be called townships, or some new word for places like this that allow for rural living within a commute of Sydney that are sort of suburbs, but sort of not. The property pages of the Highland Post advertises a surprising number of properties at over a million dollars with adjectives like “formal living”, “beautifully sited”, “spectacular panoramic rural views”, “total privacy and seclusion” and “the look, the lifestyle and the location”.

Almost the first thing you see when you drive into Bowral, the next township or village to the south, is the town’s war memorial. And nearly every small town in Australia has a war memorial. Indeed there are over 4000 of them across the country, largely built in the years after World War One, and names of the dead of that war, listed out on memorials all over the country, still outranks all those dead of other wars since. One in five soldiers who went overseas to fight in world War One died there. Yet only two of the bodies were ever returned to Australia – both now being in Canberra. The first was Major-General Sir William Throsby Bridges, commander of the first division of the Australian Imperial Forces who was buried there in 1915, and the other was the body of the unknown soldier, entombed in the War Memorial in 1993. So for almost all Australians who lost loved ones in that most horrible of wars, the local war memorial with the names of the dead upon it was the closest they were ever going to get to having a grave to mourn at. And across Australia local communities raised money for statues of diggers, and plinths and columns and cenotaphs and arches and crosses and towers and obelisks – capturing a sense of duty and grief and loss and almost 60,000 dead Australians.

Bowral’s war memorial is an obelisk-type column that Cook would be proud of, mounted above a two-tier square base that stands higher than a person, with names in gold letters of the dead on all sides. That so many served and “died leaving an example of noble courage and devotion to duty” from a small community is quite astounding and very touching. But of course it is something that is repeated again and again right across the country.

Yet Bowral has something else too. Just in front of the war memorial is another memorial. A wall of plaques, each with a story about some local identity. It is a peace memorial of sorts, that I hope will still be there over 100 years later when people stop on their travels to learn something about the past of the township. They’ll read for instance that in 1923 Hector Lamond Senior established Bowral’s last family-owned newspaper, the Four Mails, so called because it combined four local newspapers. It was taken over by his son Hector junior and ran until 1960. Or they might read of Arthur Upfield, the detective writer, who moved to Bowral in 1957 to spend his last years there until his death in 1964. Or there is the story of Arthur, Charles and Ray Baker who came to Bowral in 1921, initially living in a tent, and who went on to make the first bricks in the area, until the Depression cut their successes short. Plaque after plaque tells the story of an identity who made a difference of some sort to the community. Most are also stories of noble courage and devotion to duty. I stand there before the memorial for some time, thinking of these people from the past and what they must have been like. What a rare privilege it would be to meet them. Then I look at Cook and Lawson sitting in my car and wonder if my expectations would be disappointed in real life.

I climb back into the car, open the map that the lady at the information centre gave me and look at it. ‘Where to next?’ Cook asks.

‘Our sporting past,’ I tell him. We drive around a few streets following the signs towards the Bradman Museum. I’d remembered a small building like a cricket pavilion at a local oval, but big money has appeared and done it up. I’m now standing in front of the International Cricket Hall of Fame with a glass and metal exterior. ‘Wow!’ I say, but Lawson and Cook profess little interest in cricket and decide to stay in the car. Probably thingy about the way the past is being replaced by the present, I presume.

I wander in and there’s this tall beefy athletic guy in his sports gear at the ticket booth. ‘Gidday,’ he says. ‘One please,’ I say in return. He takes my money and gives me a ticket. ‘Enjoy the experience!’ he says.

I turn and amble into the exhibition spaces, following two tall young guys. I’m soon watching them more carefully than I’m watching the exhibitions. They are like two old diggers at the War Memorial. They point at old photos and awe at the rankings of international cricketers and stand in front of the large photo of the legendary 1948 Australian cricket team, the Invincibles, to photograph themselves. Directly opposite this photo is another life-sized photo of a kids’ cricket team, made up of boys and girls and a mix of races. Nice touch, I think.

I follow the two awe-struck guys into the next section, where there, behind glass, is a lump of wood that says it is a cricket bat from 1750. Cook would have played with it when he was a young lad like these, I think.

I walk into the next room and there is a dad and his young son, standing in front of an exhibit and the dad is explaining to his son the intricacies of different bowling types. The kid is nodding his head in eager fascination, clearly as happy as being a part of this with his dad as seeing all the cricket things. There is another wall with information on the first Australian cricket team to tour England, that was actually an all-Aboriginal team, in 1868.

I keep moving through and go into a small theatre that is playing footage of the Bodyline test series of 1932-33 when the British adopted a style of bowling called Leg Theory – which the Australians called Bodyline, since it meant throwing the ball at the player. The news clips make it out as if it was a military invasion of Australia with lines like, “only the police presence prevented a riot”.

And then I wander into the Bradman Experience – which is a room dedicated to Bradman that was clearly the original part of the museum before the International Cricket Hall of Fame was built around it. There is everything Bradman you’d like to know. Pictures of the young 19-year-old in his first Sheffield Shield match. Newspaper placards of the time, extolling “Bradman Versus England”. And all the Bradman statistics you could ever learn, like his 29 centuries in 52 matches, with a total of 6,996 test runs, and his famous average of 99.94 runs. And all over he’s extolled as the “boy from Bowral” – even though he was actually born at Cootamundra, in northern New South Wales. My favourite bit of this experience though is in a corner. There’s a bit of a rainwater tank and stump and ping pong ball where young kids can try and emulate the Don’s practice technique as a kid, bouncing the ball off the tank and hitting it repeatedly with the thin stump. The few kids I see giving it a try don’t look like they’re going to have any museums built for them any time soon.

I leave the Don’s room and the silent adoration of the old timers in there, gathered solemnly like they are before the tomb of the unknown soldier, and move into a whole other part of the museum. Suddenly it really does become the International Cricket Hall of Fame – like somebody visited the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland and brought back some great ideas. There are huge posters and open spaces and large TV monitors up near the raised ceiling playing excerpts from some of the great and famous cricket matches. There are news clips about the introduction of One Day Cricket, and coverage of cricket betting scandals. And yes, there is a Hall of Fame section that gives statistics of cricketers of renown and the dates they were inducted.

I can see some of the guys about my age standing there turning their heads back and forward like they’re at a rock concert, mouths agape, reliving the memories of the events, in awe or respect or fascination or something. The first half was a museum, but this bit really is an Experience.

I stop at the desk on the way out, passing by all the cricket merchandise, and the guy asks me if I enjoyed it. I tell him I did. He nods his head knowingly, as if there’s no other answer possible to give. He then tells me that the revamped museum has only been open in sections for a year or less and so many people who visit are coming here for the first time. He says that most people who come are families, or seniors who come for the Bradman Experience. Kids really enjoy the modern museum with the touch screen and so on he says. Then he segues straight into cricket and laments that the rainy summer has meant they’ve lost about a third of the cricket season that we’ll never get back.

I seem to not be mourning this fact enough and he asks me, ‘But you’re a cricket fan, right?’

How do I tell him no? I say I’m an occasional fan, and he laughs and says the bit he loves most in his job is the wives who are dragged in by their husband who tell him they don’t like cricket, but come out the other end of the exhibition and say they really enjoyed it and that it gave them a new understanding. He doesn’t explain if that is a new understanding of cricket or of their husbands.

‘All Australians love this sport, right?’ he says. ‘It is a lot about the Australian identity.’

It’s certainly a part of it. I thank him and go back to the car. There’s a new person sitting in the back seat with Lawson and Cook. ‘Hello,’ I say cautiously.

He doffs his hat and Lawson introduces him. ‘This is the Don,’ he says. ‘But you can call him Don. He’s looking for a lift to Canberra.’

‘The Don?’ I ask. He nods his head and doffs his hat again. ‘As in Donald Bradman.’

He sighs. ‘Yes. That’s me. Or that was me.’

‘Uh – isn’t this your museum?’ I ask. ‘Isn’t this a monument to you?’

‘Do you see the name Bradman Museum or do you see the name International Cricket Hall of Fame?’ he asks me.

I get it. Another part of the past disappearing like Brigadoon. There one day and gone the next. The quiet adulation and newspaper clippings replaced by touch screens and huge video monitors.

‘Okay. All aboard,’ I say and hop into the car. It’s time for a bit more back story. Hume and Hovell arrived at Mittagong on Wednesday 6 October, 1824, a day they described as “sultry” and they reached the Bong Bong River by the end of the day, and camped on its banks. By my best estimates, that’s what we now call the Wingecarribee River, between Bowral and Moss Vale. And of particular note, when they set off on Thursday 7 October they had to find a blacksmith to fix their carts. Dr Bland described it in his normal bland text as:

“Had not proceeded more than five miles, when, the carts requiring some repairs, they availed themselves of the assistance of a blacksmith living in the neighbourhood for that purpose, and stop during this short detention at the house of Mr. James Atkinson, with whom they breakfast.”

I hope we don’t repeat their ‘detention’, because as unlikely as it was to find a blacksmith in the area at the time of their journey it will probably be just as difficult for us to find a garage willing to do repair work without a booking.

We drive on to Moss Vale. It is still overcast with no sign of rain yet, though it keeps threatening to rain on us. I might even to be tempted to call it “sultry” too. The road takes us over the Wingecarribee River via the Bong Bong Bridge and then up the Bong Bong Hill into Moss Vale where a sign tells me the town was established in 1863 and another tells me that the Moss Vale show will be from 16-18 March. There are more walls and hedges around the properties here. Clearly the locals are more introverted here and less interested in flaunting their wealth than in the other Southern Highland townships.

On the outskirts of town there are some old empty small factories and shops. One of these was the site for the proposed McDonald’s. We pass some little stone and brick cottages. A Mission Australia office. A little pub. Saint Vinnies. There are car yards and the small take-away shops that would have suffered if the McDonald’s was built and there are old houses under corrugated iron roofs. Moss Vale has the prettiest name of the southern highland townships, but it is not the prettiest of them. There are more empty shops. More welfare places. More sagging tracky dacks on the few women walking along the street. There are a few notable exceptions to this, of course. Peppers Resort – where I once stayed – is hidden on the other side of town, and grand old house and yards that hosts conferences or wealthy tourists.

I stop by the railway station and the park on the main street. I have a distant memory that there is a war memorial plaque here. But when I walk along the fence and look I see there isn’t. There is a short history of Moss Vale on placards though. Memories of war memorials in small towns seem so strong you can remember then even when they’re not there. The plaque says that the town of Moss Vale stands at the junction of three large land grants that were made by Governor Lachlan Macquarie in 1820 to Dr Charles Throsby, John Waite and William Hutchinson. The township was established after the arrival of the Great Southern Railway in 1863, on a sub-division of Throsby’s land. The town was named for Jemmy Moss, an ex-convict who worked for the Throsby family and lived in a small hut on what is now Spring Street. When the railway station opened in 1867 there was also a shop, post office and hotel. Moss Vale soon became the centre of commerce, farming and grazing in the Southern Highlands and by the 1870s it began to receive its first tourists, escaping the heat of Sydney summers.

There is no mention of the indigenous Dharawal people who were largely all driven off the land or killed, also by the 1870s.

Hume and Hovel went to visit a nearby farm while having their cart fixed and had breakfast with one Mr Atkinson, and Hovell opined his property was “one of the best Farms I have seen in the colony the soil good, and command a most beautiful view of the Country around”. He should have considered a career writing real estate copy.

I hop back into the car and say, ‘Okay. Next stop is Berrima.’ Cook has the map again, and as I drive on a little he says, ‘We turn right here.’ I follow his directions and we end up in a part of town I’ve never been through. There are some old fibro houses and I see an old man stooped over his letter box, like he’s searching for a letter that he’s been waiting ten years for. There is a For Sale sign on his house. What is his life like, I wonder, and why is he selling? Is he too old to stay there? Is he moving north like so many retirees? And why are we driving around in circles?

‘Didn’t you say something about the towns here being full of wealthy people?’ Lawson says.

‘Well, clearly they are not all wealthy.’ I suppose it’s healthy to have my biases challenged. At least every now and then.

Cook finds the right road eventually as the rain starts to spit on us just a little, and then has a rest from it. Berrima is about ten kilometres away, near the new Hume Highway via an underpass that takes us back to the Old Hume Highway again. Coming into town, the obligatory sign tells me that Berrima was established in 1831. Hamilton Hume and his brother John had explored the region in 1814, and the New South Wales surveyor-general Thomas Mitchell chose Berrima as the site for the major town between Sydney and Goulburn, with ambitions that it become a commercial and manufacturing centre, rather than the quiet village it now is.

I’ve always liked Berrima, and no matter how many times I’ve stopped here I’ve found something new. For many, Berrima is a long line of tourist souvenir and craft shops that have managed to survive despite being bypassed. But there is a wonderful park with some of the tallest evergreens you’d find in the area. And an old church where friends were married. And a museum and the old Gaol, only recently closed down. And just up the road a few kilometres is a marvellous book barn where I have spent many hours browsing the many thousand second-hand books. I’m tempted to go there again, but I don’t want Cook and Lawson trawling the shelves for hours trying to find who has the most books on themselves there. Berrima also has very fine pub, and Lawson is quick to see it.

‘Look,’ he says, reading the sign over the front verandah. ‘The oldest continually licensed pub within four walls in New South Wales! That’s historic.’

It’s a bit like being the Tidiest Town with a population between of 20,000 and 25,000 west of the Blue Mountains, and north of Orange, and with a name with over eight letters in it that has no double consonants, I think, but I agree. ‘Yes. That’s historic,’ I say.

We park out the front of the Surveyor Hotel and amble in. The pub part of the hotel is very tiny, and was undoubtedly the original pub’s four walls as referred to. Next to it is a room with cordoned off poker machines and pinball machines. I lead Lawson and Cook through into the Bushranger Bistro, which is very large. There are wooden bench tables and windows looking out onto a garden. On the walls are charge sheets of nineteenth century convicts, perhaps from the gaol next door. There are also posters of bushrangers. I walk around and look at them. One says that the bushranger Captain Thunderbolt was shot dead at Uralla by Constable Walker in 1870 and that Walker’s dad owned a pub in Berrima.

Another tells me that in 1839 it was reported that there were more hold-ups and robberies in the Berrima district than any other place its size in the colony. Things hadn’t improved much by the 1860s, when Ben Hall and his gang roamed the district and at one time they rounded up all the people at the tiny village of Paddy’s River and forced them into the local hotel. There they held a dance until daylight, boasting to them how they intended to release all the prisoners at the Berrima Gaol.

We have a quick bite to eat and then I say, ‘Time to visit the past.’ Cook and the Don say they’ll join me, but Lawson says he’s had enough of the past and would rather stay at the pub and have a drink. He then asks me to lend him some money. ‘Just for one,’ I tell him and give him a few dollars. He wanders off to the bar and we go out and walk around the corner to the old Museum. There are puddles on the ground from the recent rains and a pleasant smell of greenery and flowers.

The Museum is housed in a small building set back from the road. The gent who invites me in introduces himself as Bob Williams, and his wife Gloria at the desk says, ‘Just for one?’ I look at the Don and Cook and say, ‘Uh – yes. Just one.’ She takes my admission fee. While they sort out my change I look around and see the museum won a Southern Highlands Business Award for Excellence in 2008, an iMAGine (inspiring museums and galleries in excellence) Award in 2009, and in 2010 Bob and Gloria were awarded Heritage Heroes awards. I’m impressed.

Bob leads me into the Museum, past some exhibits on early Berrima and then proudly shows me the exhibition on Prisoners in Arcady, the story of the German internees in Berrima during World War One. It’s a fascinating tale. The old Gaol was put back into commission to house German “internees”, when people were locked up just for being German. And unlike the overcrowded and ghastly internment camp at Holsworthy in Liverpool, Berrima became something of a holiday village by comparison. The internees had a lot of freedom, being allowed to wander up to two miles away from the Gaol during the day, and as the majority of them were merchantmen who spoke some English, they tended to be on good terms with the locals of Berrima, shopping at their stores and helping out with fighting bushfires and so on.

Over time the 300 or so Germans built little villas, or huts, along the banks of the Wingecarribee River that flows through town. They even erected a dam to increase the river’s size and they also built substantial gardens and boats. An interesting result of the growth in gardens was that after being let out of their cells for the day and after roll call, many of them would race off into the bush or paddocks to try and find turds as manure for their gardens was in short supply.

Some of the internees were even able to bring their wives and families to live nearby. Eight children were born to German families during the war. For entertainment the men organised gymnastics, wrestling and swimming clubs as well as a theatre company, with the men dressing up in women’s clothes to play the female parts. There are marvellous film clips and still shots of the internees out on the river in their boats, waving at the cameras, or milling around on the small verandas of their huts. At one time they held a regatta and made fancy boats that included a paddle-steamer, a zeppelin and even a mock submarine with a canon on its deck.

Bob tells me that a documentary about the Berrima internment camp was made during World War One to show how well we were treating internees, but it had to be dropped from being shown in public as there were concerns it would be seen as being too soft on German prisoners and would be create some outrage.

Indeed, while many people from the nearby region used to regularly visit to see the German boats and huts, some others came to make trouble, more interested in demolishing what the Germans had built. In the end the authorities erected large fences around 17 or so acres that the internees had use of.

The make-up of the camp changed a little when seven prisoners of war from the German cruiser Emden, sunk by the HMAS Sydney, were imprisoned there. There were a few escape attempts from Berrima, none of them very successful though – with one pair getting as far as Orange before a confidence trickster stole their money and when they attempted to report it to police they were identified as the escaped internees.

One of the 25 guards who would be rotated through at a time, Lieutenant Edmond Samuels, wrote of the class distinctions that stayed with the Germans:

“It was told me by an internee who was a fourth officer on a ship, and whose captain is also interned here, that during the three years of their internment, not more than a total of a few hours’ conversation has taken place between them. It is not considered desirable by them, even under these prison camp condition, to alter their training as regards social difference, unless a captain of a ship is addressed first by, say, a junior previously under his command, no conversation would take place.”

Bob tells me that while the prison was built for 100, it housed over 320 Germans, so conditions could sometimes be crowded and day-to-day activities in the camp were run by a committee of internees, who tended to use ship-bound procedures. Bob then shows me the remains of a wooden dugout boat that was found on the banks of the Wingecarribee River in 1978 by a noxious weeds inspector. It was identified from photographs of the time as the vessel Störtebeker, which had been built by internees and at one time had sails mounted on it. It sits there like an ancient dugout canoe from an era more ancient than only 100 years ago.

After the war had ended the internees had to wait until mid-1919 before being released, after Germany had finally signed a peace treaty. The internees then sank their boats and took their huts apart, leaving only the photographs, film and memories.

Bob then tells me that the gaol has been a central piece of Berrima life for many, many years, and it only closed in late 2011, which put an end to its claim as the oldest Australian “correctional facility” in operation. It used to house male prisoners some years back, he said, and they were able to get prisoners to help out on things around town, but then in 2001 it became a medium-security women’s prison and then it was no longer possible. Some of the women were pretty rough and difficult to let out for any reason, he said.

I bid farewell to Bob and Gloria and tell them I’m honoured to have met real Heritage Heroes and then with Cook and the Don we go back up the hill, past the Surveyor Inn and the very well-kept garden of the two-storey stone Governor’s residence, to visit the Court House Museum. It is a classical sandstone building with four Greek columns out the front, clearly designed to intimidate felons of the day. We go in and are met by a middle-aged couple working in the little shop foyer of the museum, who don’t introduce themselves, and look like they’ve had a very big day yesterday. I ask them how the local Australia Day celebrations were. They tell me it was a great day. There were thousands of people there and they’ve only just finished cleaning it all up that morning. They also tell me that they had a lot of people through the museum.

They’re very proud of the museum, clearly, and I ask them what is going to become of the gaol next door now that it’s closed. They’re hoping to get some money from the government to extend their museum to include the gaol they say, but they don’t know what’s being planned for it.

‘Berrima was a gaol to be feared,’ I’m told. It was very harsh and the prisoners were kept in solitary confinement for much of the time. I then ask them if the bypassing of Berrima by the New Hume Highway has had much of a negative impact on the town. ‘It was the bypassing by the railroad that had the most impact,’ he tells me.

‘How’s that?’ I ask.

It seems that Berrima used to be the main township here abouts because it had the easiest ford for the river and back in the day when cargo was hauled by bullocks and passengers in horse-drawn coaches. They’d all stop at Berrima and there was a long line of pubs up and down the street. And then the court house and gaol were built here as an administrative centre. It was very prosperous.

But then the railway started being built, and while Berrima was very well located for oxen carts and horses it was not so good for the railway because of the hills and valleys around and so it was built further to the east. That was in 1867. The railway line went to Mittagong, Bowral and Moss Vale, and Berrima became a backwater.

The only courthouse in the southern highlands is now in Moss Vale, they tell me. Then they ask if I’m interested in going into the exhibition. ‘Just the one?’ they ask me. I look at Cook and the Don and say, ‘Yes, just the one.’

We are taken down to a small theatrette to watch a short film on the Berrima district, which is not quite as good as hearing the story from the locals, but is still not bad. We learn that the gaol opened in 1834 based on the panopticon design, where a single gaoler could sit in the centre of a circle, facing the cells, and keep his eye on many prisoners at once. I’ve always liked the analogy of a reverse panopticon to describe how we all have such different values and perspectives to each other. The idea is that we are all sitting in little cells only able to see a single view of the watcher’s tower in the centre and unable to envision or imagine that those in different cells might have a different view from us. So we rant at each other that our singular view of politics or economics or climate change or whatever is the only possibly right one as it is the only one we can see.

The film also asserts that the gaol had a reputation for harshness, with underground solitary confinement and condemned cells, although only five people were ever recorded as being hanged at Berrima Gaol, but that included Australia’s worst serial killer, John Lynch. He was executed in 1842 for the murder of nine persons, most of whom had lived in the district, including a couple with two children, whose farm he took over after burying the bodies.

His reign of murder finally came to an end early in 1841 when a drover found the remains of one of his victims, Kearns Landregan, half buried in brush near a bridge. Police noted that the man’s head had been bashed in. He had last been seen having dinner at a nearby inn with a local farmer named Dunleavy. Upon further investigation, two important facts were discovered, firstly that Dunleavy ran a nearby farm that once been the property of the Mulligan family – who mysteriously sold it to Dunleavy and left the district without telling anyone. And secondly that Dunleavy was actually John Lynch.

Despite strong evidence against him, Lynch continued to maintain his innocence with a complete belief that he would soon be freed. But evidence continued to mount against him, including the fact that he had previously been tried as a bushranger and incriminated in a murder, but had escaped the charge. It was not until he was found guilty of murder that he finally admitted to his other crimes, and shocked righteous members of society by stating that he had committed murder and robbery under the watching and approving eye of God.

His first two murders were committed on the razorback range near Picton. He killed a farm-hand named Ireland and his Aboriginal boy helper, and stole their bullock wagon of produce and sold it in Sydney. Then on the return trip he murdered a Mr Frazer and his son near the same location, also stealing their wagon and supplies.

Under “God’s watchful eye” he avoided police and next went to the property of John Mulligan, an old colleague from his days as a bushranger, who he believed owed him money for stolen goods. He demanded payment and when he was refused, he first lured their young son into the bush and murdered him, then he murdered John Mulligan and his wife. And finally after raping the 14-year-old daughter, he killed her too. He dragged the four bodies into the bush and set them alight atop a huge pyre. "They burnt like bags of fat," he stated.

He then decided to stay on the property, and forged letters stating that the Mulligans had sold everything to one John Dunleavy. He then settled down to the life of a squire farmer, hiring workers and living the good life. One potential worker he met was Kearns Landregan, but when he learned he was in trouble with the law for receiving stolen goods, he decided to murder him – even though the two men had been seen in each other’s company by many people.

The Judge presiding over Lynch’s murder case in 1842 said:

"John Lynch, the trade in blood which has so long marked your career is at last terminated, not by any sense of remorse, or the sating of any appetite for slaughter on your part, but by the energy of a few zealous spirits, roused into activity by the frightful picture of atrocity which the last tragic passage of your worthless life exhibits. It is now credibly believed, if not actually ascertained, that no less than eight other individuals have fallen by your hands. How many more have been violently ushered into the next world remains undiscovered, save it in the dark pages of your memory.”

Despite statements that his horrific crimes shook the entire colony and ensured his place of infamy in the annals of Australian history, I have to admit I’ve never heard of him.

After the film has ended we are led into the museum. The first rooms have information on the First Fleet and curios of the convict era, but it doesn’t get really interesting until we’re led into the old Court Room. There are mannequins of a jury in a jury box, and of a rather rough-looking man and woman in the witness box. There is a sheet of glass where the judge would sit and after pressing a button an image is projected onto the glass of the judge, and a voice comes booming out over the speakers, telling us the story of the murder of Henry Dunkley of Gunning, by his wife, Lucretia Dunkley, the only woman ever hanged at Berrima. She and her lover, Martin Beech, a convict worker on the Dunkley’s property, stand together in the dock looking pitiful and as aghast as a mannequin facing a death sentence can look. The judge admonishes the two for their heinous act and sentences them to death. They went out together though, being were executed on the same day in October 1843.

The Australasian Chronicle of 9 September 1843 described their appearance in court as:

“On Tuesday last, Martin Beech and Lucretia Dunkley, both of Goulburn, were indicted for the wilful murder of Henry Dunkley, the husband of the female prisoner, at Gunning, on the 13th September, 1842. The facts of this revolting murder will be in the recollection of our readers, the male prisoner having conspired with the wife, his paramour, to murder the unfortunate deceased, which they effected by dispatching their victim with an axe after he had retired to bed on the fatal night. The demeanour of the prisoners, during the course of the trial, exhibited a most fearful degree of hardihood, the female indulging in the most violent invectives against the principal witness; and even when the instrument of destruction was produced in evidence, together with the bloody garments of their victim, and the bed saturated with gore, she laughed outright upon allusions being made to the criminal intimacy existing between herself and her accomplice.”

At the back of the court room, behind a wooden partition are racks and boxes of clothes so visitors can dress up to get into the mood of things. I pull on a pair of breeches and put on an ill-fitting jacket and am about to suggest to Cook that he dress up to – but of course he’s already dressed up in trappings of the past.

There is even a special Ghost Tour of the court house advertised that boasts a two hour tour led by a psychic medium from the Australian College of Mediumship to “help you to communicate with Spirit in a variety of ways, from using some of their investigative equipment to experiencing psychic phenomena, so you may experience for yourself what lies beyond the realm of the living”. I wonder what the mediums would make of Cook and Lawson and Bradman. If my book isn’t a success I could always come back here and rent out the three of them.

We go back to the pub to see how Lawson has been getting on at borrowing money for a drink. We find him in that small bar room sitting next to a scruffy young man. ‘Who is our new companion?’ Cook asks him.

‘This is Graham Bennett,’ says Lawson. ‘He says he needs a lift to Gundagai and that it’s really important, and I said we’d take him.’

‘Splendid,’ says Cook.

‘Are you a cricket fan?’ asks the Don.

‘I love cricket,’ the young man says.

‘Well it’s settled then,’ says the Don.

‘Don’t I get a say in this?’ I ask. ‘After all it’s my car, isn’t it?’

Henry waves his hand dismissively and then leans in close to my ear. ‘He’s one of Moonlite’s boys.’

‘Who?’ I ask him.

‘Captain Moonlite,’ he says. ‘You must know the story. Bushranger. Led a gang of boys. There was a shoot out with police at Wantabadgery. It all ended in tragedy. Young Bennett here was sentenced to imprisonment at Berrima. But he wants to be at Gundagai where Moonlite and another of the boys is buried.’

‘Of course,’ I say and wonder if the psychic tour guides will miss him when he’s gone. So we squeeze into the car and set off out of Berrima and back to the Hume Highway.

‘Where to next?’ asks Lawson. ‘I think I’ll have worked up a thirst by the time we get there.’

I laugh. ‘You won’t get a drink where we’re going,’ I say. ‘Unless its altar wine.’

‘Where’s that?’ he asks.

‘A monastery.’

We drive along the New Hume Highway for about 20 kilometres, and then I turn off onto Hanging Rock Road. Tall stringy trees grow close to the roadside here and after a couple of hundred metres we see two stone lions guarding the entrance to the Penrose Park Monastery. I look up into the rear view mirror and see by the looks on my passenger’s faces that it’s probably been quite a few years since most of them set foot into a church or the like. But to tell the truth, neither have I.

We drive up the monastery’s drive way, past the tall monastery building to the left and follow the road along to a parking lot. It is totally empty, with not even a single monk in sight to ask what Australia Day here was like, though there are signs that there had been plenty of people here recently. Full bins and car tracks in the dirt.

‘There’s nobody here,’ says Lawson, stating the obvious.

‘There is now,’ I say. I climb out of the car and urge the others to follow. There is a goat and a sheep tethered nearby. That’s clearly a Catholic visual joke, I think, separating the sheep from the goats.

At the edge of the large empty paddock that serves as a car park the neatly tended lawns of the monastery revert to bushland behind a fence. But that’s an illusion that is shattered as soon as you step to the other side and past the sign that says, “No cars. No noise. Sacred place.” There are trees and shrubs, but scattered all around are what first looks like little cubby houses, but upon closer inspection are small chapels or shrines. We walk around and look at them and I am immediately reminded of one of those miniature villages that has famous buildings from all over the world, as there are many different nationality designs here. Up closer though each is a shrine with a religious altar or devotional place and each seems dedicated to a different saint from a different country. Polish and Italian and Indonesian and Philippine. There are over 40 of these little chapels, and then I’m thinking this is a Catholic version of Disneyland’s It’s a Small World – a religious theme park.

We walk around the shrines where people have been laying flowers and then follow the path further into the bush. The stations of the cross are marked out on gum trees, with crosses and solar powered lights over them. We follow the path of divine light and it loops around and comes out at the grotto of the Shrine of Our Lady of Mercy.

Cook and Lawson and Bennett and the Don are looking a little bemused. There is a rock cliff face in front of us that has wooden benches and an altar before it. To the left is a sign that says “Jesus’ tomb”. I can’t resist that so I look inside. It makes me jump a little. There is a large carving of Jesus inside the rock cave. It’s a bit spooky, to tell the truth. I come back out and cross to the far side of the altar where there is a path that leads up to the cliff face above where there is a railed off grotto, or under hang, with statues of Mary and vases of flowers and rosary beads hanging from pegs in the rock. Plaques tell the story of Lourdes in France, and it is apparent that people come up the slope to press against the rail and pray for miracles here as well.

As I walk back down the curved steps I notice that there are three large crosses set on the slope above me. They have standing platforms and ropes on the horizontal beams so that people can hang there. I’m sure that when this place is full of pilgrims everything here seems perfectly normal.

Yesterday was an Australia Day service – which would have been another type of celebration of another type of Australian identity. And I must say that it’s a very calming feeling to be standing here, even though we are completely out of context. The others can feel something too, it seems, and are keeping quiet and being respectful. Henry is the first to notice the lone old woman sitting there by one the gum trees and he narrows his eyes and says to Cook. ‘I think I know her.’

‘Hello Henry,’ she says. He slaps his forehead and groans. ‘Caroline Chisholm!’ he says. She gets up and walks over to him and straightens his coat and says, ‘It’s been a long time.’

‘Not long enough,’ he mutters. I have an idea where this is going to go, but I wait until she’s had a bit of a talk with him and he leads her over and introduces her and says, ‘She needs a lift to Melbourne.’

‘We’re a bit crowded,’ I say.

‘Nonsense,’ she says. ‘There’s always room for one more. It’s very nice of you to give me a lift, of course, but there’s something we need to do first.’ And she walks off up that curved path and steals a large bunch of flowers from the grotto. Then she says, ‘Well, what are you all waiting for?’

We squash into the car, Caroline in the front seat and the four guys in the back. She looks over the four men and says, ‘You’d be James Cook of Lancashire.’ He nods his head. Then she turns to the Don. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know you,’ she says.

‘Donald Bradman,’ he says. She smiles and says hello. The name clearly doesn’t mean anything to her and I can see he’s miffed because of it.

‘And who is this young man?’ she asks, looking at Graham Bennett, who looks down at his feet.

‘This fine young man is Graham Bennett,’ says Lawson.

‘Hmm,’ she says. ‘What’s your attitude to women? I hope you’ve never treated any of them ill.’ He grows a little red in the face.

‘I never really knew any to treat ill,’ he mumbles.

‘Hmm,’ she says again. ‘Young men need a strong guiding hand to keep them on the straight and narrow path.’

‘A lay preacher was my guide,’ he tells her.

She smiles at that. ‘He’s one of Moonlite’s boys,’ says Lawson.

‘Moonlite!’ says Caroline. ‘That rogue! Leading young men into a life of crime and moral turpitude.’ She frowns at him and he looks down at his feet again.

‘Don Bradman the cricketer,’ says the Don.

We drive off and Caroline directs me like she is a satellite navigation system with a bossy voice. ‘Turn left. Go slower.’ When we reach the highway she indicates I should turn left.

‘Melbourne is to the right,’ I say.

‘There’s something we need to do first,’ she says. ‘It’s not far.’ I consider protesting, but think it would probably be pointless. There is something about thick-set middle-aged bossy women that I have always found just impossible to refuse. We drive back about 15 kilometres and she says, ‘Left here.’

I read the turn off sign and say, ‘Oh no.’

‘Oh yes,’ she says.

There is a VC rest area at the turn off and I pull into it. ‘No way!’ I tell her.

‘No way what?’ asks the Don.

‘I’m not going in there.’

Caroline folds her arms. ‘Go and read that sign there,’ she instructs me. ‘Read what Private James Gordon did.’

I sigh and climb out of the car. Along the Hume Highway to past Goulburn and then along the Federal Highway in Canberra, makes up Remembrance Drive, which has 26 roadside rest areas named after Victoria Cross winners. This one is Gordon VC rest area, and on the tall placard I read that he single-handedly attacked an enemy machine gun nest in Syria in 1941, saving the lives of many of his comrades who were pinned down by its fire. I sigh again. I know just what she’s doing, but still can’t really prevent myself from agreeing that I need to prove that I’m willing to try and be somewhat more courageous as well, when confronting something I’d rather not to.

I walk back to the car. ‘Okay, let’s do it!’ I say.

‘What exactly are we doing?’ asks Lawson.

‘Taking a glimpse into the heart of darkness,’ I tell him.

We drive along the road for a few hundred metres and there is the sign proclaiming the entrance to the Belanglo State Forest. As soon as we enter the forest reserve I feel a chill run up my spine and a strong desire to turn around and flee. It is largely a stringy pine plantation with dirt roads here and there. ‘Turn right,’ Caroline Chisholm says after a bit, and I follow her directions. We go down increasingly rocky dirt roads that become little more than fire trails. I slow the car to a crawl and try not to get stuck in mud patches, nor to try and drive over rocks that will bash the bottom of the car.

‘We should really have a four-wheel drive for this,’ I say. Caroline says, ‘Your car has four wheels and it drives, doesn’t it?’

Clearly there is no point in debating things with her. The forest gets spookier and spookier, with thin trees looking uncannily to me like those in the Blair Witch Project, and I feel the forest turning into handycam black and white scenery about me. I hope to hell we don’t get stuck here. I don’t fancy the idea. Like I don’t fancy the idea of being stuck in the passenger seat of a large four-wheel drive that is bashing its way over the ruts and mud holes, with a gun or knife held towards me and a large man smiling evilly in a chilling macabre pleasure.

‘Now just drive along this track to the end,’ Caroline says. But it’s easier said than done. There are some steep sections that I can’t easily negotiate and some ruts that are desperate in their depth. Finally we reach the end of the road at a T-junction. It turns back into the plantation to our left, and goes through a fence on our right into bushland that is not plantation.

‘Just here,’ says Caroline, and I pull up and she climbs out of the car. I can see what she’s led us to now. There is a rock with a plaque on it in front of us and next to it a small wooden cross with flowers about them all. You could almost think it was just another historical marker, but I know what’s going to be on the plaque. The names of seven young people: Caroline Clarke, Deborah Everist, James Gibson, Anja Habschied, Gabor Neugebauer, Simone Schmidl and Joanne Walters. And above them is the inscription, “This plaque commemorates the memory of the following persons whose remains were found in the Belanglo Forest during 1992 and 1993.

The wooden cross to the side has a single name on it: Simone, with an inscription in German. Undoubtedly put there by family members. It is a monstrous contrast to the shrine at Penrose Park only a few kilometres away.

‘What is this place?’ asks the Don. He’s clearly spooked too.

‘It’s a memorial to the seven young hitchhikers who were murdered in this forest by Ivan Milat,’ I say.

Ivan Milat. Ivan Milat. The name has become a chant from a children’s tale to instil terror. And it has. He changed the Australian psyche. Changed the way people travel. Hitchhiking – that most trusting and comradely way of journeying – has all but disappeared in many parts of Australia because of one man.

Caroline Chisholm places the flowers at the base of the rock and says a silent prayer. I’m looking around carefully. It is spooky here. Really spooky. Nothing like the feeling I had in the Jesus tomb. This one really makes me feel ill in my stomach.

‘Did you know that some of the bodies were found just a few hundred metres that way,’ Caroline says, climbing back to her feet. I look into the bush in the direction she’s pointing. The thickness of the bush there seems ominous, and menacing. I have no desire to step off the road and walk into it. Not a single step.

‘They were mostly English and German backpackers,’ I say.

‘Two were young Australians,’ Caroline Chisholm says, correcting me. ‘The first bodies were found by orienteerers, running through the forest. They were Caroline Jane Clarke and Joanne Lesley Walters, from the United Kingdom. Joanne had been stabbed 35 times, and Caroline had been shot several times in the head.’

The men look appalled.

‘The next bodies discovered, quite some time later, were of the young Australian couple, Deborah Everist and James Gibson,’ she says.  ‘They had been missing since leaving Frankstown in Victoria four years earlier in 1989. Soon after a skull was found that was identified as belonging to Simone Schmidl from Regensburg in Germany. Three more bodies were discovered and they were also found to have died from either numerous stab wounds or being shot in the face. One of them, Anja Habschied, had been decapitated.’

The men look sickened. ‘Ivan Milat was the man eventually arrested and convicted,’ she says, ‘yet there is suspicion there may be other bodies still to be found.’

‘John Lynch believed God was condoning his atrocities,’ says Bennett. ‘What drove this cove?’

She shrugs. ‘He was one of a family of 14 children, who grew up under a strict father and was surrounded by guns and violence all his life,’ she says. ‘But what he did to these young women is unpardonable, incomprehensible and unforgivable.’

‘He was a foreigner then?’ asks the Don.

‘His father was from Yugoslavia, I believe,’ says Caroline Chisholm.

‘Aha,’ says the Don, ‘they don’t play cricket there.’ As if that explains it to him.

‘And to add the horror of it, Milat’s 17-year-old great-nephew became fascinated in him and tried to copy him by torturing and killing a friend here in 2010,’ she says. ‘He was younger than any of these young people killed here before us.’ The Don doesn’t seem to have any way of explaining that to himself.

‘We can go now,’ says Caroline and we all pile back into the car, glad not to stay here a moment longer. We drive in silence for some time, and nobody says a word until we emerge from the forest back onto the bitumen road leading to the Hume.

‘More people are going to die on this highway than will ever be born on it,’ Caroline Chisholm says suddenly. None of us has a response to that.

We drive back up the highway for about ten kilometres to the big Shell service stations there. ‘Let’s have a break,’ I say and we pull off the road. We need petrol too. It’s very busy today and as I’m filling up the car I look around and take note of the uniforms of people on holiday all about me, which seem delineated by age. The young guys are mostly all tall, beefy and boofy looking, and they wear tight T-shirts, long shorts and thongs. The middle aged guys have collared T-shirts, long shorts with lots of pockets and orthopaedic sandals, and the old guys have short-sleeved shirts, long shorts and expensive runners. The only blokes I see wearing trousers are Asians. There is also a hierarchy of where you put your sunglasses I note. The young guys wear them backwards on their heads, the middle-aged guys hang them from their shirt fronts and the old guys have them in a protective case in their shirt pocket.

I go in to pay, and after standing in line I make small talk with the middle-aged lady behind the counter. It take a few questions for her to open up, but then she seems to welcome the interest and tells me that she’s from Hay, way out west of New South Wales and is planning to go home next weekend, as she hasn’t been back for a few years. The line of blokes behind me, in their various arrangements of T-shirts, shorts and sunglasses, tap their thonged, sandaled or sand-shoed feet in impatience, but she seems really glad for the chance to tell somebody this. She meets hundreds of people a day, but her job is to take their money and just give them change, not any information about herself. The last time she planned to go home the roads were closed by floods, she tells me, so she’s really looking forward to this trip. I tell her I hope it works out this time.

‘Your travel safely, love,’ she tells me and then turns to the next customer, her face dropping back into the impassive counter-staff look.

Across the highway the large yellow M tries to lure us towards it, but I stop at the Coolabah Cafe next to the service station, on this side highway. It’s a more traditional road stop that doesn’t get as much traffic as McDonald’s. We park in the near-empty car park and I give a nod to the old guy sitting at a plastic chair and table outside the main door. He looks a bit like the Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, or perhaps Barnacle Bill the sailor from The Magic Pudding, with a bald head and long white beard. He’s sitting there in an old pair of shorts, eating what looks like a plum pudding and having a smoke. He nods back to us.

Inside the cafe there are several staff standing ready to take our orders. I look up and scan the menu. They offer burgers, but also T-bone steaks and roast meat. It makes me think of a billboard we saw along the Hume. “There is room for all God’s creatures.” Then in the smaller text. “Right next to the salad and chips.”

One side of the counter is a separate eating area for truckies. This is primarily a truck stop for the workers of the Hume. I order a hot drink, pay for it and wander over to the booths. There is a lot more space here than across the road, also there are some game machines, a fridge of drinks and ice-creams to help yourself to. I look back and watch some more customers come in. Coffee seems to be one of the big sellers. I also notice that nobody with young children seems to choose this side of the highway to stop and eat.

‘Do you know,’ I say, ‘I sometimes miss the hitchhikers. I’ve picked up some really interesting people over the years, but just you don’t see many people hitching any more. Especially not around Belanglo.’

‘Like who?’ asks Bennett.

‘Well,’ I say, ‘I remember one young guy we picked up, travelling south like this, about here, when my kids were young. They were crying and fighting and carrying on like kids on a long trip do, and we saw this young guy in a Greenpeace T-shirt, so we picked him up. And of course the kids just went totally quiet. There was this stranger in the car and they didn’t know what to make of it. He was a really nice guy too. Full of idealism and plans for making the world better.’

The whole world seemed full of idealism then. Before September 11. Before the Global Financial Crisis. Before so many things. ‘Here’s another story,’ I say. ‘We were driving to Sydney about 15 years ago, and picked up this guy outside of Goulburn. He was clearly from the bush and had this old beat up hat and was as thin as a sapling with red eyes from dust or something. He was sort of quiet, but polite and told us he had been hitchhiking from the Northern Territory and was heading towards Sydney to visit his brother there.

‘His mother?’ asks Lawson.

‘His brother,’ says Caroline Chisholm, leaning in close to his ear.

‘Yeah. Well we ask him if he’s ever been to Sydney before and he tells us that he’s never been out of the Territory and has never been to a town bigger than Alice Springs. He was working on cattle stations all over the place and he’d gotten most of the way so far by getting lifts in trucks. So we drive on and get into Liverpool. This was before the new Hume Highway was built, and he says, “Anywhere along here will be fine.” And I tell him, “Uh – we’re not actually in Sydney yet. This is just the outskirts.” And he doesn’t quite know what to make of that. Then I ask him where exactly in Sydney his brother is living, and he says he doesn’t know for sure, but he’ll just go into one of the pubs and ask, and somebody will know him.’

Caroline Chisholm nods. She can see where this is going.

‘So I tell him, “Look, Sydney is big. Really, really big!” And he just nods his head. “Anywhere on the main street would be okay,” he says. Anyway, there’s this point on the old Hume Highway into Sydney where you top a rise and can see Sydney stretching out for miles and miles and miles and as we reach it he suddenly goes really, really quiet and it’s hard to get another word out of him. So we take him into the centre of town and leave him near the railway station and he just looks like he’s in some sort of shock, y’know. And we keep asking him if he’ll be alright and if we can help him in any way, but he sort of half shakes and half nods his head and grabs his bag and just stands there on the footpath looking like he’s been kicked in the head by a bullock.’

‘A what?’ asks Henry.

‘A bullock,’ says Caroline Chisholm.

‘Well we always like to think that he walked into the first pub he passed and asked about his brother and it was one of those one in a million things that somebody did know him.’

Bradman sniffs disdainfully. ‘I’d never hitchhike,’ he says.

‘Lots of people don’t have a choice.’ I say. Then, ‘There was this other young guy I picked up when I was driving to Sydney with my daughter, who was 18 or so at the time. He worked at the jail at Goulburn and had missed his train to Sydney. He was fascinating. He worked on security there and told us all about how the cameras worked and how the inmates would know if one was out of order and would corner somebody out of sight and bash them if they needed bashing where they couldn’t be seen.’

Bradman sniffs disdainfully again.

‘And he was ringing his girlfriend on his mobile phone to explain to her why he was going to be late and she wanted to know who had given him a lift and if we were trustworthy and all that, and I told him to tell her that our names were Milat and that we were just going to stop off at Belanglo for a picnic and he thought that was pretty funny and told her, but she went crazy and started shouting at him to get out of the car.’ I laugh at the memory and then look at each of my travelling companions in turn. None has the slightest hint of a smile on their faces.

‘Well,’ I say. ‘It seemed funny at the time.’

‘The past often does,’ says Cook.

We are all quiet for some time to the hum of rubber on the highway, and then Caroline says, ‘Anyway, dear, tell me about this trip of yours. Henry only gave me the briefest of description.’

‘Well, I’m driving from Sydney to Melbourne,’ I tell her. ‘Sort of travelling in the footsteps of Hume and Hovell, the explorers, you know.’

‘Oh, yes,’ she says. ‘I knew them well.’

‘Beaut,’ I say. ‘Well I guess my idea is sort of about discovering Australianness, based on the idea that everybody should walk their country at some time in their life to find out what it means to them.’

‘But you’re driving,’ says Lawson.

‘I’m hopping out and walking in some places,’ I say. ‘We walked into here didn’t we.’

‘You seem to be doing more talking than walking,’ says Cook.

I nod. ‘Yes, maybe that’s it. Maybe everybody should at some time in their life walk and talk their country to find out just what it means to them.’

They all stare at me like I’ve just said something that was so obvious they can’t fathom how I’m treating it like a revelation. ‘Well, anyway,’ I say, looking out the cafe window at the cars zooming up and down the Freeway, getting from A to B as fast as possible, with their windows closed tightly and CDs probably blaring away inside. ‘I miss collecting those stories.’

280 Kilometres – to Goulburn – the Lilac City

The Hume Highway has its share of oddball stories, and one of my favourite is from early this year when police arrested a truck driver for driving erratically and found he had a large screen TV attached to the dashboard of his truck. This was a 32cm screen, fitted to a DVD player, so he could watch movies as he drove along. Clearly he was not watching road safety films. Police charged him not only for driving with his vision obscured, but also for talking on a mobile phone while driving. Now it might sound like one of those urban myths, such as the old lady who bought the new campervan and found it had cruise control so she switched it on and went into the back to make a cup of tea, and then ran off the road as no one was at the wheel. But this story had photographs of the rig with the TV screen bolted to the dashboard. It looked like a bit of a backyard job, which at least provides some certainty that nobody is offering this service professionally for truckies.

Just before Goulburn there is the site of a stockade where chain-bound convicts were kept who were used to build the Great South Road, or the precursor to the modern Hume Highway. It was used from between 1836 and 1842, and became the principal penal establishment in the southern districts south of Sydney, and housed up to 250 convicts.

The back story is interesting, and goes that there was a lot of in-fighting in Goulburn amongst the early gentlemen of the region, as to whose property the road should go past and while this was being sorted out the convicts had to be kept busy. The men were put to work breaking rocks into stones and building stone culverts, many of which can still be seen today. It was a pretty harsh place as the men slept on bare boards, with just a single blanket to keep warm and there were up to ten men in a cell.

There is not much that still remains today. There are the remains of the powder magazine, built into the side of the river bank, a few remnants of buildings or indents in the ground where they once were, and the culverts and the graves of nearly twenty people. Three of them have tombstones, including one Private Moxey and two women, Elizabeth Whittaker and the young Mary Brown – but there are over a dozen convicts buried there who we might never know the names of. More poor souls who have slipped through the cracks of recorded history. The site itself is slipping through the cracks of the restoration of our heritage and in another few decades and it might all be gone, which has prompted a movement to recognise and maintain the site.

It starts me thinking about the six convicts who accompanied Hume and Hovell. They might have preferred to be in such a stockade at some times on the expedition, being hungry, exhausted and uncertain if they’d complete their journey alive or be lost in the bush or speared by natives. So time for a brief look at them.

First Hovell’s men, Thomas Smith and William Bollard. Little is known of their early days unfortunately, and his third man, Thomas Boyd, was actually lent to him by Hume’s brother John, and he was known to be a very capable horseman, bushman and swimmer.

Hume’s three men were Claude Bossawa, James Fitzpatrick and Henry Angel. Claude Bossawa was criticised by the others as being rather lazy and not much of an asset to the expedition, and his main role was to push the perambulator used to measure distance. James Fitzpatrick was born in Ireland and was 23 at the time of the expedition. He was transported for seven years for insurrection and escaped upon arrival and upon being captured was put in a road gang like the convicts who were kept in the stockade near Goulburn. Henry Angel was born in England and was 34 at the time of the expedition. He had been sentenced to death for robbery, but had it commuted to transportation for life due to his youth at the time. He worked on road gangs, like Fitzpatrick, before being assigned to Hamilton Hume.

A few kilometres further on and we are at the turnoff to Goulburn. Hovell didn’t have very much to say about their trip through here, writing: “... on Goulburn’s plains, where we remained all night weather Squaley with little rain from the East the distance ... through the range is 21 Miles, and not a good road.”

‘Ah Goulburn,’ says Caroline Chisholm. ‘I’ve always had fond memories of this town. I travelled through here many times on my journeys to place young immigrant women with good families in the colonies, did you know?’

I didn’t, but of course I pretend that I do. ‘And did you know that the local community even commissioned a mural in one of the churches in my honour?’

‘They’ve built a whole centre in my honour here,’ says Lawson.

‘No dear,’ says Caroline Chisholm. ‘That’s in Gulgong.’

‘Isn’t that what you said?’ She chooses not to answer.

‘I came here to a reception in my honour after our victorious 1930 tour of England,’ says the Don.

‘I came through on my way to Berrima gaol,’ says Graham Bennett. ‘But they never did anything to honour my memory.’

‘Well that big tower on the hill wasn’t here when I last visited,’ Caroline says, tactfully changing the subject and pointing to the square shaped tower that sits on the hill overlooking the town. ‘What is it? A look out or a fort or something?’

Now that’s a question that I actually have the answer to. ‘It’s a war memorial,’ I tell her. ‘It was built by the locals to commemorate those who died in the First World War. If memory serves me correctly the land was donated by the local brewery and all the locals gathered up the stones to build it with. Inside there is a winding staircase that takes you up to the glassed-in lookout and there are all these large black and white photos of different battles on the walls as by the stairs, and down at the inside base of the tower is a large wall with the names of all the local dead on it.’

Bradman seems impressed. ‘That’s a bit more significant than your average statue of a single soldier,’ he says.

‘Yes,’ I agree. Then I tell them, ‘Actually I was in Goulburn one ANZAC Day, driving back from Sydney. It was bitterly cold and I went up to the tower and the wind was howling around it and I climbed up to the top and looked out over the town.’

‘What did you see?’ Cook asks.

‘The town,’ I say. ‘But there’s a little war museum up there. It’s small and crammed with things the way small country town museums are, but it has some really interesting things there too, including some old rifles and guns and even a door from Changi prison.’

Bradman’s impressed again. ‘I had a chat to the lady who was working there and she told me that they get quite a few visitors making the drive up the hill, especially on ANZAC Day, but the visitor book didn’t really reflect what I’d call quite a few. They used to have a full time caretaker living up there, when it was considered important, but it’s a bit out of the way really. But she did tell me to make sure I was down in town for the parade at 11 O’clock. So I drove back down, and where the centre of town had seemed deserted about an hour before it was now crowded. It was like everybody in town had turned out, shivering in the wind to watch the parade of soldiers who had been bussed in and local kids from the boarding schools or scouts and guides and the few other pseudo-paramilitary organisations in town, marching down the street towards the Returned Soldiers League Club.’

Then I say, ‘It wasn’t much of a parade compared to what you see in Canberra or Sydney or Melbourne, but you could see it meant the world to everyone who turned out to watch it.’

‘Lest we forget,’ says Carolyn. But it’s not war dead I’m most interested in here, and I head down to the Tourist Information Centre, the source of all necessary information when you’re trying to find the grave of somebody long dead. The friendly lady there passes me a brochure on the Lilac Festival, to be held in September-October and I’m glad to see it’s not actually a celebration of Lilacs but has street processions and carnivals and bush dances and fireworks and markets and other music and entertainment.

I thank her and tell her I’m actually after William Hovell’s grave. She tells us that there are actually five graveyards in town and the one we want is the Saint Saviour’s Graveyard and she pulls out a map to show us where it is. She admits that it’s in a bit of a poor state, and is something that the council keeps planning to fix up a bit. But I suppose an old graveyard can’t really compete with flower shows or a blues festival. She also gives me an A4 sheet of a map that somebody has painstakingly marked out all the main graves on, and a guide to who is who – or perhaps more accurately, who was who.

I thank her and head off, following the map to the cemetery and find it is bang smack under the walls of Goulburn jail. I’m not sure what Hovell would have thought to have Ivan Milat as his next door neighbour. Taking the sheet with the rough markings of where the graves are I tromp through the cemetery, looking for something a little bit grand – but fail to find his tombstone. So I go back to the gate and try again, certain there is some guard at the jail with a pair of binoculars trained on me checking me out, just in case I’m casing the place. I walk through the graveyard, sort of row by row, but since there aren’t rows as such to speak of, I still fail to find it. So I call for help and Caroline Chisholm finds it first.

It’s not like I expected it would be. It’s not a plinth or a tombstone, but rather a huge concrete rock or block or something, that is surrounded by a small iron fence with all the details carved on two sides. The first plaque on the far side says, “To the Memory of W. H. Hovell, who departed this life November 9th 1875, aged 90 years. By Sophia his wife. Also of the said Sophia his wife who died at Goulburn Dec 5th 1876 aged 75.” Then under that in Latin it reads: Nom Omins Moriar, which Caroline Chisholm tells me means: I shall not wholly die.

Lawson laughs at that and says that we’d better keep our eyes open for him then.

The plaque on the other side is to Hovell’s first wife, Esther, who died in 1846, aged 59 years, as well as her granddaughter Louisa. I’m not sure what I should be thinking, having found his grave, but I’m wondering which way they buried him, with his feet pointing towards the small creek and overgrown banks around it, or back towards the jail.

Caroline Chisholm has her head bent forward, as if she’s paying her respects, but it could be that she’s having a short nap while standing up. The other four are wandering around and perhaps looking for any names they know.

When he died the Argus newspaper in Victoria wrote:

“The death of Captain W. H. Hovell, the companion of Mr. Hamilton Hume, in the celebrated overland journey from Goulburn to Port Phillip in the year 1824, was announced yesterday in our Sydney telegram. He had attained the ripe age of 90 years before he passed away, and he lived to see the country of which he was one of the early explorers become the most flourishing colony of the Australian group.”

He is but one of Goulburn’s many sons and daughters from better days when it was a major city – indeed it lays claim to being Australia’s first inland city, so defined because it had a cathedral consecrated there in 1863. Since then Goulburn has known good times, riding high on the sheep’s back and has also known hard times, but it is experiencing a bit of a rebirth, as people no longer consider it beyond commuter distance to Canberra, attracting people to move here for cheaper housing or a country-town lifestyle. One such person is Nigel. He moved to Goulburn two years ago, selling his home in Canberra which enabled him to fully buy and renovate a charming old 1890’s house.

He tells me that while cheap housing was his key motivation for moving to Goulburn he has found he enjoys living in a small community and now feels part of it. Being able to live mortgage-free also enabled him to cut back his paid working days to two days a week in Canberra, and spend time on the things in life he is passionate about, which for Nigel is reading and writing. This is his Australian dream. ‘I have found a creative life here, and a creative community,’ he says.

He also enjoys the heritage things in Goulburn as it has the oldest continually running theatre company in Australia and the oldest continually running newspaper, and one of the oldest breweries – all less than an hour from one of Australia’s newest cities.

Nigel says that he enjoys the diversity of people he meets in Goulburn too and his neighbours include jail workers, abattoir workers, unemployed people and some well to do people in heritage houses. He tells me that he’s recently become involved with an arts centre in town, South Hill, that has been set up by some lawyers from Sydney and they chose Goulburn as a location because they felt the people here were real. He said they told him if you parked your car on the main street of Goulburn you could have a truck and a ute on either side of you, but if you parked your car on the main street in Berrima you’d more likely have wankers parking on either side of you.

‘It’s an honest town,’ he says. ‘It’s a fair dinkum country town – not like other pseudo-country towns that tend to be close to bigger cities.’

Nigel thinks that Goulburn has a lot of potential to be a home for artists. ‘In the 60s and 70s artists were moving to Redfern, now they can’t afford Redfern, but can afford places like Goulburn. Although he does acknowledge that while people like him might move in and say that Goulburn is the best thing since sliced bread, he is aware that many younger people will say that they can’t wait to get out of Goulburn. “Youth unemployment is quite high here.’

He says that you do get to see the entire cross-section of life here in one small locale, not hidden in outer suburbs or housing estates as it might be in larger cities. ‘There’s only one main street here, so you see it all.’ Nigel believes that if one of Canberra’s universities opened a satellite campus in Goulburn it would make a tremendous difference to the young people in the city and would enable them some wider life choices.

Nigel also tells me that about 400 cars a day head into Canberra from Goulburn with people who are working there. While the tyranny of distance might make Sydney a little too far for commuting, the Canberra to Goulburn drive is no longer seen as too distant. But an influx of external workers can be a two-edge sword for local communities, bringing in new people and money, but subtly changing their communities too. For communities in decline there can be little choice, but locals still worry about rising costs of housing and the impact of new developments. In Goulburn there has been a lot of concern around redevelopment of the old Kenmore Mental Hospital, which was built in the 1890s. Since ceasing to be an institution for the mentally ill in 2003 there has been a lot of discussion over what to best do with the heritage listed complex that has played a central role in the community, hosting art and craft workshops, theatre and musical productions and sporting events. But early in 2012 an approval was given for developing residential blocks on the grounds, which caused some community concern. There have even been rumours about turning the Victorian buildings into a gated community. Ironic in a way, I think, going from gates to keep the unsociables in to gates to keep the unsociables outs.

Nigel says he’s concerned that economic development in Goulburn might lead to some significant buildings being knocked over, as the push for economic development is everything. ‘But people come here for the architecture whether they know it or not.’

He also tells me that the shortage of water in Goulburn had been quite an issue, with the dams effectively being empty during the recent drought, but that has been solved with a new pipeline and the current stigma for some people is the presence of the jail. He has met people who have told him that while they really like the heritage aspects of Goulburn they could never live there because of the jail. Conversely it does have a police academy, Nigel says, which sort of balances things out.

Nigel says that while the town – oops – city, is very conservative in general the inner city electoral booths tend to be held by the Labour party, ‘But if you support the ALP or the Greens you won’t be seeing any change of power. You do see a little bit of redneckism here,’ he says, ‘but nothing too severe.’ He has spoken out on same-sex marriage in the local paper and it hasn’t caused him any grief with locals. ‘I feel as free here as I do anywhere,’ he said.

He sometimes takes the train to Sydney from Goulburn, which is extremely cheap, and he says you can watch the different types of people that hop on at different stops as you get closer to Sin City. At Goulburn he says most of the passengers have hi-vis fluoro work vests on, at Moss Vale they are mostly in tracky dacks, by Mittagong they are wearing suits and at the outer suburbs of Sydney they are different again.

So then I ask Nigel what does it mean to be Australian, and after mulling on that for some time he says, ‘I don’t know. I’m less aware of what Australia is now than I used to be. I think Australia is still incredibly lucky though.’

As lucky as living your dream in your early 40s with no mortgage – or is that really through careful planning and being brave enough to follow your dreams? The wool farmers who made Goulburn a thriving town would undoubtedly put it down to following their dreams while those who ended up losing money on wool would say it was luck. But that’s one of the things about luck, isn’t it. Good luck is all due to your own careful planning and bad luck is only due to ill fortune.

On the way out of Goulburn we see that the Big Merino statue. ‘What on earth is that?’ asks Cook.

‘It’s a big sheep,’ I say. ‘To symbolise the importance of sheep to this area. It’s one of the many big animal statues that dot Australia’s highways. There’s a big koala, a big lobster, a big trout and a big banana.’

‘A banana is not an animal,’ says Lawson.

‘Is there a big Captain Cook?’ asks Cook hopefully.

‘Yes. Up in Cairns,’ I say. He smiles. I don’t tell him that it’s not as well proportioned as the merino statue, and is a bit out of context, with one arm and hand outstretched as if he is giving a Nazi salute or trying to stop traffic. It is actually a pose from a painting of him at Botany Bay by the artist Emanuel Phillips Fox, showing him telling his men not to fire at the Aborigines who are telling him to ‘Fuck off our land!’, even though he actually ordered them to shoot at them.

‘I’m sure that Big Merino used to be on the other side of the road,’ I say.

‘Has anyone heard this one?’ asks Lawson. ‘Why did the merino cross the road?’

Nobody answers him. ‘To get to the other side! Get it?’ Still nobody answers him. ‘And they say I have a hearing problem,’ he says.

I note that although the Big Merino has crossed the road it still has a gift shop in its testicles, which is perhaps well-suited as a memorial to the greed and follies of the Australian wool industry. Charles Massy has documented the sorry tale well in his book Breaking the Sheep's Back, which has been described as a story of political skulduggery and betrayal, regarding Australia’s biggest business disaster leading to a loss of $12 billion – back in 1991.

Charles Massy described the mindset that led to the disaster as “Quarry Vision”, quoting another author, Guy Pearse, who was referring to the unprecedented access that the Big End of town have to governments and influence over government policy, often with self-interest and short-sightedness.

But back to wool, once the economic mainstay of the nation, the Australian Wool Corporation developed a wool reserve scheme to protect the suppliers of wool, and to smooth out the swings in prices that naturally occur. The basis of the idea was that the Corporation would buy up stocks of wool if the commodity price fell below a certain level and when then sell it again as the market recovered.

Another way of looking at it was protectionism, which over the years has shown to be non-sustainable in one way or another, but during the 1980s as the price of wool boomed the Wool Corporation built up huge stockpiles of wool. Coupled with that the power to set the reserve price for wool was put into the hands of the Wool Council, who, suffering from their own form of “Quarry Vision” kept increasing the floor price. And, as inevitably happens, the market turned downwards. All over the country warehouses were full of unsold wool because the Wool Corporation and Council refused to reduce the floor price from 830 cents a kilogram.

By the time the Government, the Hawke-Keating government of 1991, dicked around a bit and finally abolished the scheme and held free market auctions to sell off the wool, it fetched 430 cents a kilogram – and it took about a decade to sell off the stockpile. Respected science journalist Julian Cribb, who was one of the first to predict that raising the floor price of wool back in 1988 would lead to disaster, in reviewing Breaking the Sheep’s Back, wrote:

“...this is a book for those who dream the Australian mineral boom will never end, that the climate will never change and the sea never inundate our cities. That the landscape will remain covered in gum trees and koalas. Our oil, soil, water and food supplies never dwindle. And that the Australian Dream will somehow transcend global financial incompetence and greed.”

It’s good preparation for our next stop. We pass four huge road signs alerting us to take a left turn to Canberra, and Cook says, ‘Don’t you think they’re overstating it?’

‘Not at all,’ I tell him. ‘Once my wife and I were driving along here at night, and I was snoozing while she drove, but she was wearing her prescription sunglasses as she’d left her normal glasses at home. Well she drove right past all those four huge signs without seeing them and when I woke up, expecting to be in Canberra, I found we were in Yass instead.’

‘Is that a dig at women?’ Caroline asks me sternly.

‘Heaven’s forbid,’ I say as a non answer. We drive on past white cows that look like huge sheep. Not quite as huge as the big Merino of course. Then we are crossing the Great Dividing Range, which feels like a rather small hill here. There are poplars planted all along the road and farm lands either side of us.

About ten minutes later I stop the car at a turn off. The road to Gundaroo is on our right and the Federal Highway into Canberra is ahead of us past Lake George. At this point Hume and Hovell, having sighted Lake George and noted that it was full of water, turned north. In fact they made a short detour off their path to have a look at Lake George. Hovell wrote:

“Until now I thought Goulburn plains to be the most delightful spot of Country I had seen in the colony, but haveing seen Lake George from one of the highest hills, close to its banks, I must decide in its favour, the immence sheet of water the highe surrounding Hills with lofty Mountains at a distance, and here and there studded with plains gives it a most beautiful and pictureant appearance – the soil is not good on the tops of the hills...”

And I’m reminded of that scene from the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail when King Arthur leads the men to Camelot and there is a cut away to inside the castle where knights in armour are drinking and dancing and falling off the furniture and singing: “We’re knights of the round table, we dance whene'er we're able, we do routines and chorus scenes, with footwork impeccable. We dine well here in Camelot, we eat ham and jam and spam a lot. ... Between our quests we sequin vests, and impersonate Clark Gable...”

And then King Arthur says, “On second thoughts, let’s not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.”

I’m very tempted to say just the same thing about Canberra. We drive along the lake shore and note that it has water in it for the first time in many years. Then we notice the battalion of tall windmills on the far side of the lake. There are dozens of them, tall and white, blades spinning slowly in the breeze.

‘Windmills!’ says Lawson in delight. ‘Look at them. They’re like giant flowers.’

‘Now those aren’t actually windmills,’ I tell him.

‘No?’

‘No. Anybody who has read Don Quixote knows that what looks like a windmill can just as easily be a large monster or a dragon. And those are monstrous beasts advancing relentlessly across the landscape, laying wreck and ruination in their paths.’

Lawson looks at me curiously, like he’s certain he hasn’t heard me correctly.

‘What do you mean?’ asks Caroline Chisholm.

‘Well,’ I tell her. ‘To your average citizen they might look like windmills that are generating electricity and saving on pollution and so on, but in fact they are insidious causes of health and family breakdown.’

‘How?’ she asks, leaning forward and frowning at them.

‘Well, just by being there. The hum of the turbines causes all manner of health problems. Sleeplessness. Cancers. Vibrating of the brain. And just because there is no known medical research to prove that such stories are not more than anecdotal, and just because there appear to be links to coal companies trying to demonise windmill technologies, you can’t deny that people who suffer ill health from having a windmill farm near them actually feel ill health.’

‘You’re being sarcastic,’ she says, wagging her finger at me, as if it should be beneath me to do so.

‘Why would I be sarcastic?’ I ask her. ‘This is a great introduction to Canberra. An example that an interest group cannot just work really hard to play upon public fears to create a belief that something is wrong or dangerous, but that after a while those fears become so real that people start linking all manner of woes to the fear. Boat people and unemployment. Ethnic minorities and crime. And there are lots of technologies other than windmills that could be doing us more good than harm. Look at genetically modified foods, nanotechnology, fluoridation, infant vaccination – despite the best scientific evidence that the benefits outweigh the risks, interest groups play upon our emotions, which is much more powerful than playing upon our logic. But it’s the way we are all wired. Our brains respond much more powerfully to emotional messages linked to fear and hysteria than they do to logical messages of safety.’

‘So what should be done about that?’ asks the Don.

‘Somebody ought to run a scare campaign about being afraid of the damage done to children and families and personal health from interest groups,’ I tell him. He nods his head and then asks, ‘So are windmills good or bad?’

‘Do they look bad to you?’ I ask him.

‘No. They look quite lovely,’ he says.

‘Then they are lovely,’ I tell him. ‘Certainly more lovely than the alternative of not having them and using coal or nuclear power to generate electricity.’

We drive on, looking at brown and white cows grazing on the lake’s edge to our left as the low rocky hills come down closer to us on the right. We pass a few more VC road stops, Badcoe VC, Wheatley VC, then we’re at the far end of the lake, climbing past Newton VC and are approaching the ACT Border. Black Mountain tower points up to the sky like a giant syringe.

‘Welcome to Camelot – I mean Canberra,’ I say. But it could have just as easily have been named Cooeeton, Eucalpytia, Empire City, Democratia, Kagaromu, Woolgold, New London, Caucus City, Federatia, or names made up of mixing countries and other cities, such as Engirscot, Sydmeladperbrisho!

Back in the early 1900s, when there was a newly federated Australia, there was also a need to have a newly federated capital city that was none of the existing state capitals – as that would only piss off the others. So Senators and bureaucrats embarked on a study tour of the twelve best sites, from Armidale to Eden, with local communities lobbying them furiously with meals and picnics and so on, so that the tour was described by one journalist of the day as a “silly picnic excursion”.

King O’Malley (a grand self-promoter and creator of his own history, including his name), who was Minister for Home Affairs from 1910 to 1913, and was to lay the foundation for Canberra in 1913, summed it up slightly differently, stating: “Where is the capital? What shall we call it? We must remember that in this matter we are not acting for ourselves alone, but for countless millions of unbegotten generations of future ages.”

The selection criteria for the site were that it had to be in NSW but over a hundred miles from Sydney, it had to be inland to avoid attack from foreign ships, it must have plentiful water, it must be a beautiful location, and it had to be in a cold region. That last one was a curious choice, based on the European myth that only cold countries produced superior societies, and has given generations of Canberrans and visitors to the city on business or pleasure reason to grumble and shiver. The short-list that fulfilled this category was the towns of Albury, Armidale, Bombala, Canberra, Dalgety, Lake George, Lyndhurst, Orange, Tooma, Tumut and Yass-Canberra.

Some of those towns were along the path that Hume and Hovell trod, including Lake George which was favoured by those who wanted a city built upon a lake, but when the parliamentary committee visited it the lake was dry due to drought. The Yass-Canberra site, north of the current city of Canberra, was considered to be favourably close to the railway, but with inferior water quality to that of alpine contenders. Tumut was rated highly but not favoured for reasons of access. Albury was considered a good choice as an existing town was there, and it was on the Sydney to Melbourne railway link as well as being about as close to Melbourne as a city in New South Wales was ever likely to get. Yet oddly enough the final winner, Canberra, was actually missed out by most of the Parliamentarians on the junket as they slept in on the chilly morning of May 1902 when they were due to tour the area. Which makes we wonder if its selection wasn’t just a little bit like that 2002 Winter Olympic Gold medal won by Australian ice skater Steven Bradbury, who just happened to be standing after all the other main contenders had fallen over?

Well, once the site was chosen and the name was selected there was then a competition to design the city, with some very interesting proposals being submitted. Second prize went to the Finish architect, Eliel Saarinen, who envisaged a cross between Paris and ancient Rome with lakes and canals that would have been rather expensive to build. Third place went to Huber Donat Alfred Agache, a Frenchman, who envisaged a much more Parisian city, but one that would have required a large scale levelling of the land. And fourth place went to an Australian consortium of Walter Griffiths, Robert Coulter and Charles Caswell, which was not too dissimilar to the winning design of Walter Burley Griffin and his wife Marion Mahony Griffin – even though it was noted that their design featured roads leading nowhere and the transport infrastructure was impractical.

King O’Malley, in laying the foundation stone for Canberra, also laid on the rhetoric a bit, declaring: “The chronicler of the future will look back on the twelfth day of March, 1913, as an epoch in the affairs of the Commonwealth of Australia, second only to the historic occasion of the landing of Captain Cook.” Personally I’m not sure Captain Cook would agree, nor would most Australians – particularly those forced to visit Canberra in winter.

Work on building the capital city was actually very slow – largely due to the First World War – and the old Parliament House was not completed and opened until 1927, when it stood relatively alone amongst a dusty plain. The Duke and Duchess of York attended the opening ceremony, along with most of the members of high society, who came by train for the day and departed again soon afterwards.

There were a few others who attended too though, like Jimmy Clements, a Wiradjuri man who wandered up in front of the levelled white steps of the Parliament building and tried to meet the Duke and Duchess, before being hustled away. He stood there nevertheless, with all the VIPs in the assembled crowd, as dignified as any of them, with long unkempt hair and beard, clad in an old coat with upturned collar buttoned with pins, and became a part of the history of the Capital.

Now it’s easy to pour crap on Canberra, and it is a bit of a national sport, after all the politicians come from Canberra, don’t they? And Canberra can easily be seen as a place of polarisation and politicisation and assassination as a result of that. But if you ask local Canberrans they have a different take on things. Politicians in fact come from all the far corners of the country and they invade Canberra, so it’s not a case of Canberra giving the nation grief with its politicians, it’s a case of the politicians from all the other towns and cities of the nation coming here and giving Canberrans grief.

Most of the local community have lives that have nothing to do with politics, and they are more concerned with dropping the kids at school and sporting events on time and making sure they have all the groceries they need for the week ahead and paying the bills that need paying for and dealing with work hassles, than they are focussed on local politics. Statistically Canberra has a higher level of education than just about any city in Australia, and has a higher standard of living than most anywhere, but it doesn’t have the filthy rich that Sydney or Melbourne have, nor the numbers of dirt poor. When you get off the national monument circuit you find suburbs with people living like they live in suburbs all over the country.

As early as 1938 Canberra-bashing and Canberra-defending was clearly already occurring when author Warren Denning wrote, in his book Capital City:

“And strangely but truly there are people living here, living quite ordinary lives… and they are living and loving and laughing and quarrelling and dying and singing and cursing and betting and eating and sleeping… just like people anywhere else.”

Just like they are still doing. But of course a lot of them are those public service bludgers who lie in bed until lunchtime and then ring up and say they aren’t coming into work or that they are busy working from home and sit around watching repeats of Q&A on the ABC or documentaries on SBS, really happy that they’re being paid an overpriced salary by the hardworking taxpayers of the nation. There are a few who go into work, admittedly. Those who have to answer the phones for the vast numbers ringing in sick. And perhaps a few others who administer the Centrelink system that allows welfare benefits to be paid. And maybe a few others who deliver things like military support and education and health services and undertake studies into environmental impacts, and compete with the private sector, with less staff each year, to offer the best and most thorough advice to government – regardless of who is in power – on things like industry competitiveness, online services, telecommunications, economics, indigenous affairs, roads and transport, regional development, education, science and technology investment, aviation infrastructure, cultural support, mental health, consumer affairs, endangered species, parklands, water resources and so on. Yeah, but apart from them, all the rest are bludgers. Surely.

‘So,’ I ask my travelling companions. ‘Here’s a question for you. If you wanted to find out as much about Australia as you could but could only visit one of the many national institutions in Canberra, which one would you visit?’

They clearly think this is a trick question and mull it over carefully. ‘What are our choices?’ Lawson asks.

‘How about you choose from this list I say, the National War Memorial, Australian Archives, National Gallery, High Court of Australia, Australian Portrait Gallery, Parliament House, Old Parliament House, Museum of Democracy, Questacon Science Centre, National Museum of Australia, Reconciliation Place, the National Arboretum, Black Mountain Tower lookout, the Australian National University, Duntroon Military College, the history of Canberra exhibition at Regatta Point, Canberra Museum and Gallery, the Academy of Science, the Mint, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, the National Film and Sound Archives, the Australian Institute of Sport, one of the jails, the local shopping malls on a Friday night or the local supreme court on a sitting day?’

‘I don’t suppose there’s a national pub in Canberra?’ asks Lawson.

‘It’d have to be the Australian Institute of Sport,’ says Bradman.

‘No idea,’ says Graham Bennett. ‘They all sound pretty boring.’ Rolling his eyes like a teenager on a forced school excursion.

‘Isn’t there a national institution for welfare for women in need?’ asks Caroline Chisholm.

‘I know,’ says Cook. ‘It’s all of them!’

‘Well you’ll just have to wait to find out,’ I tell them. ‘I’ll take you there in the morning,’

‘What’s that?’ asks Lawson, cupping a hand to his ear, ‘It’s a place of mourning? Not another bloody cemetery!’

‘No dear,’ says Caroline Chisholm. ‘At least I don’t think so.’

370 kilometres – Camelot – I mean Canberra

So early the next morning we are parking the car outside the National Library of Australia. ‘Let me explain,’ I tell my curious travelling companions. ‘The National Library of Australia has heritage, addressing our past, but it also has stuff that addresses our present and our future. It has artefacts but it also has the thoughts and ideas of the nation and the world stored there.’

‘You mean like – books,’ says Graham Bennett suspiciously.

‘Inward and onwards,’ I tell everyone. We go into the library, through the cavernous foyer, past the bags and coat desk and stand at a sign advertising tours of the national treasures gallery. ‘This looks a good starting point,’ I say and we linger beside a display case that has a large brass sextant used by Major Mitchell in mapping much of Australia’s first road network, including much of what was to become the Hume Highway. A few others show up to join the tour and when our tour guide Shirley arrives there are about six of us.

She does quick introductions and starts off by telling us that the library has over ten million items in its collections and only three million of those are books, then she leads us into the treasures room. But before we even get into the room Lawson and Graham Bennett are staring in fascination into a cabinet window on the outer wall. I go over to see what has their attention. ‘It’s my hand!’ says Lawson, looking just a little spooked. And there is a cast of Lawson’s hand, taken just after he died, in 1922. It is an old man’s hand with prominent tendons and wrinkles. Lawson is holding his own hand out to compare it to. ‘I don’t recall giving anyone permission to do that,’ he says.

And next to him young Bennett is staring at a small dark metal lantern. ‘I know it,’ he says. ‘It was Moonlite’s.’ Sure enough the card behind the lantern says it was used by Captain Moonlite at his last hold up.

I leave them to confront their pasts and follow in after the tour group.  Shirley is showing everyone a globe of the world, about 40 centimetres across, constructed in dark yellow sepia colours. She says it was built in 1815 and is the first globe in the world to show a full depiction of Australia’s coastline. The tour group ooh and ahh at it, and then Shirley shows us in fine detail where Captain Cook’s voyages have been marked on the globe. Cook pokes his head forward to see and seems suitably impressed. But not half as impressed as he is when we turn to the next items. There is a large painting of the Death of Captain Cook, by George Carter, done only a few years after he was killed in Hawaii. It shows a heroic, if not slightly angelic white-clad Cook defending himself from the sinister dark natives attacking him with knives. Cook is certainly much taken with it, though he might be more pleased with some of the other paintings of the incident that show him turning to his men and exhorting them not to fire their muskets at the Hawaiians who are about to plunge their knives into his back.

And laid out under the painting, quite majestically, is his Endeavour journal. The tour group are gobsmacked. ‘Is that it?’ ‘Woo-hoo!’ ‘Is that his handwriting?’ Again Cook pushes forward to look at the journal. The pages are turned to Sunday 29 May, 1770, the day he sailed into Botany Bay, and I can read the words in his looping script, with corrections included:

“Saw, as we came in, on both points of the bay, several of the Natives and a few hutts; Men, Women, and Children on the S. Shore abreast of the Ship, to which place I went in the Boats in hopes of speaking with them...”

Shirley tells us that the journal was purchased by the Australian Government in 1923 for £5,000 and is catalogued as MS number 1, and is the founding item of the treasures collection. She then points to two smaller documents either side of the Endeavour journal, which she explains are, firstly, Cook’s secret orders to search for a great south land, and the other is his instructions not to claim any lands that are already inhabited by people. There is a sudden rush of tut-tutting amongst our group. I look at Cook and raise an eyebrow.

‘Too much fuss is made over that,’ he mumbles and disappears behind a column to look at something else.

Shirley leads us deeper into our heritage and shows us Ben Hall’s gun and William John Wills of Burke and Wills’ fame’s notebook and an early manuscript of the music and lyrics of Waltzing Matilda, penned by Banjo Paterson at Dagworth station in Queensland. The story accompanying the exhibit says that Christina Macpherson had been playing a variation on a Scottish tune, Thou Bonnie Wood of Craigielea, and according to a note she wrote, “He thought he could write some lines to it. He then and there wrote the first verse. We tried it and thought it went well, so he then wrote the other verses – in a short time everyone in the district was singing it.”

I’m glad Lawson isn’t with us to see this. He’d have his nose quite put out, I’m sure, and tell us how one of his poems would have made a better national song than any Paterson-penned poem.

Shirley then leads us over to another highlight of the collection that she says is the counterpoint to Cook’s Endeavour journal. This one consists of a few lined foolscap pages that have been written and drawn on with texta colours. It takes a moment to realise what they are. Eddie Mabo’s claims on his land in the Torres Strait that formed the basis for the High Court of Australia to challenge the notion of Terra Nullius established by Cook when he decided his orders on claiming possessed land didn’t apply here, and planted his flag, very near to Eddie Mabo’s land, at the top of Cape York and wrote, in that same journal across the room:

“Notwithstand I had in the Name of His Majesty taken possession of several places upon this coast, I now once more hoisted English Coulers and in the Name of His Majesty King George the Third took possession of the whole Eastern Coast . . . by the name New South Wales, together with all the Bays, Harbours Rivers and Islands situate upon the said coast, after which we fired three Volleys of small Arms which were Answered by the like number from the Ship”

The tour group are very impressed with the stark simplicity of the Mabo papers and are giving equal ooohs and aaahs that they gave to Cook’s journal. They are having a ball in here, being introduced to the treasures of the nation. I look around for Cook, but he’s making himself scarce. Caroline Chisholm and the Don are still following close behind me though, looking hopefully for some treasure of their own in the collection. Shirley shows us a few more items, such as the models for the Sydney Opera House, the first book printed in Antarctica in which Sir Douglas Mawson has a story and a pair of Patrick White’s glasses, and I can see the Don and Caroline looking a little bit concerned as we’re getting towards the end of the exhibition.

‘So, um, do you have anything here from Don Bradman or Caroline Chisholm?’ I ask Shirley.

‘Well,’ she says. ‘Of course we have a lot more treasures than we can exhibit here at one time and we do try and rotate them a bit, so there are other things you’ll see in the National Treasures catalogue that have been on display here at some time, and that includes one of Don Bradman’s cricket bats.’

‘Uh-huh,’ I say. ‘And Caroline Chisholm?’

‘Well, no,’ she says, ‘But I think that’s something I should suggest. She’s certainly deserving.’ Her voice trails off a little and I wonder if that’s the same answer she has to give to all the suggestions that are put to her as to the treasures that they don’t cover. It might be, of course, that Caroline Chisholm never left anything behind that has been deemed treasure-worthy, like an old pair of her bloomers wouldn’t quite fit the bill. I turn back and see the Don looking very pleased but Caroline looking quite crestfallen.

‘Never mind,’ I tell her when Shirley has left us. ‘There’ll be more than a few books on you in the library catalogue I’m sure.

Indeed, when I take her over the catalogues and search by her name, with the others looking over our shoulders, we find 112 results. I then search for Don Bradman and he’s only got 111 results.  ‘Now,’ I say. ‘I think I still have to prove a point about this being a repository of ideas about our country.’ I lead them across to the new books display and start lifting down publications and spend most of the rest of the morning on a journey of discovery into what different people think of Australia, its current problems and where it needs to be going in future.

I start with George Magalogenis’s book The Australian Moment, which questions whether Australia might not just be the West’s last best role model as a successful nation. He argues that our recent history over the past thirty years or so, has positioned us to weather the current global storms particularly well, even though we are increasingly being caught by the disease of intolerance, our politicians are getting “duller by the doorstop” and we have few heroes left to look up to.

He says that it a particular curse of Australians that we amongst the best managers of adversity and the worst managers of prosperity, in the world. And then he gives an example of the competing versions of Australia that exist amongst our political leaders, which are mirrored in competing versions of our national narratives and histories and visions for the future. He says that in interviewing previous Prime Ministers for the book he found that Hawke praised Howard, so that he could take a chip at Keating, while Fraser gave credit to Keating, who reciprocated in turn, but so that they could together diminish both Hawke and Howard by comparison, and while Howard applauded Hawke, he did so in order to reduce Keating. He also summarised their different points of view towards the nation as, Hawke and Howard believe there is nothing wrong with Australia as it is, Keating and Fraser both see some room for improvements and Rudd seemed to answer the question by talking about himself.

I next turn to an essay by Andrew Charlton in an issue of Quarterly Review, looking at the ever-prevalent competing interests of environmentalism and economic development. He concludes that there is no choice between progress and the planet, for if we focus on one we will certainly destroy the other. We must, he argues, find a way to balance and reconcile our need for economic development and environmental sustainability.

On a similar theme I next pick up Sharyn Munro’s book Rich Land Waste Land, in which she argues that unrestrained coal and coal seam gas development is blighting the land and threatening our future. She says that the economy is not the only part of Australia that needs to be healthy and asks, what about its people, its air, its land and water, its remnant natural heritage and its fast-diminishing unique plants and animals? She also states that since most Australians – most voters – live in the large cities, they reap the infrastructure and service benefits that have come from the “spoils of war” being handed to the government by big companies, at the expense of regional communities.

I next find a study on what Australians want that says our main concerns are about Health Care and Crime and interest in environmental issues has been dropping. And in the World Happiness Index I find we rate 9th, between Ireland and New Zealand. The IMF says we are the 5th richest country in the world, or the 11th in terms of purchasing power.

I then read that maverick politician Bob Katter says we’re an incredible race of people, not because we’re descended from convicts but because we’ve ascended from that. Political journalist Laura Tingle says we’re too expectant of and reliant on government handouts. Public commentator Robert Mann says we’ve lost the capacity to be critically introspective about what it is to be Australian.

Moving on I find a brilliant essay by Richard Flanagan, again in Quarterly Review. He writes on what he terms “the Australian disease”, which he says is the decline of love and the rise of non-freedom. He argues that we are giving away our national freedoms, and allowing non-freedom to grow – manifest in intolerance and disrespect and racism and bigotry and the politics of division and so much more. He says that for much of the last part of the twentieth century Australia seemed to be opening up to something that was “large and good”. We believed we were a generous country, where battlers got a fair go. Whatever happened to that? he asks. Whatever happened to the battlers? Because, he says, if an Afghani Hazara isn’t a battler, then he doesn’t know who is.

And on the whole issue of politics, he says that it is too easy to dismiss, deride or mock our politicians, while it is far harder to try to understand the drift of our times that has led to our politicians to behave so abysmally, or for us to recognise that neither our problems nor their solutions come with political party tags on them. We have reached a moment in our history, he argues, where politics suddenly seems unequal to the terrible problems that beset us.

Then he gives a wonderful point for consideration, asking that perhaps our “homeland” is simply the people we love and those who love us? And perhaps the world advances to a better place simply through the countless acts of everyday goodness that are shown by millions of people to those around them, that we might too easily dismiss as “everyday”.

That’s what I’m looking for, I think and I hold up the page to show Lawson and Caroline and the Don and Cook and young Graham Bennet, but they are back over at the catalogues, trying to see who has the most newspaper references to them.

‘Okay, so that’s why we’re here at the National Library,’ I tell nobody but myself and the surrounding furniture. ‘Each time you come back here there is something new and challenging to engage with. It’s here, but you have to mine it. Oops, divisive analogy. You have to “delve” for it.’ That’s a word about as understood as “girt by sea” in the national anthem, as most people couldn’t actually explain it if pressed to, and so in Canberra is clearly a useful word.

Eventually Caroline Chisholm comes and sits by me and asks, ‘How is it going dear? Are you finding what you are looking for?’

‘I think so,’ I tell her. ‘Though you could spend a year here and barely read a small percentage of the books.’

Caroline Chisholm looks at me closely and just when I’m certain that she’s about to say, ‘You only need one book to know how to act in life and that’s the Bible’, she says, ‘Tell me what this book is about.’ She holds up David Marr’s Panic.

‘Well,’ I say. ‘As best as I can gather, he’s arguing that we are being manipulated into panic by the politics of fear. He reckons that turning fear into panic is a great political art that is based on knowing just how to stack the bonfire and when to slosh on a bucket of kero to set the whole thing off with a satisfying roar. He says that as a nation we are too often manipulated by politicians and the media into panic over things like refugees, boat people, drugs, Aborigines and so on. Or perhaps he’s saying that if you scratch just a little beneath the surface of most Australians you’ll still find racism and paranoia and xenophobia.’

‘You don’t sound too certain,’ she says.

‘No. Because perhaps that’s just his belief, and he was searching for examples to prove it.’

She nods. ‘Or perhaps you just remember the bits of the book that you most agree with or disagree with?’

She’s right. Of course, she’s always bloody right. Every writer has a theory that they hold up examples to prove, and every reader looks for the bits that they agree with themselves to prove their own theories. We read media articles or trawl the internet or favour books that provide messages that we agree with. We ignore the articles and books of our ideological opponents. We listen to debates and praise our heroes and denigrate those we don’t agree with – not on the strength of their argument, but on their ideology. We might as well all be sitting in Parliament!

And I tell her, ‘I was just thinking earlier what it must be like to be able to wander the book stacks here. Miles and miles and miles of books on everything. The closest I can imagine it is when I was at the big Lifeline Book Fair they hold in Canberra each year. It’s the biggest second-hand book fair in the country. Thousands of people fill up boxes and bags of second-hand books, and I was remembering when I was there, standing by the table on Australia politics, looking at several metres of books laid out spine up. There were titles on democracy, government, social movements, immigration, multiculturalism, US-relations, Asian relations, trade unions, multinationals, socialism, liberalism, capitalism, the Howard years, the Hawke years, the Fraser years, the Cold War, the culture wars the history wars, environmental wars, problems with the left, problems with the right, political journalism, the media, globalisation – and each offered a prescription and analysis of the problems and solutions as the author or authors saw it. But when you stood there, scanning down this long, long table of books, you had to wonder whether there was any possibility of a single analysis and solution – or are we, as humans, limited by our mental ability to never grasp more than one piece of the jigsaw puzzle? And if so, how do we link all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together? I mean in physics there is this search for the unified theory of everything that ties all competing theories together. That’s what I think we really need. A single theory that unites all these different wisdoms and perspectives and analyses, allowing for our biases and perspectives but allows for everybody else’s as well.’

Caroline Chisholm nods, and says, ‘That sounds quite similar to something young Donald over there was telling me about. He said he’d read a book that argued that it was becoming increasingly hard for us to keep abreast of change around us as the media fire blips of unrelated information at us, while experts bury us under mountains of narrowly specialised analysis, and popular forecasters present lists of unrelated trends, and none of it ever has any model to show us the interconnections or the way to reverse these problems.’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘That’s the problem of our times. Who wrote it?’

‘It was a book called Future Shock,’ she says. ‘We looked it up in the catalogue. It was published in 1970.’

That’s depressing. Clearly the more things change the more they stay the same. She smiles and pats my hand. ‘I think it might be time for a bit of fresh air,’ she says. So we go out and sit on the steps and watch people coming and going. Some have laptops and are off to study. Some have handbags and are off for a cup of tea or a browse in the bookshop. From here we can look across to the Lobby Restaurant where Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott had to run the gauntlet of protesting Aborigines on Australia Day, with 220 year grievances. Nearby is the Treasury Building where people are busy completing economic modelling on making budget cuts so that this year’s budget returns the current account to the black. Ironic, I think. Further away in front of us, by the lake, we can see the High Court where people will be struggling over the fine points of law. Up the hill at Parliament House similar brains will be working on legislation. And across the road from us in Questacon, the National Science and Technology Centre, there is a meeting going on to discuss whether humanity is reaching, or has reached, a tipping point in world history in terms of our impacts on the planet, and what might be done to communicate this to people to increase awareness about it.

Over the last 250 years since the industrial revolution, or a period encompassing the modern history of Australia, our economic and social growth has been incredibly rapid. Health care and education and wealth have continued to increase. But since the 1950s things have gone a little ballistic. Our social and economic well-being have grown exponentially, but suddenly so have our impacts on the planet with ocean acidification, increased carbon dioxide levels, nutrient loss in soils, water and food shortages and pollution. So we really are one of the best role models for the developed world, as our history mirrors this trajectory. We were settled by Europeans at the start of the industrial revolution and have embraced each technological and social change that has come along. If anyone can demonstrate how to get it right, it deserves to be us. Surely. It was described by the Economist magazine as Australia having to decide what sort of country we want our children to live in, whether we will simply enjoy our prosperity and squander the opportunities presented to us, or set about creating the type of society that other nations envy and want to emulate. If only our leaders are up to the task, it stated.

But of course it’s as much up to us. Are we the ones we fall for every political promise of getting more services for less taxes each year? Somehow believing that a Federal Budget should be any different to a household one, and you can somehow spend more than you earn? More on education and more on health and more on roads and more on sustainable energies and more on policing and more on defence and less taxes to get it. The Parliament and the bureaucracies of Canberra are perpetually being circled by sharks who are lobbying for more funds for their causes, indignantly outraged that their cause is the most important one for the country. But we need to somehow look beyond this frenzied lobbying, and as a people we really need to pay attention to the question of what we want to be as a nation, and as a people, and then decide how are we going to actually afford to be what we want to be?

Canberra is full of monuments to the past, I think, but where else might we locate something that is a little more focussed on visions of our future?

‘Penny for your thoughts,’ says Caroline Chisholm.

‘A penny for yours,’ I say.

‘I’m waiting for you to make the statement that you’ve deduced that life is a journey along a highway. Not just our lives, the obvious metaphor, but that larger journey of humanity can also be seen as a road trip along a highway. But we need to acknowledge that despite our confidence in that we know where we are going, we are really just like Hume and Hovel, setting off into the unknown anew each day, creating the maps as we go.’

‘I wish I’d said that,’ I say.

‘Don’t worry,’ she says. ‘You will.’

I’d actually been thinking that we are all just backseat drivers really, either sitting there in oblivion as to where we are going and complaining when we don’t end up where we want to, or passing comments and judgements the whole journey, but never taking the steering wheel ourselves.

‘Have you had enough thoughts and ideas of the nation for today?’ Caroline Chisholm asks me.

‘I believe I have,’ I tell her. ‘And I also think it’s about time we took Henry Lawson to a pub for a drink.’

‘I thought Canberra didn’t have any pubs,’ she says. ‘Only wine bars and clubs and things.’

‘Aha,’ I say. ‘Canberra has most everything any other city has, but you just have to know where to look. There is even a pub named after King O’Malley, which is another bit of irony, since he was an ardent tea-totaller and abolitionist.’

‘He was an American, did you know,’ she says, ‘Not a Canadian as he claimed, and should never have been allowed to sit in Parliament.’

I laugh. ‘Then his declaring Canberra as Canberra was potentially as null and void as Cook claiming Australia?’

‘Oh dear,’ she says. ‘Do you think we should tell anyone?’

I consider it. ‘There’d only be tears,’ I tell her.

‘Then onwards and inwards, I think you would say,’ she says.

490 kilometres - MY ASS

We drive out of Canberra on a rainy Sunday morning. Going through the outer suburbs we pass several churches that all have quite full car parks. We pass Anglican and Evangelical and Catholic and Presbyterian churches and it clearly pleases Caroline Chisholm to see so many people still choose to spend their Sunday mornings this way.

As we leave Canberra and enter the Barton Highway there is a road sign that says 638 kilometres to Melbourne. One day’s drive if we were just interested in zooming down the Hume Highway, but of course we’re going to take a lot longer than that and travel much further than that, though not as long as H1 and H2, who took two months to reach Melbourne from Yass.

Then we are back in New South Wales. We drive past the small stone church at Wattle Park, just north of Canberra and again Caroline Chisholm nods appreciatively to see the many cars there. There are cows standing contently in the soft rain and creeks have overflown to become broad silver paths across the paddocks. Then we turn off onto the small back roads. We’re heading to the rural township of Gundaroo and there is little traffic about. We pass a few boutique wineries and tall majestic gum trees loom over the road, which start Lawson off, waxing lyrical about the Australian bush. I don’t ruin his imaginings by telling him that most off the people hereabouts all work in Canberra and are more likely professionals than bushmen. The closer we get to Gundaroo the more European trees appear.

The maverick millionaire Dick Smith has a property along this road, just before Gundaroo, and I’m told he has an airstrip there for when he flies in, and I’m also told that he’s one of the reasons that Gundaroo has such super high-speed Wi-Fi connections. We cross the Yass River, which is running high, and then we are in Gundaroo village.

The original settlers of this area were squatters, as early as the 1820s, and the origin of the name is believed to be from the Ngunawal name for the Yass River, which was Gondoroo. The village was fairly slow to develop, not receiving electricity until 1954. In recent years however it has seen a boom of modern squatters, moving out of Canberra to enjoy a rural lifestyle.

Abram and Philippa moved to Gundaroo a few years back, leaving a shared-wall townhouse in the outer-suburbs, and are now renting a house while building their dream home for themselves and their two young kids, where Abe’s parents will also live with them. It will be a solar passive house and water-conserving and fit in with the environment, like most of the new houses being built here.

Abe says they always wanted to live away from suburbia as they found it profoundly alienating, and Philippa describes their time in the Canberra suburbs as living in ‘closeness with strangers’. Like most Canberrans they were born elsewhere, and found it hard to establish any sense of community in Canberra. Philippa’s twin sister had gotten married in Gundaroo, and they always liked the feel of the place. They also had friends who moved out here and told them of a block that had suddenly become available after a land sale had fallen through. They jumped at it.

Like most couples in the township Abe and Philippa still work in Canberra, making the 40 kilometre commute back and forward daily, and despite the cost of fuel and wear and tear on their cars, Abe says he loves the feeling of driving out of the city and feeling the space open up around him and all the pressures and stresses of work just fall away.

‘I didn’t realise until we moved here the impact that the physical environment can have on your emotional state,’ he says. He particularly enjoys going for walks at night, when he can see the stars without the competing lights of the city and can listen to the stillness of the place.

‘Also there is a sense of history that adds to a sense of permanency within the community that is present within the physical fabric of the place,’ he says.

Philippa says she really values the community feeling here, and she strongly believes that people are meant to live in communities. She says she feels that she can invest in this community and her efforts will be rewarded in return. They are both members of the local community church and take part in activities at the school and have made many friends here.

Abe admits that Gundaroo does have a certain sameness of culture and class diversity though, and jokes that it has one of the highest PhD levels per population in Australia. Most of the community are professionals working in Canberra with similar values of wanting to live more sustainably and simply, which leads to an odd conundrum. As more and more people want to experience this feeling of rural community living, it puts pressures on small townships to become something like outer suburbs, and they then lose that rural community feeling. Many of the small communities around Canberra already have housing estates springing up around them, but Gundaroo residents are more resistant to this. There is a lot of discussion about limiting development and maintaining the feel of the township. This means, of course, that it is very difficult for others to join the community and enjoy the lifestyle benefits that those living in Gundaroo enjoy. The current population is about 600 and the residents don’t want to see it grow too quickly beyond that.

But so goes the Australian dream all over the country. Find a scenic location that has high lifestyle appeal, and soon everybody wants to live there until it suddenly loses its lifestyle appeal. It has happened on the Gold Coast, the South Coast of New South Wales, the North Coast, Byron Bay, the Sunshine Coast, many small rural towns around Melbourne and on and on. And the long-term locals decry the fact that cashed-up city-dwellers have moved into their small communities, looking for a taste of what the small communities have, and then they bugger it up by filling it with too many city-dwellers with different attitudes and values, and the locals have to up stumps and move on.

Abe says that some people have already moved out of Gundaroo to smaller communities to the north, because the village is becoming over-developed to their minds.

So I ask them about what it means to be Australian – and also how the local community might react to an influx of foreigners. Like many upper-middle class Australians, Abe says, most people here would be more embarrassed than proud to have an Australia flag on their house, and while it is very tolerant community, it is easy to be open-minded when there are few cultural and class differences about. He says that if a Chinese family moved in who were basically upper-middle class, they’d fit in easily. But if a bogan family moved in who wanted to develop a lot of things, they’d have troubles.

In 1999 the community developed a Vision Plan for the township that was “a statement by this community of the assets it wishes to protect and how it wishes the village and surroundings to develop in future”. The Plan states that while population growth and other changes are inevitable, “good planning now will ensure that the intrinsic value of the area is not eroded and that the historical, social, cultural, economic and environmental fabric is preserved for future generations”. That means no housing estates, very slow growth, and hanging fiercely onto their Australian dream.

Reflecting this, Abe says that in 20 years he’d like Gundaroo to be just like it is now, but acknowledges that some form of development is going to be inevitable. It is an odd thing to have reached a point in history where the word development carries a sense of minor dread. But that’s where we are, looking down the road ahead of us, with competing visions as to what it should be like where we arrive at.

So we pile back into the car and head down our own road to the future, in this case the Gundaroo Road, heading back to the Hume Highway, about 30 kilometres due north. We pass through the tiny hamlet of Bellmount Forest and see new houses being built – undoubtedly the refugees from Gundaroo seeking a smaller village to live in. We then cross into the Upper Lachlan Shire, and re-enter Wiradjuri country. Over a small rise we suddenly see the plains spread out around us and a troop of about 40 windmills on the hills to the east.

Then we are passing over the Hume Highway, with trucks roaring past beneath us and we head into the village of Gunning. ‘This is a special place,’ I tell my travelling companions. ‘This is where Hamilton Hume had a station that was the further most point of European settlement out of Sydney when they set off on their journey.’

The town’s sign says Gunning has a population of 530, but that might be dated since the place looks a little larger than Gundaroo, with a train station and service station and post office and war memorial and all the trappings of a small town you’d expect to find. The main street is a part of the Old Hume Highway and we cruise down looking for some memorial to Hume and Hovell. But we don’t see anything.

Following the signs for the local tourist information we end up at the service station, which doubles as the town’s information booth. The heavily-bearded guy behind the counter says he’s never heard of a Hume and Hovell memorial in town, though admits he’s from the nearby smaller town of Dalton, and gives me a handful of brochures on the town just in case. I skim through them and discover that Hamilton Hume’s brother, John Kennedy Hume was shot dead by a bushranger in Gunning in 1840. The Whitton Gang had attacked the town and John and his brother Francis and a few others of the town surrounded the gang leader, Thomas Whitton, in a store. The bushranger Whitton told John to thrown down his gun when he was confronted by him, and when John refused he shot him three times. Thomas Whitton was subsequently captured and hanged two months later. But there is no mention of a Hume and Hovell monument. So I ask the next people who walk in to pay for their petrol.

They are locals and while the bloke does the ‘Human what?’ question, the elderly lady who is with him knows exactly what I’m talking about and tells me that it’s about five or six kilometres out of town back up the Old Hume Highway. ‘On the left of the road. You can’t miss it,’ she says.

The two blokes then seem to have a memory flash and agree that it is out that way somewhere. So we head back down the road and after five or six kilometres, just as she’d said, we see a plinth up on top of the embankment by the road on the left. We pull over and climb out to read it. It has the text twice, once with dark lettering on an old white stone background that is a little faded and hard to read, and then redone in modern gold or brass lettering on a dark background, like subtitles for the heritage-impaired. It says that the Hume and Hovell expedition to Port Phillip set off from this site on 17 October 1824 and that this was the site of the Hume Grant – who might sound like Hugh Grant’s cousin, but refers to the land grant given to Hamilton Hume.

‘Didn’t you say they set out from Appin?’ asks Cook.

‘That was their first point of departure,’ I tell him. ‘This was considered the point at which they left the known and started travelling into the unknown.’

‘That’s absurd,’ says Cook. ‘You start your journey where you start your journey. You don’t start it several times over at different places.’

‘Don’t talk to me about it,’ I say. ‘Talk to Hume and Hovell.’

‘I expect we’ll be running across them sometime on this trip,’ says Caroline Chisholm.

‘Yes, I expect so,’ I say. ‘And there’s quite a few things I’d like to ask them too.’

‘It’s just absurd,’ says Cook.

‘What bird?’ asks Lawson, cupping a hand to his ear and looking up into the sky.

As they set out from this point, Hovell wrote in his journal, on Sunday 17 October:

“After brakefast we left Mr Humes place, and took our departure, it being the last station. Our strength being as follows, 4 Bullocks & Cart, and one horse – belonging to myself – 2 horses and cart & 1 Bullock, belonging to Mr Hume we traveled 12 Miles & rested for the night, but on the road the dogs killed 1 large kangaroo, weather very squaley with rain – country very good for Cattle – and principally composed of Slate coarse Cristal, and Granet.”

We hop back into the car and head back into Gunning. After driving around the side streets and inexplicably getting lost we stop a young boy inexplicably riding a unicycle and ask him the way to Dalton. He looks at us like he can’t believe we don’t know and tells us which road to take. We thank him and praise his unicycle riding skills and head down a smaller country road to the smaller township of Dalton, which the town sign tells us has a population of only 100. But it does have a pub and it is quite busy this wet Sunday afternoon with people sitting both inside and out. There is a metal sculpture of Ned Kelly made of scrap metal and two scrap metal horses beside him.

‘I’m certain Ned Kelly never came to Dalton’ Caroline Chisholm says in a chiding tone. I go into the pub with a rather odd request to put to a barman. ‘Hi. I’m looking for the old temperance hall,’ I say.

‘Hector and Kath?’ the barman asks.

‘Yes,’ I tell him. He tells me where they live and even what type of alcohol they drink so I can take a suitable bottle with me. He’d probably tell me all sorts of things about them that they’d rather not be widely known if I’d pressed him. But I settle for a bottle of wine of preference and follow his directions to the old temperance hall.

Kath and Hector moved out to Dalton in 2002. They had been living in Queanbeyan, just south of Canberra prior to that, but found that while they were trying to save up a deposit for a house the costs of houses was rising at a higher rate, and the place in Dalton was within their price range. At first they continued commuting the 170 kilometres or so round trip each day, but it was wearing them down, so they re-arranged their lives. Kath now works mostly from home and Hector is a house husband

Their house still has the original brickwork and foundation stone of the old temperance hall built by the “oddfellows society” in 1890. The oddfellows were a guild, like the masons, but made up of mixed members of smaller odd guilds, which gave them their name. Winston Churchill was an oddfellow. The oddfellows of Dalton were actually mostly Methodists, and they had a secret password that you had to utter to be let into the hall. That door is now bricked over on Kath and Hector’s house, and a new door has been built around the side so we don’t need to know a password to be let in. And of course we bring a bottle of wine with us, which wouldn’t have been permitted once upon a time – though Hector says that unfortunately he is on antibiotics and can’t drink alcohol. Spirits of the past, I think.

Theirs is a small house so I’m thinking there clearly weren’t as many temperance supporters around in the early days. Certainly there are few now in town, as the Dalton pub is one of the centres of the community – along with the school, that has only 15 students. Many nights in the week there are more people in the pub than that. The sign into Dalton says 1,100 people live there but Kath and Hector laugh at that and say it is only a few more than 100.

They tell me that living in Dalton is very quiet and you could easily go a few weeks without seeing any of your neighbours, especially in winter. Nevertheless it is clear that most of Dalton knows most of Dalton, and they tell me that even people who have lived in the town for twenty years are not considered locals by some. I note that Dalton is a small town, not a “village” like the slightly larger Gundaroo.

‘For a professional couple who work in Canberra, like many locals do, they can find it a bit hard to mix,’ Kath said. ‘The kids really make a difference though.’ Kath and Hector have two young kids, which means when their youngest joins his sister in school their children will comprise 15 per cent of the population of the school. Not many parents can boast that.

Kath and Hector’s half-acre block has new trees planted, a veggie garden, shed and play house and wonderful views of hills to the east that the sun set shines across gloriously. They also have a rebuilding and repairing program to do on their house that is going to keep them busy for more than a few more years in Dalton.

One of Dalton’s more interesting claims to fame is that it is reputed to have the nation's highest rate of earthquakes and tremors. Kath and Hector says that it is more like a big bang or crack when one occurs, but they are more worried about the seismic changes to the district from a huge gas-fired power plant that is being constructed about three kilometres from town. The plant, which will cost $1.5 billion and is said to be the largest such plant in the Southern Hemisphere, will only result in perhaps one part-time cleaning job for the locals though.

Kath and Hector say that there had been a significant protest movement amongst the townspeople, but they were rolled as often happens in disputes between small communities and large development projects. They think it will keep their house’s value low, making it hard to ever sell up and move somewhere else. Several places in town are already vacant, which is rare for country towns within commute of Canberra.

It seems all up and down the Hume Highway small communities each have their own development issues to deal with – housing estates or coal seam gas or windmills, or power plants or highway bypasses. The country idyll is getting harder to maintain as energy and infrastructure development encroaches more widely around the country.

Kath says she isn’t quite sure what it means to be Australian, and they joke that they are the multicultural part of Dalton, being about the only people in town who aren’t white Anglo Aussies. Kath’s father is from Croatia and Hector came to Australia from Argentina when he was very young.

Kath says, ‘I don’t have a particular feeling of being Australian, but I’m really glad I was born here and live here. When I see what’s happening in other countries, with set rules and restrictions and so on – you can largely live the life you want to live here.’

Before we leave them Hector wants to know who is going to play him in the movie of my book. I ask who he would like to play him, and without any hesitation he says, ‘Johnny Depp.’ He often has the same small beard and moustache that Hector wears, but would have to trim his hair very, very short. Then we ask Kath who she would like to play her. She mulls on that a moment as we throw names at her. ‘Demi Moore? Sharon Stone? Angelina Jolie?’ She says, ‘Meryl Streep could manage it.’ But she’d also have to shave her locks off to have short hair like Kath’s.

From Dalton we drive back to Gunning and from there it’s about 30 kilometres to Yass along the Hume Freeway. After the small country roads it’s a sudden shock to be sharing the road with large B-double trucks screaming along the wet roads. We pass a huge billboard advertising a McDonald’s road stop at Yass, with a big yellow M followed by YASS, but no matter how I try and see the advertiser’s intent, all I see is: “MY ASS. Open from 6am daily”.

We cross several creeks and the ubiquitous Native Plant Regeneration Area signs on the centre strip of the divided road and numerous signs giving conflicting distances to MY ASS – 20 kilometres, then 16 kilometres, then 18 kilometres – and then a flashing electric sign telling us that the Sturt Highway west of Wagga Wagga is closed due to flooding.

Charles Sturt, after whom that highway is named, was a friend of Hamilton Hume and in 1829-30 they had together charted the Castlereagh and Bogan Rivers in central and northern New South Wales. Sturt later invited Hume to come with him on an expedition to chart the Murrumbidgee River, which Hume did not join, and had one less landmark named after him as a result. On that expedition Sturt named the large river he encountered the Murray River, not knowing it had already been named the Hume by Hume and Hovell in 1824. But more of that later.

Then over a hill and we enter the Yass Valley, Ngunawal country, and the Yass Plains spread out before us with low rolling hills and white sheep. We turn off the Hume and head into Yass where the town sign tells us that it is a centre of Wool, Waterways and Wine and that the population is 5400 – though I suspect that probably needs updating too, based on the growing number of housing estates around the outskirts of town.

Our first stop at Yass is Cooma Cottage, the residence of Hamilton Hume, where he spent his last years as an influential landowner. The property is now owned by the National Trust. I park outside the gate and make my way across the wet yard to the main building. It is long and low with an impressive set of pillars out the front that must have impressed the neighbours of the day. I step inside and a lady looks up in surprise, clearly not expecting a visitor on this rainy Sunday.

She introduces herself as Jacquie and offers to show me around the property. Of course we agree. ‘Just the one?’ she asks. I don’t even look back to see the offended looks on my companions’ faces. ‘Yes. Just the one thanks.’

Now Jacquie is a font of all information on Hamilton Hume, which is the real reason we’re here – to try and get some feel of the man. I have to be honest here, that despite all the research and journeys through archives and back roads, I’ve not really been able to get a sense of Hamilton Hume. The only well-known photos of both him and Hovell were taken very late in life, and always makes me imagine two cantankerous old gits travelling down the highway together. So I ask Jacquie what he was like. She tells me that he was a big man. That he filled a room. But he was also a dour man. He bought the house from a pastoralist, Cornelius O’Brien, in 1839 for ₤600. At that time there were about 170 people living in Yass. Over the next 20 or so years he embarked on another long journey, pioneering the great Australian tradition of home renovations. He lived there until his death in 1873, at the grand old age of 76. He refurbished the kitchen and bathroom – of course – and built rooms that could be used for entertaining or business or relaxation.

Over the years Hume embarked on an enthusiastic and creative process of building extensions, adding his own version of Palladian style wings and a Greek Revival portico. The gardens contained many notable 19th century trees and shrubs, with vistas of sheep grazing pastures. And the other great Australian tradition of letting houses go to the dogs over the years was continued by subsequent inhabitants with the last tenant even keeping his horses inside the house. It was purchased by the National Trust in 1970 and restoration slowly began.

Jacquie shows me the fine wood work around the doors and a desk that Hamilton Hume may have actually sat at, and may have actually written things at. Great attention has been paid to restoring the floral wallpaper based on scraps of what had remained, and the house is now furnished with pieces from early colonial times, including a tin bath tub, to show how it might have looked at the time.

Hume and his wife, Elizabeth’s bed has even been rebuilt there. I walk around the house, looking at the fine details, the places where the wattle and daub original walls are displayed and also where brick work has replaced it. Jacquie shows me kitchen appliances and takes me down into the low damp cellar and then leads me into one room at the far end of the house. She tells me to watch my step, to come into the room carefully. I do. My first impression is the wallpaper. It is blue and floral and very, very loud. Jacquie tells me this is known as the screaming room. She also tells me that because of the floral style of the wallpaper and the lock on the inside of the door, it has been believed to have been a room that a woman used as a retreat or a sick room.

Then she tells me that people who have come into this room who said they were psychic have told her that it was a very sad room. I try and feel it. I really wish I could feel it. It would be very easy to write that I did, but I didn’t. Like I didn’t find Hamilton Hume in the house despite expecting to find him sitting on the back veranda looking out at the flooded creek or stomping around the stables. There were moments that it felt like there was a trace of the man ducking out of the rooms before we stepped into them, but I failed to find him. But perhaps it was the same reason I didn’t feel the sadness of the screaming room – because I had five noisy ghosts from the past looking over my shoulder, commenting on the wallpaper and choice of furniture like prospective home buyers.

Before leaving I asked Jacquie if she’d known anything about the story I’d once heard from a member of the Ngunawal people of the region that Hume had left some illegitimate Aboriginal children in Yass. She said that she had not heard that, but had heard stories that he had sired children in the district. He and his wife had no children themselves, and I wondered if there was a story in that about why his wife might have retreated to that screaming room and filled it with sadness. But I’d have to find Hume somewhere to ask him.

Back in the car I pull out my map and everyone crowds around to look at it. ‘What course are we taking?’ Cook asks.

‘We’re going up into the mountains here,’ I say. ‘From yeas to Wee Jasper to Tumut and then on to Batlow and Tumbarumba.’ Bennett leans over and stabs the map to the north west. ‘But I need to go the Gundagai,’ he says.

‘Tumut is close,’ I say, remaining non-committal as to whether I’ll take him the extra 35 kilometres or so out of my way to get there. He grumbles, suspecting that I won’t, as he’s only from the B-list of history. ‘Anyway, into Yass first to check out the road conditions ahead,’ I say.

‘Rivers flood easily in the mountains,’ Lawson tells Bennett with a conspiratorial wink.

‘We should be alright,’ I say. ‘I’ve been planning this trip a long time.’ As if that will make it somehow disaster-proof. On the way into Yass there is a sign I point out, through the pouring rain, stating that Level 3 Water Restrictions are in place.

‘What significant historical event happened here?’ asks Cook. ‘Not another riot?’

‘Not as far as I know,’ I say, ‘Though you’re welcome to start one. It would add a bit of excitement to the story.’

‘Something must have happened here,’ says Caroline Chisholm. ‘Every place has significant history of its own.’

She’s right, of course. ‘Well the name Yass is believed to have come from a local Aboriginal word, "Yarrh", which is thought to have meant “running water”, and the town was once considered as a location for the national capital, and it has had its share of deaths from car crashes and a few murders and the odd earthquake, but I can’t actually think of anything outstanding in Yass’s history that would make it a contender for a documentary on the Discovery Channel. It’s a fairly normal and peaceful rural town from my reading of things.’

‘Well that in itself should be worth commenting on,’ she says. ‘There is not enough written about the history of common decency.’

Again she’s right, or course. When isn’t she?

We drive down the common and decent main street and pull up outside the tourist information centre. It is pretty busy for a rainy Sunday. There is a large bus pulled up there, with an Outback Spirit sign on it.

We go into the Centre and find it full of pensioners from the bus. I wait for a turn at the counter and it seems that everyone not off the bus is asking the same question, about which roads have been closed by flooding. We all press around a map as the lady there tells us what she knows from the NSW Roads and Traffic Authority website, and other travellers update this. One man says the road to Wee Jasper is definitely closed and another says they were at Tumbarumba and had to detour back to the Hume Highway to get through to Yass.

I run my finger along all the variables of back roads I can see on the map that might provide a chance of getting closer to Hume and Hovell’s path, but they are all closed in places. One of the pensioners off the bus says that they are just going to go straight down the Hume now and that they wanted to check if it was closed anywhere, but the lady at the Centre says while the Old Hume Highway used to flood in a few places, the new highway rarely floods.

‘But I’ve been planning this trip for a long time,’ I mumble to no one in particular except myself. The only consolation I have is that Hume and Hovell also had a lot of trouble crossing the Murrumbidgee River too. They reached the Murrumbidgee River on 19 October 1824 and found it was flooded. They estimated the current was running at about three or four miles an hour and they waited there for three days to see if the waters would go down any, but they did not. Hume at first tried to make a native canoe using bark from a tree, but it split, so he then took the wheels off a cart, covered it with a tarpaulin and made a boat of it. Thomas Boyd and Hume swam across the river with a rope in their teeth and when it was tied on both sides they were able to ferry the party and stores across the river.

Outside the Centre Lawson and Cook are pouring over the town map on the wall. ‘Look,’ says Cook and points at Cooks Hill Road. ‘That’s probably named after me.’

‘I’ve got a park,’ says Lawson, and indicates Henry Lawson Park.

Cook sulks a moment and then says, ‘Banjo Paterson Park looks bigger and stabs at the green square one block over from the main street.’ Now Lawson sulks. I shepherd them back into the car and Bennett asks, ‘So we’re going to Gundagai?’

‘We’re going to the cemetery,’ I say.

‘Who is there?’ asks Caroline Chisholm.

‘Hamilton Hume,’ I say. ‘We’re going to try and catch a glimpse of him.’

Now I foolishly think that finding Hume’s grave will no harder than finding Hovell’s grave in Goulburn, but this cemetery is huge and just goes and goes and goes, with more inhabitants it seems than the current town has living in it. The first section I search through turns out to be just the Catholic section and over a rise is the Presbyterian Section, followed further on by the Church of England section. I imagine there are Methodist and Jewish and other corners in here somewhere as well. There is even a corner reserved just for nuns with similar white crosses marked with each sister’s name.

Some tombstones are recent and some are aged and in disrepair. Some are cracked and fallen to the ground and some of have metal railings around them to protect them. All have beautiful view of the Yass Valley behind them though – apart from the power pylons there. I see rows of family names: Vallances and Franklins and then a long row of plain unmarked concrete crosses for the unknown whose family names will never be recorded.

Finally I see a signpost to Hamilton Hume’s grave and follow it along a row of old tombstones until I find it. Now I’d had certain expectations of how it should feel standing there in front of the mortal remains of Hume, but after walking through rows and rows and rows of the dead I find I’m a little puffed and am just thinking, ‘Thank God for that. Found him at last.’

His tomb has a plinth, of course, for him, and next to that is an ornate gravestone for his wife Elizabeth, and between them is a stone with the story of his several journeys of discovery chiselled into it, including opening a new route over the Blue Mountains, and ending with his own words: “For the sake of those who bear my name I should wish it to be held in remembrance as that of one who with small opportunities but limited resources did what he could for his native land.” But the thing that most sticks in my mind is the giant cobweb that is hanging between them. And on the cobweb is the goddamned biggest fattest spider I’ve ever seen in my life. Now call me arachnophobic if you like, but this spider would have gobbled up the giant spider Shelob from the Lord of the Rings and spat out the remains just for an entrée.

I take a photo of the tomb, hoping to catch some of the feeling I’d hoped to find from looking at it later, keeping a careful eye on the monster spider, and then step carefully away from it. Then I notice something interesting. Several of the tombstones nearby have familiar names on them, and even though he may or may not have had any children, he still had enough influence for others to bear his name: Charles Hume Barbour, John Hamilton Harris, Rawdon Hamilton Hume to name a few.

On the way out of Yass, heading back to the Hume Highway near the My Ass McDonald’s road stop we see a hand-written sign for a lost dog. It reads: “Please Help me. Lost. Jack-Russell, Full Male, 12 yrs Old, White & Tan, Docked Tail, Micro-chipped, Missing from Glover Dr Duro Estate. Please.”

I find it a very sad sign, and I wonder how long it has been there. But then, further along, is another sign that is even sadder. This one is a set of four crosses, three of them hand-made out of welded iron, covered with fading wreaths such as distinguish roadside accident memorials all over the country. It is another set of tombstones. One reads: “Paul Hill. Loving Husband and Father. 20 – 3 – 09.” Another reads “RIP Mathew Our Loved Brother”. The third is harder to read in the rain, and is on rusted metal and seems to read: “RIP ELSY”. The fourth cross is just the remnants of a white wooden cross. I wonder what their stories were and if there was any connection to the deaths. I can see that they were all recent and were accidental and they were mourned by loved ones who erected public markers so that everybody can see their loss.

About 25 kilometres out of Yass we pass a turn off to the Burrinjuck Dam. ‘Damn!’ I say, wishing to turn down that road anyway and head up into the mountains and follow Hume and Hovell’s path more closely. But if the dam is overflowing there are going to be more blocked roads that way than anywhere. Everywhere the Murrumbidgee River flows along its winding, meandering path like a snake across the landscape is going to be flooded. The land around here is flat and looks like good sheep land. Good flood land. I turn my head and ask Cook, ‘Ever have second thoughts about having declared the land Terra Nullius?’

‘Why do you ask?’ he asks.

‘Well, there’s an argument put forward by historian Bill Gammage that Aboriginal land management was responsible for the state of the landscape, you know.’

‘What do you mean?’ asks Cook. ‘It was entirely untended and wild.’

‘Well, according to Gammage it wasn’t. He says that Aboriginal people actually managed the land in a far more systematic and scientific fashion than we have ever realised and he likens the outcome to a huge estate.’

Cook frowns. ‘Gammage says that many early settlers remarked how much like parklands the landscape was,’ I say. ‘He reckons that through their use of fire and the natural life cycles of native plants and animals they were able to maintain the land to support them, and they did it with far less effort than early European settlers ever did.’

‘Preposterous,’ says Cook.

‘Of course the Europeans viewed the landscape through European eyes,’ I say, ‘And they saw it as an opportunity to run sheep and cattle and plant crops, and so in some places they cleared the land for these and in other places they let it grow wild. But both these practices did a lot of damage to the land.’

‘It seems improved to me,’ says Cook.

‘Well over-farming has led to a lot of reduced productivity from the land. And if you follow Bill Gammage’s argument, this also means that the uncultivated land only became wild and overgrown when the native peoples were no longer able to tend to it, and when that happened that’s when huge bushfires became a problem. So our tendency to leave national parks alone to grow thickly is actually detrimental and a potentially dangerous practice that we should reconsider.’

‘So you’re suggesting we should consider more Aboriginal land care methods?’ asks Caroline Chisholm.

‘That’s how I understood it,’ I say.

Lawson is considering this deeply. Bennett is looking out the window. Cook is sulking. ‘I still say it looks pretty good out there to me,’ he says. ‘Certainly an improvement on the wild bushland that used to grow around Botany Bay.’

‘Or the big oil refineries that grow there now,’ I say. He sulks some. We drive past Bookham, which is barely a blink by the highway. Just a few properties and a lot of agricultural machinery standing in the rain. The village was named by Lady Jane Franklin, the wife of the Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, Sir John Franklin, who is better known for getting lost on a voyage to discover the north-west passage above Canada and the years and men and ships that were lost in trying to find him. Anyway, Lady Jane Franklin was one of the first women to travel the Hume, or the Sydney Road, going overland from Melbourne to Sydney in 1839.

To the right of Bookham is Illalong Road. ‘That’s where Banjo Paterson grew up,’ I say. ‘He went to school in nearby Binalong and wrote lots of his poems about this area here.’ I look up into the rear view mirror. Henry Lawson doesn’t seem amused and is muttering to himself something about blue-blooded rich boys and doggerel.

‘Should we go down and have a look if there’s a monument or anything to him?’ I ask.

‘Not unless you want to record another riot,’ says Caroline Chisholm, laying a hand on my arm. ‘Let’s just drive on. Henry can be a little sensitive about Paterson.’ I look back up in the mirror and see Henry and Cook are now both sulking. ‘Okay,’ I say. ‘What about Ben Hall? He used to range around here. I believe there is a memorial beside the highway for him somewhere nearby. They stuck up a stage coach around here and had a shoot out with the police, killing one of them. Let’s look for that.’

Caroline puts her hand on my arm again and shakes her head a little. I look up into the rear-view mirror and see that young Bennett is now sulking too. I sigh and keep driving.

‘Did you know that I came this way,’ says Caroline Chisholm, ‘One my great overland trek southwards.’

‘I didn’t know you made a trek this far,’ I say. There are a few things about her I know, such as that her scheme of settling families of small lots of land across New South Wales was largely a failure, as was discovered after World War One with the soldier settler schemes. And I know that she had been a Protestant who converted to Catholicism and spent long times away from her husband and many small children, taking settlers around the colony finding them jobs or families to live with.

‘Oh yes,’ she says. ‘In 1844, twenty years after Hume and Hovell I left Sydney with a party of over two hundred souls, travelling along what is now the Hume Highway, with them. We didn’t get quite as far as Hume and Hovell got, or course, but we reached Gundagai and then went on as far as Tumut.’

‘That must have been quite a journey,’ I say.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Children were born along the way and some others died, but it was a remarkable journey. And do you know what they said of me afterwards?’

Of course I don’t know, so I ask her, ‘What?’

‘Well,’ she says, and lowers her voice to a whisper, ‘If Captain James Cook discovered Australia – if John Macarthur planted the first seeds of its extraordinary prosperity if Ludwig Leichhardt penetrated and explored its before unknown interior – Carole Chisholm has done more; she has peopled – she alone has colonised it in the true send of the term.’

I look across and see she’s blushing slightly with pleasure and then look in the rear-view mirror to see if any of the blokes heard her. If they did they are not acknowledging it though. We pass Connor’s Creek which is trying its best to become a river and then on the highway divide we see these huge wheel ruts where a big truck has recently slipped off the wet road and failed to respect the flimsy signs warning people to keep off the native plant regeneration area, and ploughed these twin large troughs through the shrubs and bushes, churning them into two muddy trenches. That would have been something scary to see, I think. Then we pass a roadside Water Supply Catchment Area sign, where a car is stopped and a young man is pissing against the sign. If I’d invented the scene no one would ever have believed it, you know.

At Jugiong, State Emergency Services volunteers in bright-coloured vests are working to hold back the flood waters and keep people out of danger. There has been an evacuation order given for the town and there has already been news on the radio of one body having been pulled from a swollen creek near Braidwood in New South Wales. The small township is built right by the Murrumbidgee River, and boasts a “Stop, Revive, Survive in Jugiong” sign to invite motorists in. But today the road off the Hume, Riverside Drive, is more river than riverside, and is closed. I pull off the highway from the next exit and drive along the main street. I see several locals are working beside a huge pile of sand that has delivered by some truck, making sandbags.

I continue on down the road to where a roadblock has been set up, and get out of my car to talk to the two SES guys there by the swollen river that stretches about 100 metres across. They’re from Harden, about 40 kilometres to the north. They tell me the flooding is going to get worse before it gets better as there is over 160,000 mega litres of water coming over the top of the Burrinjuck dam and the Murrumbidgee river is going to be flooded all the way to Wagga Wagga and beyond. I can’t even guess how much water that is, but is sounds an awful lot.

I ask about evacuations and they point to the river that is lapping across the road beside us. ‘Everyone down that way is already out,’ they say. We’re standing at an intersection and on one corner is an old service station that has been converted into a house that has been sandbagged all around the doors. Water is already probing around one side of it. On the other side is a NSW fire services building. I think that a bit odd that an emergency services building has been built in such a flood-prone location.

‘How much higher is the river going to get?’ I ask.

One of the guys, the more talkative one, walks across and shows me a faded white line on the road. ‘That’s where the last big flood of October 2010 reached,’ he says. I try and estimate what that height will mean for the house and the fire services building. They’re going to get their share of water I think.

I wish the guys all the best and drive back into Jugiong. ‘Let’s give them a hand with filling those sandbags,’ I say. Lawson and Cook look appalled. But when we get there the number of locals has increased dramatically, including small kids in brightly-coloured gumboots and there are now more volunteers than shovels. I catch the eye of one young mother. She has several littlies in raincoats in the back of her ute. I give her the slow rural nod and she nods back.

‘It’s the thought that counts,’ says Caroline Chisholm as we continue on.

If you take the old Hume Highway out of Jugiong and don’t rejoin the new Hume Highway you can follow it along until it reaches a dead end with a bush growing out the middle of the road. The bitumen disappears into the bush and grass and reappears 100 metres or so as the Hume Freeway, highway 31. Cut off by bush and trees like the road through Jugiong has been cut off by the river, I think.

‘About this stage in their travels Hume and Hovell also hit a dead-end of sorts,’ I tell my passengers as if to explain things. ‘Having crossed the flooded Murrumbidgee River they advanced to find themselves hemmed in by mountains. In trying to find a way past them Hume went in one direction and Hovell went the other. While Bland described this as “The party now separated; Mr. Hovell, with one of the men, following a chain of ponds in the direction N.W. for four or five miles...” When they found that way impassable he stated that “they would have returned to the tent, but lost their way in the attempt to find an emu which they had killed on their way out....” They finally returned to their tent the next morning.

‘Hume told the story a little differently however, describing it as: “Mr Hovell lost himself for part of two days, and when I found him, he was actually, but unsuspectingly, travelling back in the direction of Yass.”

‘You don’t mean the good Doctor William Bland?’ Caroline Chisholm asks me.

‘Um I believe that was his full name,’ I say. ‘Did you know him?’

‘Quite well,’ she says. Of course she knew him. Why would I even think that she hadn’t? ‘In my latter years he was very good to me when I was quite ill. He was a very fascinating man. Transported to the colonies for killing a man in a duel in India after a wardroom argument while in the navy, and then working his way up to becoming a very respectable member of society. Did you know that the very first photograph taken in New South Wales was taken of him, in 1845?’

I didn’t know that.

‘And I gather you’re saying that he wrote Mr Hume and Hovel’s journals up?’ she asks. ‘Then it must be quite an accurate account.’

‘Well, there was actually some disagreement on what he’d written years later,’ I say. ‘But I suppose he was basing it all on the information he had in front of him at the time.’

‘His first wife was a bit of a trollop, did you know,’ Caroline almost whispers. ‘Very scandalous.’

‘First rate author, Trollope,’ says Lawson. ‘This chap Bland’s wife was related to him you say?’ I leave that to Caroline to explain and turn the car around. We rejoin the trucks and racing cars. We pass the bulging waters of Cooney’s Creek and Black Springs Creek and then a large sign by the road that asks, “Where will you be five minutes after you die?” That gives us all pause to think, but not sufficient pause to decelerate.

‘What did that mean?’ asks Cook.

‘I think it was a reference to the afterlife,’ says Caroline Chisholm.

‘Then why don’t they just say that?’ he asks.

‘It’s called metaphor,’ says Lawson.

‘What’s the use of it?’ asks Cook.

‘To make you think of it in a new way.’

‘It’s made me think how silly it is,’ says Cook,

‘It’s about trying to instil a sense of fear into you,’ says Caroline Chisholm. ‘Where do you fear you will be after you die?’

‘That’s easy,’ says Cook. ‘Forgotten.’

‘Yes,’ agrees Lawson. ‘That’s about the worse place you could be. Do you know, if I go into a pub and say that I’m Henry Lawson, and is that worth a free drink, most young bar staff, with tattoos and ear-rings just stare at me like they’ve never heard of me.’

‘Disappearing off the money was the start of it,’ says Caroline Chisholm.

‘Before that,’ says Lawson.

‘I was on a fifty cent piece,’ says Cook. ‘But you don’t see them around anymore.’

‘You lot don’t know when you’ve got it good,’ says Bennett. ‘No one had ever heard of me when I was alive even.’

‘Sorry,’ asks Lawson, cupping a hand to his ear. ‘What did he say?’

‘Exactly,’ mumbles Bennett and slumps into his seat like a surly teenager whose iPhone has run out of battery power.

‘So why don’t you tell us about your friend Moonlite,’ says Caroline Chisholm. ‘I’m sure we’d all like to hear about him.’

Bennet just scowls for a moment and then says, ‘It wasn’t his real name, you know. His real name was Andrew Scott. He was a gentleman too. Well educated. He grew up in Ireland but went to school in England and trained to be a cleric. That’s what he first did when he got to the colonies, worked as a cleric in Bacchus Marsh. But it was his destiny to be more than that, you see. He knew it and so when he took all that money from the bank in Mount Egerton it wasn’t thieving. It was fulfilling his destiny. That’s when he took the name Moonlite. He left a note behind signed Moonlite. It was pretty clever really, see, cause the way he spelled it would make you think that he didn’t know how to spell properly and hadn’t been to school like. That’s why he wasn’t blamed for it. They blamed the bank teller who tried to tell everyone it was Andrew Scott that done it, because he recognised his voice and the way he walked with a limp. That was a war wound he got when he was young, fighting in Italy, or against the Maori or somewhere. He went to Sydney then and bought a sailing boat to take to Fiji, but they stopped him going out of the harbour for passing a bad cheque to pay for it and put him in gaol. He didn’t tell many people about this, but he actually told them he was insane and they transferred him to an asylum. He wasn’t actually mad but. And don’t think for a moment that he was. But when he got out of there things went really bad for him. They took him to Pentridge and locked him up there for the Mount Egerton robbery. That was a terrible place. But at least he met James Nesbitt there. They were more than chums, see. They were as close as any two men were ever likely to be. You should have seen them together. They were just so happy in each other’s company.’

He grows quiet for a minute and then says, ‘But don’t think there was nothing bad about that either, cause there wasn’t. It was just the way they were. And then he started recruiting us boys when he got out. But they were treating him bad again. He tried to get a job and he tried to lecture about prison reform and they wouldn’t leave him alone. Kept telling people not to go to his lectures. Wouldn’t leave him be to earn an honest living. What other choice did he have, you know? He found us boys one by one, till there were five of us. Thomas Rogan, Thomas Williams, Gus Werneckie, James Nesbitt and me. Some of us had come to his lectures or he found us and said he’d help us. And he did. We were his family now, see. We belonged together. But not there in Melbourne. There was no future for us there. So we snuck out of town and headed north. We were going to go to Sydney and get a ship and go to Fiji. We’d live in the sunshine with young dark women to be our servants. We’d grow coconuts or flax or something and become rich. We’d have followed him anywhere for the promises he made us.

‘But still they wouldn’t let us alone. He told us that policemen were following us and we’d have to move quickly. Some people stopped us and asked us if we were the Kelly gang.’ He laughs at that. ‘Moonlite says Ned Kelly was an uneducated oaf. A dangerous violent upstart. It really angered him to be thought to be Ned Kelly. He said, no one will remember his name 100 years from now, but they’ll remember the name Moonlite.’ He laughs again. ‘Things didn’t turn out quiet that way though, did they.’

He’s quiet for a bit and then Caroline says, ‘How did it all end, dear?’

‘Well,’ Bennett says, ‘We was getting near to Wagga Wagga and didn’t have much in the way of money or food and were really done in and Moonlite tells us he knows a station, Wantabadgery, where we can get some work. So we head there, but we find that the station has changed hands, and they keep us sitting out there in the yard like dogs or something for hours and then come and tell us that there’s no work for us and not to be expecting any handouts. Well we went back into the bush where we was cold and wet and starving and Moonlite determined he wouldn’t have it. Wouldn’t tolerate it. He worked himself up into quite a frenzy over it. The injustice and indignity of it, he called it. Then he led us back to the station and we bailed them up. You should have seen him then. He was never finer. He had everyone assembled in the room to listen to his sermons about destiny and injustice and everybody else who came to the property was bailed up until there were 25 of them there. Ned Kelly never done anything so well as Moonlite did it.

‘Well the next morning the police arrived. Somebody had told them we were there, but they were cowards. We fired some shots at them and they galloped off. That was a marvellous feeling. Like all Moonlite’s promises were coming true. We had the fear and respect of these people, see. Well, Moonlite then tells us that it’s time to be making our way on to Sydney again and we slip away until we reach another property. And that’s where the police surrounded us. There were about nine of them I reckon. The gunfight was ferocious with bullets and noise and gunpowder everywhere.’

He looks out the window then and says in a soft voice, ‘They shot young Werneckie first. And he was only fifteen. Then Moonlite shot one of them, Constable Bowen. But then they shot James Nesbitt, who was trying to lead the police away from the house so we could escape. When he saw him fall dead all the fight suddenly went out of Moonlite. Like his dreams of living free in Fiji only existed as long as he could live there with his chum Nesbitt. The police took us all and cast us in chains, with Moonlite having to be dragged off Nesbitt’s body in tears.

‘They threw me and Thomas Williams in gaol, but hanged Moonlite and Thomas Rogan too. Hanged him on his father’s birthday and then denied him his one wish, to be buried beside his beloved James Nesbitt at Gundagai. It’s a bloody shame that more people don’t know about him. He was a great a decent man, not like Ned Kelly. He was just a criminal.’

Then he says, ‘If there was more justice in the world they would build some tourist village near Wantabadgery where you could come and watch re-enactments of that shootout and buy T-shirts and things with Moonlite’s picture on them. Can you imagine it. He’d have liked that.’

‘Yes,’ I say after some moments. ‘I can imagine it. And I’m sure he would have liked it.’ Though what I’m actually imagining is one more closed-down tourist attraction, too far off the freeway to make a buck of it.

We drive on just watching the cars and trucks whiz past on the other side of the highway, getting to wherever they are going to, as quickly as they can.

590 Kilometres and Five Miles to Gundagai

As we get closer to Gundagai the paddocks around the highway look more like rice paddies. At Muttama Creek the fences by the roadside and covered in flotsam and vegetation washed up against it by the recent flood waters.

Five miles from Gundagai we pull off the road to the ‘Dog on the Tuckerbox Tourist Centre’- which is a little bit of an overstatement for a roadside cafe with a small statue of a dog in a pond. But despite that it is a very popular stop for travellers zooming up or down the Hume. Perhaps because it’s one of the few attractions right there by the road side, or that it is not a service centre (that’s just up the road), and you can let you kids run around on the grass or can just sit at the tables and have a picnic under the trees and feel you are in Australia rather than a bit of corporate landscape.

Lawson is very impressed. ‘Look, it’s a statue based on my story the Loaded Dog,’ he says. I wait until he climbs out of the car and is out of earshot – which doesn’t need to be very far really – before correcting his mistake to the others. The story actually goes that there was a teamster called Bill the Bullocky, back in the 1850s who was trying to get his bullock team across a creek five miles (or nine in some versions) from Gundagai, when he became bogged, and then while trying to get them out one of the bullocks broke the wagon’s yoke. In disgust Bill gave up and went to have his lunch, only to find a dog shitting on his tuckerbox. This became the stuff of legends and was cleaned up just a little to become one of the many versions of the bush poem about a dog sitting on a tuckerbox five miles from Gundagai.

‘Oh,’ says Caroline, a little disappointed. Clearly she’d expected a story of canine loyalty like Edinburgh’s Greyfriar’s Bobby or some such. Clearly there are a few quirks to bush humour she never quite got the hang of. Now I’ve got to say, that for a very small and mischievous dog it has a lot of plaques about it. There is the main one on the column on which the dog and the tuckerbox sits that proclaims that it is a tribute to “Our Pioneers”, unveiled by Prime Minister Joseph Lyons in 1932. There is another to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the memorial, unveiled by the Governor of NSW, Air Marshall Sir James Rowland, in 1982. And beside it another to commemorate the 75th anniversary, unveiled by the Governor of NSW, Professor Marie Bashir, in 2007. There is another on the stone fountain in the centre of the pond that proclaims it a pioneer’s wishing pool and that all coins thrown in will go to the Gundagai hospital. Then there is an inscription at the base of the plaque that grandly proclaims: “Earth’s self upholds this monument to conquerors who won her when wooing was dangerous and now are gathered unto her again”. I have to read that one a few times before I even half begin to understand it.

The small shop has a sign on the door that advertises “Best Burgers on the Highway” as claimed by “Nev the Truckie”. I go in and buy a drink and chat to the lady at the counter. She tells me they are under new management and the boss has been trying to spruce the place up a bit. There are bush songs playing over the speakers all about the Gundagai region, which must drive them crazy after several days. She says they get slow and busy periods and when several buses stop at once it can be real hectic.

Back outside I watch people posing for photos in front of the dog statue in the fountain. Firstly three tall young yobs with tattoos take it in turns jumping out onto the brick foundations and posing with the dog. A gardener walks past with his tools and ignores them completely as if this is a very common sight. Next is an old balding guy who lies down on the ground in front of the statue and poses like he was once a male model in his youth. His wife obliges him with a joke and photo for their album. Next is a young couple from Perth who have a metal garden duck that they photograph in front of the dog. They tell me that they really wanted to bring a gnome on their road trip around Australia, but when they went down to Bunnings they didn’t have any gnomes so they bought the duck.

That humble dog made national headlines back in 1981 when students from the University of Canberra, which was then the Canberra College of Advanced Education, stole it as a part of a treasure hunt for foundation day – or Stone Day. Some of the fallout from the dog-napping included a furious Gundagai Shire Council writing to the College demanding compensation for the cost of sending two staff and a ute to Canberra to retrieve the dog, which prompted discussion over whether they should send Gundagai Council a bill for all the free publicity they’d received.

We climb back in the car, having stayed about as long as anyone stays here, ten minutes or so, and head off to Gundagai. The name Gundagai has several possible origins, but my favourite is that it is a mix of Aboriginal words that translate as the place of birds near where there is a large bend in the Murrumbidgee River that was caused by a cut in the back of the knee. The town grew up originally as this was a good place to cross the Murrumbidgee River, even though the River found it also a good place to sometimes flood and cross the town. Back in the day there were even paddle boats operating on the river here in good years. And Gundagai has also become a favourite port of call for poets and writers, featuring in many traditional songs and stories and poems, including Banjo Paterson’s ‘The Road to Gundagai’, and Henry Lawson’s ‘Scots of the Riverina’. Others include ‘Ode to the Dead of Gundagai’, ‘The Gundagai Calamity’, ‘Where the Dog Sits on the Tuckerbox Five Miles from Gundagai’, ‘When a Boy from Alabama Meets a Girl from Gundagai’, and of course, ‘The Road to Gundagai’, where the old fashioned Ford, made of rubber, tin and board was driving to.

Bushranging was also common in the district back in the day, although it reappeared along the Hume Highway in the 1950s with a modern variation of gangs jumping into the trailers of heavy transports as they drove along, and throwing goods out for their gang members to catch.

We take the first turn off into Gundagai and are barely into the town when there is a sign post showing the way to the cemetery and Captain Moonlite’s grave. This is going to be a lot easier than Yass it seems. We turn onto William Street, and drive along to the cemetery. There is a new bit to our left with standard small dark stone plaques and headstones, shaped with straight sharp corners. And to our right is an old stone wall that has fallen down in one part, with the familiar jumble of pale grave stones that mark historic graves. Some are tall and some small and some crosses and some half in ruin. The walled part of the cemetery is about the size of a football field, or probably a little less, and the area outside the wall is just as large. One will be the Catholic section and one will be the non-Catholic section. Wouldn’t want the dead of different denominations mixing with each other, after all. There is a sign pointing into the cemetery that says Captain Moonlite grave – into the non-Catholic section.

Bennett is looking very nervous all of a sudden. Caroline Chisholm puts an arm around his shoulders and leads him over the road and into the graveyard. We all follow. We walk along slowly, looking at the gravestones to our left and our right, reading the names on then, searching for the one that will say Andrew George Scott, or Captain Moonlite, but don’t see it.

Caroline Chisholm walks right through the centre of the graveyard though, as she if she knows exactly where she need to go and leads Bennet to a dark clump of a tree overlooking the graveyard on the far side. We follow. Sure enough, it’s the grave. There is a rock on a small concrete base with a metal plaque fixed to it. It says both Andrew George Scott and also Captain Moonlite, followed by a quote attributed to him that reads:

“As to a monumental stone, a rough unhewn rock would be most fit, one that skilled hands could have made into something better. It will be like those it marks as kindness and charity could have shaped us to better ends.”

And there is a final line that says he was laid to rest near his friends James Nesbitt and Augustus Wernicke who lie in unmarked graves close by. Bennett looks around at the ground nearby us. It makes me feel a little spooked that we could be standing on them, but there is a good twenty or so metres until all the other graves begin and I suspect not – but who knows.

Bennett says, ‘When they sentenced him to be hanged his last wish was to buried beside his beloved James Nesbitt, right here, who he said was “the man with whom I was united by every tie which could bind human friendship, we were one in hopes, in heart and soul and this unity lasted until he died in my arms”. Did you know he even went to the gallows wearing a ring woven from a lock of Nesbitt's hair on his finger?’

None of us did know that.  I knew that they didn’t agree to his request though. They buried him up in Rookwood Cemetery in Sydney and he was not reinterred in Gundagai until 1995, and that was to a mixed reaction. Some locals felt it was all too much about theatrics and turning the cemetery into a tourist site, disturbing the way they wished to pay respects to their own relatives there. But somebody has been paying respects to Moonlite as there are fading flowers on his grave, like those on the roadside grave markers where people have come to sudden and violent deaths all along the Hume. We all stand there in silence for some time and then Carolyn Chisholm says, ‘Aright, let’s go.’ She only means us though. Not young Graham Bennett. He’s at his journey’s end.

We walk back down through the graveyard and Lawson indicates a tombstone that is cut like a plinth. I walk across to it. It reads:

“Edward Mostyn Webb-Bowen, Senior Constable in the New South Wales Police Force who was mortally wounded when bravely performing his duty in an encounter with armed criminals near Wantabadgery on the 17th November 1879. He died at Gundagai on the 23rd November 1879, Aged 28 years. Erected by the Government of New South Wales.”

It is the grave of the policemen killed in the shoot out. He will have mourners too. Indeed, when Moonlite’s remains were reinterred at Gundagai in 1995, the local police formed an honour vigil by the grave there as a mark of respect towards police officers who had been killed by bushrangers, while the mob of Moonlite supporters went through their ‘theatrics’ just up the hill.

We go back to the car and drive quietly into town. Neat little fibro and brick cottages with leafy trees out the front line the road. The main street is wide like many country towns, dominated by old buildings and churches. ‘It’s a nice looking town,’ says Lawson. And we haven’t even passed a pub yet.

We go into the tourist information centre and meet Wendy, a middle-aged womanwith an air of someone who has her finger on the pulse of everything. She and Caroline Chisholm would hit it off wonderfully. We stand in line and listen to the conversations of the other people at the counter. First an old guy and then a young couple ask about trying to get to Cootamundra or Wagga, or a long list of places off the highway, and she just shakes her head. “All closed. Roads have been closed for days,” she says.

Then there is a group of students trying to get back to Charles Sturt University for classes tomorrow morning. They are trying to plot roundabout routes that don’t involve crossing any rivers but none of them can figure out a route that will work.

When I finally get to the counter she asks if I want to know about road closures. ‘Well that and a bit about the town,’ I say. She smiles. Says, ‘Had a bloke come in this morning and ask where he could get a tyre fixed, and I got really excited. A different questions at last!’

Then she has to take a phone call and passes me to her assistant, in her early 20s. She tells me she was born and bred in Gundagai, but has only been doing this job for a week. She shows me on the map which bits of town are underwater, which is pretty much everything near the river. There is a creek that cuts through town and joins the Murrumbidgee but the river has reached out and brought the creek into its flow.

She shows me where the sports oval and golf course and other entrance to town are all cut off by the water. I then ask her what are the best things to see in town, and despite having been born and bred in town she asks Wendy for advice on that one. Wendy recommends the old gaol tour and my ears prick up. ‘Is that the gaol where Moonlite was sentenced?’ I ask.

‘We have a section on Moonlite on our audio tour,’ she says and explains how they have gone high-tech. They have portable audio players that you take with you, and push certain buttons and it reads the story of bits of the gaol to you. I’m impressed. She tells me with pride that it is award-winning. Then she tells me that they worked hard to get all the facts right and on their first version, when Moonlite was sentenced to death, there were two gunshots heard. But Moonlite was hanged and so they had to redo that bit, but the sound of the hanging is a bit blood-curdling, so just be ready for it.

So for $20 deposit for the audio gear and $10 cost I’m sent off to the old gaol with the keys in my hands. It works on an honour system. It’s an odd thing to be breaking into a gaol, looking over my shoulder at the local police station, while I fiddle with the keys in the lock. The street is on a hill and the gaol wall has that off balanced look that all properties set sideways to a hill have, and the door, a thin drab olive green wooden thing, seems to be at slightly the wrong angle, whichever way you look at it.

There is a metal tourist placard, which are becoming my guides to the past, that tells us that the building was constructed in 1859 as a lockup and began use as a gaol in 1861, with extensions being built over the next forty years. Although it ceased being used a gaol in 1909 it was still used as a local lock up until the late 1970s. It held men and women prisoners who were generally serving less than 12 months and its prisoners included Chinese, Indians, Aboriginals and Europeans. As a gold town Gundagai naturally had a very diverse racial mix, including a significant Chinese community, living outside of town. That was back in the day, of course, when Chinese people were more likely to be found in smaller towns across the country working as miners, market gardeners and merchants, rather than found in the big cities working in finance, futures and IT.

The major crimes, according to the placard were horse and cattle stealing and larceny, but people were also arrested for using obscene language or furious riding of horses. Then the placard names the most notorious prisoners held there who included Captain Moonlite and his gang and Frank Gardiner’s partner in crime John Peisley as well as John Molloy, known as “Jack in the Boots”.

‘Who?’ I have to ask Caroline Chisholm, who waves her hand a little, as if dismissing him and says, ‘Bushrangers! Common criminals!’ I wonder if that means it’s something she actually doesn’t know. We step in through the olive door into the outer courtyard of the gaol. It feels a little neglected and we step up and let ourselves into the first building of the gaol proper. Fiddling with my audio guide it tells me that this was the room where prisoners were processed. It also tells me that gold brought many people to the Gundagai area and also brought bushrangers, looking for easy money. They would often stake out a road as their own, not unlike a franchise I suppose. The narrator’s deep voice tells me that one bushranger in particular, John Peisley was a favourite of the locals and had an aura like that of Dick Turpin in England, until he went on a drunken rampage in 1862 and shot a man.

I follow the flow of the narration and walk out into the exercise yard. It is drab mildew-stained concrete with a thick-ribbed cage over the top of it. Not much of an area for exercising, except for walking around and around I think. But it’s an improvement on the cells. They are also drab concrete, and not too much bigger than some bedrooms I have lived in. But I suppose I’ve no idea how many people might have had to share a cell. There is graffiti scratched on the wall of one cell from the 1970s, counting down the days. “10 days”. “7 days.” Crossed out and “6 days” written in. Then “5 fucking days”. And beneath that, “Mullet loves Wendy”. On another wall the scratched in text reads: “The foods great but the rooms aren’t worth $25 a day”.

I walk back down the other end of the corridor into another cell. This one feels even more dim and chill. I switch on my audio guide and I’m told the story of Andrew Scott – alias Captain Moonlite. The narrator says that he was a highly educated man who came to Australia from Ireland and set up as a lay preacher in the church. But then he turned to crime and was involved in a robbery at Mount Egerton in Victoria. He escaped conviction though and was on the verge of escaping from Sydney on a yacht when he was arrested. He served ten years of hard labour at Pentridge Prison, as I’ve already been told.

He was really more of a con man than a bushranger, the narrator tells me, until he reached Wantabadgery. He then gives a short summary of the story that Graham Bennett had given us, but this narration culminates in Moonlite being hanged, to the sound of a rope screeching tightly. Wendy was right, it is a bit blood curdling. I take the earphones off and stand there in the cell. There is something about the audio narration that helps understand the past but also gets in the way of feeling it. Listening to the silences. Like the way a camera captures the landscape you travel through, but gets between you and the scenery as well.

I place my hands against the chill smooth walls and close my eyes a moment, trying to feel something. Trying to imagine what it might have been like to be locked up in here. Trying to imagine what this enigmatic man Andrew Scott had felt being here. Mourning his lost boys. Mourning his lost everything. I think for a moment that young Graham Bennett should have come here with us, as he would have undoubtedly felt a trace of Scott here, but then I remember that he would have been locked up in here himself and it might not be a memory that he wants to recall.

‘What is it?’ asks Lawson, looking at me. ‘Gaol cell chills?’

I nod my head. ‘I’ve just remembered what the guide at Cooma Cottage near Yass told us, when we were in that room,’ I say. ‘The one that some people had told her had a deep feeling a sadness in it.’ The stark bare walls of the cells in Gundagai Gaol seem to me a lot more melancholic than that room of screaming wallpaper. Though I might just be getting a little bit better at feeling it.

There is a lot more of the gaol to see but I think I’ve seen what I need to. ‘Let’s go,’ I say. Nobody disagrees. Back outside the sunshine helps rid the chills that seem to have settled on us, and we lock up the place and hop back into the car. We drive further down the main street and then turn right towards the museum, which is also towards the river. The road is flooded before the end of the next block. I park next to a caravan with a sign on the back that says “Grey Nomad. Adventure before Dementia”. I get out and walk down to the river’s edge and try and gauge if it is still rising and how fast. A van of Chinese tourists pulls up, everyone piles out, takes photos and are back in and away like a trained Formula One pit stop team.

There is a tree next to the road, with water up against one side of it, with a green sign that reads: “Emergency Assembly Point”. I watch to see if the water is rising around it, cutting off its use for anyone to assemble who is not wearing gum boots. The river is wide and brown, at least 200 metres across, and there are several trees standing out in its waters as well as a tall stripped marker pole that I see indicates the heights of previous floods and I can see there is still a long way to go before this flood becomes historic. In 1950 the flood waters reached 35 feet in height, and above that, in 1974 they were over 36 feet and in 1925 they reached 37 feet and in 1891 they reached 38 feet, and in 1870 and 1852 they topped 40 feet. Those floods of 1852 destroyed the original township and an estimated 80 people drowned.

That makes it one of Australia’s worst natural disasters in terms of deaths, on par with the Granville railway disaster and outstripping the death tolls of Cyclone Tracy in Darwin in 1974 and the Ash Wednesday bushfires in Victoria of 1983. If you wonder why you’ve never heard of it, it’s either because there’s never been a mini-series made on it, or maybe the death toll is considered minor compared to more recent disasters like the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires which lead to 173 direct deaths and 374 deaths were attributed to the heat wave that lead to it, as well as an estimated $3.5 billion damage to buildings, crops and plantations. And we are told rural Australia should expect more fires. More floods. More droughts.

Anyway, I’m looking at that in amazement and see a young woman come up the road to take photographs of the marker pole. I ask her if she’s a local and she says she is. She lives in Gundagai but is studying nursing at Charles Sturt University in Wagga, but doesn’t think she’ll be getting to classes tomorrow. She points out for me where the golf course would be and the race track. And then she tells me that the sewage plant on the far side of town must be underwater too and points through the trees to where it would be. ‘You wouldn’t want to be living downstream of that,’ I tell her.

She says there’s a bridge right there in front of us, underwater, that is named the Yarri Bridge, to commemorate an Aboriginal man who saved people from that first big flood that destroyed the township. Then she points out a rock out there in the flood waters with a plaque on it. I use my telephoto lens to read it. It says:

“In Memory of Yarri, Hero of Gundagai. Near this site on the night of 24th June, 1852, an Aboriginal man named Yarri rescued 49 people from the flooded Murrumbidgee river. Placed in his honour by the Tumut-Brungle Aboriginal community on 7th September 1990.”

She tells me that the first settlers built their properties down near the river, which was a flood plain and the Aborigines knew a flood was coming and tried to warn everybody, but nobody paid them enough attention, and then when the river did flood they used canoes to save lots of people. ‘You’ve never heard the story?’ she asks.

‘No,’ I have to admit. She seems surprised. ‘There’s a special tombstone for him in the cemetery.’

I’m sorry I didn’t see that. But we do see a few locals, with shopping bags, come down the street and wade through the knee-deep water to get to their houses. The building right next to us, heavily sandbagged all around, has a Real Estate sign outside it saying, “Lifestyle Unit. Easy access to walking and bike tracks. Close to golf, bowling, tennis clubs and swimming pool.”

It’s good to know that some real estate agents have a strong, if unintentional, sense of irony.

Back along the main street of town I’m looking for an icon – and see it there on the left. A small cafe with a group of teenagers out the front sitting on plastic chairs. They are all bare legs and arms, with singlet and bra straps competing for shoulder space on the girls, noisily talking and texting at the same time, revelling in the latest town teen gossip. Caroline Chisholm tut-tutts. Of course. ‘What is this place?’ asks Henry Lawson.

‘This is the famous Niagara Cafe,’ I tell him.

‘Why is it famous?’ he asks.

‘Let’s go in and find out,’ I say.

We step into the doors and look around. It is an old-fashioned styled cafe, with a long counter running down the whole left side of the place, and orderly booths filling the floor. But it’s the jumble of photographs on the rear wall and right side of the room that attracts my attention. Most prominent is a large banner proclaiming the 50th anniversary of war time Prime Minster John Curtin’s visit to the cafe.

The story goes that on a cold winter’s night in 1942, just as the then owner of the cafe, Jack Castrission was closing for the night, a man knocked on the door. Jack shouted out that they were closed, but the man was insistent. Jack went to give him a piece of his mind, but recognised the bespectacled face peering into the cafe. It was Prime Minister John Curtin. He opened the door and welcomed him in. Curtin asked if he could get something to eat and drink and Jack assured him that he could, and then Curtin said, “I’ve got some mates in the car.” They turned out to be former Prime Minster Arthur Fadden and later Prime Minister Ben Chifley. Along with a Senator named O’Sullivan they were driving back to Canberra after having been on a war-time fund raising trip. Jack invited them into the kitchen where it was warmer and cooked them steak and eggs.

The story also tells that when he was asked how he was coping with war time rationing, Jack Castrission said his monthly tea allowance was barely enough to keep the cafe going and in appreciation for his hospitality the cafe’s tea ration was doubled.

There are several newspaper clippings on the walls telling the story, stating that John Curtin became a regular visitor after that, stopping in many times. And the crockery they were said to have dined on is also on display. There are also other photos of other famous politicians who have dropped in over the years – Bob Hawke, Gough Whitlam, Brian Howe and John Faulkner. But the most attention is to a portrait marked simply as ‘Dad’ at the far end of the counter, surrounded by flowers. Another roadside memorial of sorts I think.

‘That would be Nick Loukassis I believe,’ Caroline Chisholm says. Is there anything she doesn’t know?

The Niagara Cafe was opened in 1916 by a local Greek family, the Castrissions – at a time when most cafes were run by Greek families. It acquired the name Niagara in the early 1920s, setting it apart from the many Paragon and Parthenon cafes across the nation. The cafe was refurbished just before World War Two and boasted a ceiling mural or stars and moons, which Curtin and co would have dined under, but it was sadly destroyed in a fire in the 1970s. The shop was refurbished yet again, in its original style. The Castrission family finally sold the cafe to another Greek family, the Loukassises, in 1983. The patriarch of the family had been Nick.

I buy a packet of chips to eat in the car, and as the old lady at the counter does my change I tell her what a wonderful and charming cafe she has. She gives me a sad smile that’s a little hard to read. I want to ask her so many things about the cafe, but I’m suddenly at a loss for conversation. Not for the first time I feel a little bit like a pilferer of people’s pasts. A shoplifter of memories and emotions. And also, a young man has walked out into the kitchen in the rear and I could swear I saw four men in 1940s hats and coats back there, through the open door, finishing off a meal. If they try and join us in the car we’ll never get to Melbourne!

Stepping back out into the present I notice that the shops either side of the cafe are for sale. I hope the cafe doesn’t join them and that it’s still here at some time in the future when a contemporary political leader might inexplicably find him or herself driving between Melbourne and Canberra and in need of a warm cuppa and a bite to eat – and a willingness to turn off their phone and blackberry and have a chat to the owners about how life in Gundagai is going for them.

Back at the Tourist Information Centre I return my audio kit and Wendy tells me that Gundagai was the very first town that was bypassed along the Hume, back in 1979, mainly because the bridge over the Murrumbidgee in town was rickety and the road flooded too often. She tells me that they learned a lot from that, such as to build a bypass further away from the town. You can look down on Gundagai from the bypass as you drive past it and those in town can hear the trucks roar past through the nights.

Then she tells me that this town has a McDonald’s debate like so many small towns. There was a big discussion about it and in the end McDonald’s was allowed to build a restaurant, but out of town, on the southern side near the highway. She also tells me that a Woolworths has just opened across the road and there was some concern that it would take a lot of business away from the family-owned IGA in town. In fact, she tells me, the story going around town is that the initial proposal was to build another IGA, which didn’t seem to make much sense, except that the developers knew you could get an IGA approve a lot easier than you could get approval to build a Woolworths – but the building wasn’t even finished when it was sold to Woolworths. She rolls her eyes.

I ask her how the bypassing of the town has affected things and she says at first it had a bit of a negative impact on the economy, but now their motels have about 80–85% occupancy rates. In fact the first Best Western Motel in New South Wales was built in Gundagai the same year they bypassed the town, in 1979. Tarcutta, up the road is the real half-way point between Sydney and Melbourne, but they don’t have much accommodation and people travelling the Hume tend to treat Gundagai as the half-way point.

I ask her if the heritage look of the town is planned and she tells me that it was more a matter of lack of planning. ‘We’re great procrastinators in Gundagai,’ she says. And then adds, ‘There is something about Gundagai – if you could bottle it...’ But she doesn’t finish the sentence and leaves me to figure out just what I might do if I could bottle it. But she doesn’t tell me that it’s going to be in their new local environment planning by-laws that if you redo a building you will need to redo it in heritage style.

She also tells me that the nearby town of Junee, about 60 kilometres west, has lamp posts that have been built based on heritage lamps that they had in some museum or storehouse. ‘That’s how it should be done,’ she says. ‘Make yourself unique.’

Before I leave the Centre I look around and see black and white photos of previous floods in town. One has people in a boat on one of the main streets. And I think that Gundagai has actually managed to capture its heritage well, even if it doesn’t have unique lampposts. There’s something about the town that I really, really like. Something that is worth bottling. Something about the past and the present and the future of the town that I feel doesn’t give one domination over the others.

We drive out and park on the lookout just above the town, and look down on the wide flooded river, covering so much of the land around the place. There’s a story told by indigenous author Jeanine Leane about growing up in Gundagai, in her book Purple Threads, that when she was young the town flooded and the water rose above the bridge and flooded out the entire town, turning the main street into a river, and the residents made camp up here on the South Gundagai lookout. And her nan tells her the story of two “blackfellas” who saved many of the townspeople during the 1852 flood, Yarri and Jacky-Jacky. And for their bravery they were given a medal each and told they could ask for a shilling from any of the townspeople whenever they needed it. But memories are short, she reminds us, and when the town was built again there were some that wouldn’t pay, and there were even stories of Yarri being beaten for asking for money.

And I make a promise to myself that I’m going to do the John Curtin thing and come back here whenever I’m driving between Melbourne and Canberra, and stop for a drink and bite to eat and watch the slow progression of the town as it develops and suffers floods or droughts and economic upturns and downturns and people come and people go – taking a brief reading of the town like you’d examine a flood gauge or any other statistical variation – using it as the benchmark for the health of small town Australia, half-way down the Hume. And I’ll go back to the cemetery and find Yarri’s grave too. And I’ll try very hard not to have a short memory.

‘You seem lost in thought,’ says Caroline Chisholm.

‘Just thinking,’ I say.

‘An admirable pastime,’ she says. ‘We might be better off if more people did it more often.’

We drive off over the long bridge that I have driven over many times during drought years and wondered why it was so goddamned long, but today the river under it is over a kilometre wide, more of a lake than a river, and it seems perfectly long enough to do what it needs to do. We pass one more McDonald’s franchise and continue on southwards.

Ten kilometres later we pass by the tiny town of Tumblong, which seems to have only a pub and not much else beside a wrecker’s yard of old car corpses. Beyond there are cattle and sheep looking very content standing in the sunshine in wet green grass. Shortly after the flooded out Snowy Mountain Highway from Tumut joins us from the left and then the equally flooded out Sturt Highway to Wagga Wagga heads off from the right.

Another eight kilometres and we pull off the highway to go through Tarcutta – the actual half way point between Sydney and Melbourne. I can see why Gundagai gets preference. There’s not much in Tarcutta even though there are lots of trucks pulled up in the truck parking bays. There is also a very unused looking water tanker there. The local pub, a two-storey red brick hotel is surrounded by flood waters like a moat around a castle. The local service station next door is only half flooded though, and we watch a ute drive from the servo, wade carefully though the waters and pull up outside the rear of the pub.

Across the road one house with a corrugated iron roof, and a thin white picket fence vainly holding back the water, that has a sign outside it saying: “This property was proudly flooded by Leightons/RTA.”

‘What does that mean?’ Lawson asks me.

‘No idea,’ I say. ‘Caroline?’ I ask.

But rather than admit that there’s something she doesn’t know, she says, ‘Did you know that there is a memorial to truck drivers who have died on the highway here in Tarcutta?’

She’s right, of course. The memorial wall has over 1,000 names on it of truckers who have lost their lives, and each October there is an annual service held that attracts thousands who come and remember the family and friends lost on the highways. We drive around the police station to the local park and make our way across the wet grass to the memorial. It is made of a long brick wall, about two metres tall, like you would see at a cemetery where ashes are mounted. I look across the many, many plaques at the names on them. There are so bloody many of them. And almost all of them have a nicknames: Curley, Angry Ant, Broughie, Bluey, Spooke, Kanga, Roly, Col, Pash, Poppa Smurf, the Dude, Yogi, Fossil, Jinks, Gumby, Elvis, Lumpy. The youngest I see is 17 and the oldest is 83 years old – and there is plenty enough wall spaces for new names to be added.

And on that sombre note we head back on our way, pondering once again the differences between the feeling of invulnerability and the fragility of life in reality while driving at speeds down the highway. Recently the larger supermarkets have been blamed for an increase in truck deaths, and the federal president of the Transport Workers Union stated publicly that the tight deadlines being imposed on drivers and trucking firms was encouraging truckers to drive unsafely.

He stated that the two major supermarket chains, which we all know are Coles and Woolworths, employed a large number of trucking firms or owner-drivers, who carted goods from manufacturers and farmers to supermarkets and malls all around the country, and they were instructing drivers that if they arrived outside a particular delivery time they would be fined, forcing drivers to risk fatigue.

“These practices have to change. They are literally killing people on our roads because of the economic pressure," he said.

And there are so many trucks on the highway. Another long list of names: Kalari, Willett, Cartage, Central Premix, Scott, JMF, Gourley, Imunix, McColls, Kitco, AFDC, Williamson, Francis, Schmiz, Keatings, Paul Philips, Hawthorn,  Q-Link, Collins, HFS, Lindsay Brothers, NTS, Safries, Border Express, Vinidex, Piscioneri, Veridian, RTS Rooney, Armestos, Lande, Blenners, Gunn, Hoods, Marsden Transport, Sunland, Rodney’s, Dorica, Beechy, Jets, Loadmaster, Shearers, Colins, Fernhurst, Arnotts, Devondale, Riverside, Lindsay, Ron Wilson, Blemmers, Karras, Hunter, Abletts, Green Freight, Toll, Rand, SA Hunter, Ron Finemore, Linfox, Rentsch’s, Border Express, Milawa and on and on and on.

About 25 kilometres down the road we finally reach the Tumbarumba Road, off to our right and can head off the Freeway into the high country where Hume and Hovell were wandering around trying to find their path. The single-lane road starts winding up and down hills and valleys nearly immediately, showing what difficult country this would have been to trek across with a cart. There are some glorious tall gums by the roadside, and then some cleared farm lands, and then, inexplicably, some poplar trees line the road.

We reach the small town of Rosewood, population 300 odd people, and stop to look at a Boot Hill Tree, which is a tall thin spruce thing that people have hung boots on. Next to it is a gum tree with a sign on it that says Gnome Home. It is surrounded by a gathering of garden gnomes. There is a hand-painted sign stuck in the ground that says: “Leave a gnome for good luck. Steal one for life time of bad luck.” 300 odd people indeed!

Despite the strangeness of it, when I hop out of the car to see if my eyes are really seeing this, and look around I find a rare moment of quiet and peace around me. Something like a cricket is chirping nearby and the late afternoon sun is soft. It is quite a beautiful moment. And I’m thinking how wonderful it is to occasionally find moments like this.

Then I imagine that these gnomes get this everyday and don’t have to wake up each morning to the latest update of the 24/7 media chatter of confrontational politics and tabloid-created crises, and can actually stand around here having reasoned and considered discussions, at the casual pace of the sun moving across the sky, of important things like population policies and indigenous rights and refugees and the state of the environment and how to best capture and preserve their heritage and what type of a future they want for Gnome Home and why communities should decide some things for themselves rather than be told what to think.

That imagining is worth travelling half-way from Sydney to Melbourne for.

730 kilometres – Tumba-bloody-rumba

And then on to Tumbarumba. Tumba-bloody-rumba. Probably named after the Wiradjuri name dhamba dhamba. Made famous in songs such as "Stomp The Tumbarumba", the children’s book Tales of Tumbarumba, even mentioned in James Joyce’s novel Finnegan’s Wake, and used as a “tmesis” in John O’Grady’s poem “Tumba-bloody-rumba”. A what? A tmesis? That’s a word that has another in the middle of it – such as “kanga-bloody-roos”.

According to my notes the town is situated on the southern slopes of the Snowy Mountains and is largely untouched by the modern world. Gold was discovered in the area in the 1850s leading to an influx of settlers including Chinese. One of the major highlights of Tumbarumba history was in 1864 when the bushranger Mad Dog Morgan shot Sergeant David Maginnity near the town – which led to him being declared Public Enemy Number One of the day and his scrotum to become famous. But more of Mad Dog Morgan and his scrotum further down the highway.

The town, with a population of about 2000, proclaims: “Welcome to Tumbarumba. A Snowy Valley Way Town.” There are lots of aluminium roofs and sheds in sight and also neat brick cottages by the side of the road with tall leafy trees, like oaks, or something I should know the name of, shading them. The town is also largely closed on a Sunday afternoon. I do a few laps of the main street, like we are looking for some rural action, and note the huge Australian map on the side of the stock and station agents, and one modern homestead that is flying a large Australian flag out the front. It doesn’t seem a statement of too much here, as we’re a long, long way from Cronulla. There is a small war memorial, with gold letters on black stone like a modern gravestone might look. Then we find a garage that is open. Well it is just shutting for the day actually, so we pull in and buy some petrol.

I tell the old guy working there that I’m interested in the Hume and Hovell walking track – that bit of their journey between Yass and Albury that was cleared as a walking track as one of the many bicentennial projects back in 1988. He says that he’s walked lots of it himself and that over time it’s gotten a little bit overgrown and run down. He gives me a brochure showing how to reach the closest track head, and marks out the bits he’s walked. I ask him if there’s a Hume and Hovell monument in town, but he says that there’s none that he’s aware of. He also tells me that he reckons the country has changed a lot since H1 and H2 would have come through, actually being less heavily wooded, though he agrees it wouldn’t be his first choice of location to walk with a cart and oxen.

I also ask him about driving further south, through the mountains, and heading back to the Hume Highway along the Jingellic Road, but he reckons that way would be blocked by the flood waters for quite some time, and it’s a pretty rough road that is unsealed in places. I thank him, pondering the best way to go further south, since we’re finally in Hume Hovell highland country, and drive back through the town again. Then I see, beside the flooded Tumbarumba Creek that flows through the centre of town, the Hume and Hovell memorial that supposedly didn’t exist. Admittedly it’s not your standard pile of rocks, but is a cut out metal silhouette of two men and a dog – and could easily be mistaken for a memorial to two men random men and a dog – which Hume and Hovell were – if you don’t count the six convicts, but count at least one of the dogs.

I climb out to photograph it and see further up the creek a group of young dickheads are jumping from a small bridge into the flooded creek. If they’re lucky they’ll only be swept down as far as the flooded kids’ playground. A young couple walking a dog come along and watch me watching the dickheads and we start talking. They are from Albury and are in town house-sitting. They tell me that the road through to Holbrook is fully tarred and is quite passable as they drove along it the day before. There might be water on the road, but it should be okay, he tells me. I wonder what else that guy at the garage told me might be accurate or not. I thank the couple and drive out the eight kilometres or so out of town to the Henry Angel Trackhead.

This is getting exciting. This is a real, actual, remote part of the path they walked. The turn off is into a small camping ground, which is half underwater. There are a few caravans up on higher ground, with people who have obviously invested heavily in insect repellent sitting out on fold-up chairs enjoying the late afternoon sunshine. I drive around the road, more often in water than not, wondering where the track itself is, and stop by the small information booth. It looks a little bit like a toilet block and is surrounded by a moat of still, muddy water. Captain Cook stares at me like surely I’m not going to let a little bit of water get in my way. ‘You should have brought a small boat,’ says Cook, who knows a lot about travelling over water and not getting wet. And so I take off my shoes and socks and roll up my pants to the knees.

‘Are going to walk some of the track?’ Lawson asks.

‘I think you should,’ says Cook. ‘Get the feel of it. Know what it was like.’ I look back at them, standing there in my bare feet. Caroline Chisholm gets it before I do and turns her face away to hide the smile. ‘Take a few convicts with you,’ says Lawson. ‘And a bullock and a cart,’ says Cook.

‘Dickheads,’ I mumble and wade over to the small covered area.

There are an array of panels under the shelter telling about the area and Hume and Hovell’s journey. I learn, for instance, that not only is this land Wiradjuri country but that Hume and Hovell heard “natives” in the night and called out to them, but they “made off as soon as they found we were Whites instead of Blacks”. I also learn that from here I can walk through Burra Creek Gorge, which provides some wonderful scenery with pools, cascades and waterfalls and a short diversion can be made to observe the Snowy Mountains as Hume and Hovell did in 1824, which is regarded as the first European sighting of the Snowy Mountains from the west side.

Hovell described it as: “... a prospect came in View the most Magnificeant, this was an immence high Mountain Covered nearly one fourth of the way down with Snow, and the Sun shining upon it gave it a most brilliant appearance.”

There is also the standard pictures of the two grumpy old men Hume and Hovell, and also a picture of grumpy old man Henry Angel. The panel tells me that he was born near Salisbury in England, was found guilty of stealing and was sent to Australia as a convict where he was assigned to Hamilton Hume as a servant. In 1832 his original stealing charge was found to be false and he was pardoned for his crime. He was offered free passage back to England, but chose to settle in Hay in western New South Wales. He later moved to Wagga Wagga, where he died at the age of 91 in 1881.

I’m fascinated. He was actually a free man – technically – if he was not guilty of the stealing crime. I’m glad he had the track head named after him. I wade back to the car and dry my feet while a kookaburra laughs at me from somewhere out of sight.

‘If you write that people will think you made it up,’ says Henry Lawson, looking around for the bird.

‘I wouldn’t believe it,’ says Cook.

‘Put it in anyway,’ says Caroline Chisholm. ‘Never be afraid of the truth.’

‘Oh – and this is Henry,’ says Henry Lawson. I turn around and see an old man sitting there quietly in the back seat. I recognise him from his picture. ‘Mr Angel, I presume,’ I say. ‘A pleasure to meet you.’ He just nods.

‘He wants to know if we can drop him off at Wagga Wagga,’ Henry says.

‘We can take you as far as Holbrook,’ I say. ‘If the road is passable. But how about in exchange for a story.’

‘About what?’ he asks.

‘About your time with Hume and Hovell.’

He considers that a moment and then nods his head. ‘Though I’ll not say anything ill against Mr Hume,’ he says.

‘Fair enough,’ I say. ‘What about Mr Hovell then?’

‘He was a bit of wanker actually,’ he says.

‘I’ve heard there was a disagreement about which way they should go when they sighted the Snowy Mountains,’ I say.

‘You could say that. I’d call it more of a childish tantrum. I recollect Mr Hume and Mr Hovell having a dispute about which course we were to travel after we came in sight of the Snowy Mountains. After some wrangling they separated, each going his own course. Before they parted they had a row about who was to have the tent: they were going to cut it in two, but Mr Hume let Mr Hovell have it. Then they quarrelled about the frying-pan, and broke it in pulling at it. It was not long, however, before Mr Hovell came after us, a few hours or half a day.’

All Hovell mentioned in his own journal was a disagreement with mosquitoes. So we head off further south to see if the road to Holbrook is tarred or gravel and is flooded or passable. Beyond the timber plants outside Tumbarumba we find there is a prison sitting quietly by the side of the road – the Mannus Correctional Facility, with the standard do not stop signs beside it. That was a surprise to find. It seems the paths of Australian history involve many jails.

Then we sight some wildlife – well a kangaroo standing on the road – which we carefully don’t hit and are suddenly descending down a steep hill. We pass Mannus Creek Road to Mannus Lake and watch the white, white lambs standing sedately against green, green hillsides around us. Then we sight some more wildlife – a lamb standing on the road. We also carefully avoid hitting it.

Then we are at the turn off to the Jingellic Road and there is a barrier across it stating that the road is closed due to flooding. I stop the car in front of the barrier, wondering whether to risk it or not. ‘I think we should go back the other way,’ says Caroline Chisholm. ‘It could be dangerous.’

‘What danger?’ asks Henry Angel. ‘It’s just some water on the road.’

‘Water never stopped me,’ says Cook.

‘We could get stranded,’ says Lawson.

‘I think we should brave it,’ says Henry Angel.

‘I think it’s too risky,’ says Caroline Chisholm.

They all turn to me for an answer and I’m thinking here we are, just like Hume and Hovell, arguing over which way to go, when I see a car coming towards us along the Jingellic Road. I put my arm out the window and wave it down. There is a late middle-aged couple in it. ‘How’s the road?’ I ask them.

‘Well, there’s water over it in places,’ he says. ‘But it’s certainly passable.’ That settles it. We drive around the barricade and along the road, counting the creeks we pass and slowing for the long shallow patches of water that grab our tyres and try and spin us in different directions to forward.

‘I think if you drive slower that won’t happen,’ says Caroline Chisholm.

‘Show me your driver’s license,’ I tell her. She folds her arms and pouts a little.

We reach Holbrook without further incident and without anymore wildlife on the roads to avoid. Holbrook is the only town all along the new Hume Highway that you still get to drive through. It is the very last town being bypassed, in 2013. Until then all cars and trucks and caravans and motorbikes and ride-on lawn mowers and cyclists pass down the main street, and not only do they encounter the only set of traffic lights between Sydney and Melbourne, they invariably turn their heads and stare at the long dark thin black shape of a submarine by the road.

Cook is no exception and I’ve been wandering what his reaction will be. In the last light the black shape looks somewhat menacing, though in the day children play atop it. ‘What is that?’ asks Cook.

‘What does it look like?’ I ask him.

‘It looks like a submarine,’ he says.

‘That’s because it is,’ I say.

‘And how far are we from the closest ocean?’ he asks.

‘Hundreds of nautical miles,’ I tell him.

‘So how did it get here?’

‘Well there’s an interesting story,’ I tell him, and pull the car over the road beside the long thin dark silhouette.

This story goes back to World War One when the town had been known as Germanton, which suddenly become the wrong sort of name for a town to have. So while all across Australia German Shepherds were becoming Alsatians, and fritz sausage was becoming devon, towns were also changing their names. Germanton became Holbrook, joining the long list of over 100 towns that changed their names from too-Germanic sounding ones, including other German Towns becoming Grovedale and Lillydale, German Creek changing to Empire Vale, German Gardens changing to Belgian Gardens, Minden changing to Frenchton, Mount Bismarck changing to Mount Kitchener, Petersburg changed to Peterborough and my favourite bit of militaristic jingoism - Rhine River (North) being changed to the Somme River and Rhine River (South) being changed to the Marne River.

The name Holbrook was chosen to honour Lieutenant Holbrook of the Royal Navy, who was the first submariner to receive the Victoria Cross, for skippering the submarine known as HMS B 11 in and out of the Crimean Sea to torpedo the Turkish battleship Mesudive in December 1914. The submarine had to pass through the narrow straits of the Dardanelles, later the location of the Gallipoli invasion, and negotiate five rows of mines and uncharted currents. After attacking the battleship it took eight torturous hours to escape back through the straits, under heavy fire. The citizens of Germanton were so taken with his exploits that they decided to rename the town after him.

In 1995 the Royal Australian Navy then donated the fin from the recently decommissioned submarine HMAS Otway to the town, so it could retain a link with submarines. Spurred on by this, the less than 1,500 good citizens of Holbrook started a funding drive, helped along greatly by a very hefty donation from Lieutenant Holbrook’s widow, Gundula Holbrook (who was actually Austrian-born, but didn’t play upon the irony of it). The town raised enough money to purchase the outer skin of the submarine, at least that which would have appeared above the waterline, and install it in the park in the town so that it really does appear, especially just on dusk, as if a submarine is cruising along the grassy park there.

And inside the visitor’s information centre by the submarine there is a rather impressive hologram of an actress playing Gundula telling the story of it all. When I last came through I asked the young lady at the information desk if she thought the bypass would be good or bad for the town and she was fairly optimistic about it all. She said it would mean less trucks trundling through the town at all hours, but cars would come into the town for stop as people needed to eat and drink and have a pee somewhere. As do truckers, I thought, but didn’t say anything about the tendency for cars and trucks both to stop briefly at those large service station cafes by the Hume Highway rather than pull into the towns.

The elderly lady down at the Holbrook Museum, Jill, had a different perspective on things though. She said that even with all the traffic of the Hume going right past their front door they didn’t get many visitors, and with the bypass that might slow even more. On the day I stopped by, in the late afternoon, I was only the third person to sign the guest book.

Jill told me that she had been volunteering at the museum for 40 years, and getting new volunteers was one of the biggest problems they had. The museum itself was a two-storey building with the bottom floor crowded with heritage bric-a-brac including a movie poster from the film Mad Dog Morgan that was filmed nearby and a mock-up jail cell with a mannequin of the bushranger Morgan in it (and don’t forget his scrotum, because we’ve still to get to that). Then there was a room dedicated to Commander Holbrook, and upstairs the rooms were done up as if they were still lived in by early settlers with hand-made lace and old boots and hats and petticoats and children’s toys and tins and hair brushes. Out in the back yard was an old school house (with a map of the Hume and Hovell walking track on the blackboard) that had been relocated there and a portable rabbiter’s hut and so much more than anyone could be really expected to look at in even a twenty-minute or half hour stop.

I asked Jill what the future for museums like hers was and she said that young people weren’t much interested in either stopping to see them or in volunteering to work in them, and while some places were finding ways to put their collections online, she’d rather they had people dressed up in period costume and could make it into a living museum.

She also told me that while some locals wanted the by-pass, some were worried it would make the town suffer. Her take on the Gundagai bypass, over 30 years ago, was that while many reckoned the town had recovered from it, she wasn’t so convinced. And she described the building of a service centre out on the new highway as a “that bogeyman” that is raised every now and then.

‘I wonder if people will be stopping here in a year or two?’ I ask, as we drive past the museum building, now closed for the day.

‘We stopped for a bit when we came through here on our return journey,’ says Henry Angel. ‘But not for very long either. We called it Friday Mount.’

‘What was it like then?’ asks Lawson.

‘We weren’t looking around too much,’ he tells him. ‘We were in a bit of a rush to get home before we ran out of supplies. But none of us thought there might ever be a submarine here.’

Beyond Holbrook it’s another 60 kilometres down the road to Albury. That’s only about 45 minutes, but it represented a few days walking for Hume and Hovell and about seven percent of the total Hume Highway’s length, so it probably shouldn’t have been driven in the dark when there was bugger-all to see, but that’s what we did. And as we drive on down the Freeway I start thinking about Highway 31. How many people travel it each year and how many have travelled it over the years and how much of its history has been bypassed. A few years ago in the USA I visited the route 66 Museum in Kingman Arizona. Now that had a name and a sense of history. Most of Route 66 has also been bypassed, but the museum had collected old cars and road stops and signs and even had an old truck like the migrant workers used to try to get to the promised land of California during the Great Depression, with this great quote from Steinbeck’s the Grapes of Wrath on the wall beside it. I’d love to see something like that on the Hume. Something to capture the eras and the people. But in realty we’re going to see the drive between Sydney and Melbourne marked by same-same fast food restaurants and service stations.

I sigh at the thought and then start wondering if the Hume Highway has a badland section. I suppose it used to be around Belanglo State Forest, but that still feels too close to civilisation to be anything like the dark and mysterious bits of highway where mysterious things happen. Murders and disappearances and spooky visitations. There is a well-known stretch of highway between Rockhampton and Mackay in Queensland that has the reputation of being a badland, with an inexplicably high number of shootings, drivers being attacked by passengers they’ve picked up, abductions, sexual assaults, roadside attacks and other acts of random violence. Nearby landmarks include Styx River, Charon Point, Grave Gully and the Berserkers Range, which only add to the potency of the growing urban myths about the stretch of road.

But to keep the spooks of darkness at bay, I said, ‘Hey. Let’s play a game.’

‘What kind of game?’ asks Cook.

‘A car game. The type of thing you play when you’re on a road trip.’

‘I know a good game,’ says Caroline Chisholm. ‘It’s called I spy.’

‘Henry Lawson nods his head. ‘I know that one.’

‘How does it go?’ asks Cook.

‘Didn’t you play that one at sea?’ asks Lawson.

‘After I spy O for Ocean there wouldn’t be much else to say,’ says Caroline Chisholm.

‘W for waves,’ says Henry.

‘Uh – I was thinking of something a little more – uh – contemporary,’ I say.

‘Like what?’ Lawson asks.

‘Well – there’s this game where you have to tell the others who would play you in the movie of your life.’

‘What do you mean?’ asks Cook.

‘Well, just pretend they are going to make a movie about your life, see, and you have to say who you would like to play you.’

‘Surely they’d choose me to play me,’ says Caroline Chisholm. ‘Why would they choose anybody else?’

‘Well, you’re – uh – well you might not pass the screen audition,’ I suggest to her. I almost said “you’re dead”, but I’m not sure how that would go down in the car.

‘That’s absurd,’ says Caroline Chisholm.

‘Why would they choose somebody else to play any of us?’ Cook asks.

‘Well that’s what actors do,’ I say. ‘They pretend to be people from the past sometimes.’

‘Absurd,’ says Caroline Chisholm.

Even Henry Angel shakes his head at this.

‘Okay,’ I say, ‘There’s this other game called famous people, and I have to think of a person and you have to guess who it is by asking questions that I can only yes or no to.’

‘You’re thinking of me,’ says Caroline Chisholm. And as she says it my mind is racing ahead, and I know I’m going to get into trouble with this one too, particularly when answering the inevitable question of whether a person is dead or alive. ‘Uh – yes, that’s right,’ I say. Then, ‘Well, there’s this other game that could be fun. You have to list the three pop songs that you’d want played at your ...’ I was about to say funeral. ‘At your – um – birthday.’

‘Well that’s too easy,’ says Caroline Chisholm. ‘Happy Birthday to You should be played.’

‘Of course,’ I say. ‘Silly me. Okay then, I spy with my little eye something beginning with C.’

‘Pub,’ says Lawson.

‘He said C, not P, dear,’ says Caroline Chisholm.

‘Sorry,’ says Lawson.

‘Cow,’ says Cook.

‘Yes,’ I say.

‘My turn,’ says Cook, clapping his hands. ‘This is a capital game. Absolutely capital. Let me see, I spy with my little eye something beginning with D.’

‘Pub,’ says Henry Lawson.

‘He said D, not P, dear,’ says Caroline Chisholm.

‘Sorry,’ says Lawson., ‘I don’t think I’m very good at this game.’

‘It’s the deck,’ says Cook.

‘Where can you see that?’ asks Henry Angel. ‘I can’t see a deck anywhere.’

‘You mean I have to be able to see it now?’ asks Cook. ‘How is that going to be a challenge, because you can see all the same things I can see?’

‘That’s the point,’ says Caroline Chisholm.

‘Well I’ve changed my mind,’ says Cook. ‘It’s not as much fun as I thought it would be.’

‘Let me tell you about badland sections of the highway,’ I tell them. ‘Where passengers have been attacked by the drivers who picked them up.’

870 kilometres – Albury-Wadonga – the Crossing Place

We drive on through the dark and reach Albury getting on close to 10pm, and drive around the streets with Cook turning the map upside down and right way up again until we locate the Hovell Tree Inn. The Hume Hotel is right next door, but the Hovell is a little classier. Enough said. Opposite the hotel is the large modern building for the Flying Fruitfly Circus, one of Albury’s great success stories – a circus for young people that does training in circus arts. I park under the hotel, which is mostly elevated, as if expecting a huge flood one day, and carry my bags around to the reception.

Albury-Wadonga has a population of over 70,000 people, roughly evenly split on the New South Wales and Victorian sides of the Murray River. The name originally proposed for the township was Bungambrewatha, which was the Aboriginal name for the area, however it was replaced with the name Albury when it was gazetted in 1839, though nobody seems to know why. By 1847, Albury had a handful of huts, two pubs, a blacksmith shop, police barracks and a post office, and slowly and steadily continued to grow, with the benefits of the early Hume Highway, the railway and the Murray River. A Hume Freeway bypass of the two cities was proposed in 1964 (but not completed until 2007). In the 1970s the cities received massive funding under a regional development scheme that made it Australia’s second largest inland city after Canberra.

There is a young woman at the hotel’s reception, looking like a bored hotel receptionist might look about 10pm at night, and she tells me that she’s not a local, but has come up from Ballarat to work here. She does the checkin thing, confirming once again the room is only for one person, and we head up to our room. Luckily it is quite large, and there is enough space for several of us to sleep on the bed with Carolyn Chisholm maintaining the required separation of the sexes by sleeping on the fold-out couch. Henry Lawson puts on the television, telling us he wants to find some cartoons to watch. But Carolyn Chisholm tells him he should watch ABC or SBS and find out just how badly men treat women. She finds a channel with a story about Bob Carr becoming the new foreign minister and the work he’s going to do to improve relations with the USA and China.

‘How does that confirm how badly men treat women?’ Henry Lawson asks.

‘There will be a story about it sooner or later,’ she says. But the next story is about the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens. Carolyn Chisholm turns off the TV, sits there a moment as if sulking and says, ‘I’ll be in the washroom.’

‘What’s with her?’ Cook asks.

‘It’s Dickens,’ says Lawson softly. ‘She is very unhappy with Charles Dickens. See, after setting herself up in Australia and placing something like ten thousand women as wives and servants around the country, she went to England to promote her cause, which was really about wowserism – but she claimed emigrants would be free from poverty, drunkenness, prostitution and cruelty. Anyway, Charles Dickens came out in support of her, stating in his magazine Household Words that she was right in that a wife and child were just what a man needed to chain him to hard work and probity in a new land.’

‘Okay,’ I say equally softly, ‘So what went wrong?’

‘Well, Dickens met her, and he determined she was a bit of a nutter. A fanatic if you will. He even satirised here in his novel Bleak House, as Mrs Jellyby, a lady of great moral strength and character who is forever devoting her energies to greatly worthwhile pursuits, but whose own children were left uncared for, dirty and ill-fed.’

‘Oh dear,’ I say. ‘I see it’s a bit of a sensitivity then. So let’s agree that mum’s the word.’

‘One’s a verb?’ asks Henry Lawson, cupping a hand to his ear.

‘Whose mum?’ asks Henry Angel.

‘No,’ says Cook, loudly into Henry’s ear. ‘He means none of us should mention Charles Dickens’ treatment of Mrs Chisholm.’ I hear sobs suddenly burst out from the bathroom.

‘Of course not,’ says Lawson. ‘I wouldn’t dream of mentioning it.’

‘Indeed,’ I say.

I’m hoping Lawson doesn’t snore as badly tonight, but it’s actually Caroline Chisholm who snores the loudest. And at 7am the next morning I’m woken by the sound of a bus chugging to life and I get up and look out the window. There is a tall guy in the standard rural uniform of light tan pants and light blue shirt loading up bags onto the bus. I see that most of his passengers are elderly people, milling around before climbing onboard and heading off to visit somewhere else in Australia. What a diversity of lives there are out there. Good luck to them, I think. I hope they have a great trip and enjoy each other’s company. And don’t have to share hotel rooms.

I switch the TV on to wake up my travelling companions. The morning TV news says that hundreds are now being evacuated from Wagga Wagga as the Murrumbidgee River continues to rise. No one stirs at the news so I switch the TV off and try and go back to sleep.

I drag myself out of bed again at 9am and we take it in turns using the ‘Washroom’ until we are ready to check out about 10am. It has become a beautiful warm and sunny day outside and I tell my companions that we’re going to go for a little walk. Nothing too far nor too arduous. Just across the road into the park, and back in time over 150 years.

The multi-lane road is very quiet this morning, and has probably been relatively quiet since it was bypassed five years ago. Just up along the road from us is what used to be the main bridge over the Murray River. ‘This is going to be monumental,’ I tell the others. ‘This is a real highlight of the trip.’

‘The tree?’ asks Henry Angel.

‘Yes. The tree,’ I say.

We cross the road and enter a green park with enough dew on the grass to get our socks wet as we cross it towards the Murray River. There is a sort of bike or walking path along the river banks that is signposted as the “Explorers Trail” with a sign explaining that it was opened on the 160th anniversary of the discovery of the Murray (Hume) River by the explorers Hume and Hovell, 16 November, 1984.

‘So Hume wanted to call the Murray the Hume after himself,’ said Lawson.

‘He reckoned he was naming it after his father,’ says Henry Angel.

‘What was the river like when you got here?’ Henry Lawson asks him.

‘Pretty much like this,’ says Henry 2. We peer down at the river and find, oddly enough that despite the floods everywhere, it doesn’t appear particularly high or fast flowing. It’s certainly a beautiful river, though. About 50 metres or so across and with thick green vegetation on both banks. The sun is shining on the water and looks just, well, enormously peaceful, as though you could just sit there and watch it all day long.

Henry Lawson is grinning like a man in love and I ask him what’s up. ‘It’s something about the sight of a river full of water,’ he says. ‘It restores the soul of a man the way a dry and empty river sucks it out of you.’ And I think, yeah, it’s easy to read about drought in the city and lament the water shortages that turn your lawn to yellow stubble, but it’s something else to see the whole land around you dry up and die. It must do something to you.

‘Though they did have a big fight over it,’ our H2 adds.

‘Hume and Hovell?’ our H1 asks.

‘Of course. They were completely unsuited to work with each other. Hovell, being a seaman, wanted to just strike a direct south-south-west course towards Western Port and not deviate from it, whether mountains or rivers or anything got in their way. And Hume wanted to work around the landscape. They’d already had a few fights before getting this far, first at the Murrumbidgee River, then up in the Snowy Mountains and when they got here things really blew up. Hovell wanted to turn back upon reaching this river, but Hume built another boat, using sticks for a frame. Then after they crossed the Murray, or the Hume as we knew it, we immediately reached another large river, the Mitta Mitta, and Hovell refused to go on. They had another shouting match over it. Huge. And Hume crossed over without him, but just when Hovell was going to be left behind he called out for them to come and take him over the river too.’

Henry Lawson is really enjoying this. It is just like he’d have written it, of course.

‘And they continued the fight for years, both claiming things had happened differently. Hovell claimed that he was the one who named the river and Hume claimed it was himself. Hovell claimed that he had been instrumental in the success of the expedition and Hume claimed it was only successful because of his leadership and that Hovell kept getting lost. Hovell claimed they had no notion that they had not arrived at Western Port and Hume claimed that he suspected it all along and believed they had reached the western side of Port Phillip. Hume claimed he called Hovell and Claude Bossawa cowards and Hovell got the shits over that and wrote him a letter demanding to know if he had actually called him that as he had no recollection of it, and Hume wrote back that “he may be correct”. It went on for years. Each rewriting the story of the expedition to make the other come out worse. Hume said that Hovell would have turned back at the Murrumbidgee, and Hovell responded to that by saying that it was his cart that they made the boat out of, and Hume said the boat was his idea, and just after crossing the river Hovell got himself lost near Wee Jasper and was found wondering back to Yass, and Hovell said that wasn’t true and Hume said Hovell tried to incite the men to abandon the expedition after crossing the Murray and Hovell denied it. It was only their deaths that brought it to an end.’

I’m pondering that, and thinking that they might have been remembered more kindly, or more frequently, in history if they did not fall out so badly, when I see an old timer coming striding along the path. I greet him and he stops for a chat. He tells me that he walks along the side of the Murray every day and by his reckoning it’s up about three foot or so, which he knows because the muddy banks are underwater. He tells me that when he was a youngster the river used to flood more often, but they’ve built all these ponds and drainage areas around the town to prevent that now. Then he goes on to tell me just how much rain he’s had in his rain gauge over the past two weeks.

I’m impressed. A rain gauge! I can remember back in primary school days in the Blue Mountains when they were commonly kept, but haven’t seen one or heard of anyone using one for decades.

So then we talk about the rural fear of floods and fires and the many years of drought we’ve had. ‘The climate is changing, I suppose,’ he says. ‘And it’s probably going to get more extreme here in Australia too.’ I admit that it probably is. Then he says, ‘But you wouldn’t want to live anywhere else, would you?’ I have to admit that on this fine sunny day I can’t think of anywhere else I’d rather be than in Albury Australia.

‘I’ll talk to ya later,’ he says in a particularly optimistic form of farewell to somebody he’s never met before and will undoubtedly never meet again. I bid him a good day, and Lawson, who has been standing nearby listening, says, ‘If he hadn’t come along you’d have had to make him up.’

‘I don’t make up characters,’ I say. He just laughs.

‘So where’s this tree then?’ Cook asks. ‘Is this it?’ There’s a nice looking something or other tree, surrounded by plaques with the obligatory cranky old men pictures of Hume and Hovell and stories of the expedition.

‘I thought it would be taller,’ I tell Henry Angel.

‘It is,’ he says. ‘This isn’t it. This is some pretty park tree. Ours was a huge old gum tree. We search around and Cook, the explorer amongst us, finds it. ‘Over here,’ he calls. We follow him up the garden path, as it were, and find a huge old gum hidden amongst brush and bushes. There is a plaque at the foot of the tree that says, “Copy of Inscription HOVELL NOVR 17/24, cut on this tree by explorer Hovell 1824.”

Next to that is a small plaque that reads:

“This tree was inscribed by Captain Hovell on November 17th 1824 when Hume and Hovell discovered and named the Hume River now the Murray.”

The tree itself is looking a bit the worse for age and has a Perspex brace or something around its midsection, that has a type of metal gauze like steel wool pads behind it. The tree is looking a bit like an invalid, I think. I also wonder how many people manage to find it here, even if they do stop in the park. I’ve driven past this park dozens of times and never thought to stop. But it’s a living part of our history, like the Burke and Wills Dig tree, or the Barcaldine Tree of Knowledge. Though in fact I know that time has been a bit unkind to them too.

The Dig Tree in Central Australia, is still alive, though aged, and has a protective fence and boardwalks around it to prevent soil compacting and its health is closely monitored. The legendary Tree of Knowledge under which the 1891 Queensland Shearers’ Strike gave birth to the Australian Labour Party, has not been so lucky. It was declared sickly in 1991 and shortly after being placed on the National Heritage Register it was poisoned and was declared dead in October 2006. The remains of the tree became the basis for a huge monument that was built on the site, and cuttings from the tree that had been taken earlier were used to clone the tree, which is regrowing in Barcaldine and Brisbane.

The Hovell tree has had its share of reconstructive surgery too. In the early 1900s a termite infestation in the tree was scraped out and the hole plugged with two tonnes of concrete. The tree has since grown over that plug, but to ensure its continued life it has also had cuttings taken for cloning.

‘There was another tree nearby that Hume carved his name on,’ says Henry Angel, ‘Though it was lost to a bushfire in the 1840s.’

As we walk back up the path, Henry Angel stops and reads another plaque on a brick monument that looks like a barbeque. I notice a tear shed from his eyes and step up beside him to read it too. This plaque lists the names of the six convicts who accompanied Hume and Hovell, including our very own Henry Angel. He is clearly quite moved by that. The six men were very rarely given any recognition on the many monuments that were built along the path they trod.

‘What next?’ asks Lawson. ‘Who fancies a drink? It’s a beaut day for it.’

‘I think we should visit the local library,’ suggests Caroline Chisholm.

‘To see how many of my books they have?’ asks Lawson.

‘Well, we could do that too,’ she says, ‘But I read in a brochure in the hotel that there’s a particularly good exhibition on the region there.’

‘Okay,’ says Cook. ‘I’ll navigate.’ We start walking back across the road to the hotel car park, but Henry Angel says, ‘I think I’ll just stay here.’

‘You sure?’ I ask him. ‘We’re going to cross the Murray afterwards. And it’ll be a lot easier than the last times you crossed it.’

‘Thanks,’ he says. ‘But I think I’ll just sit here on the river bank. I’ve not had the chance to just sit here and just look at it, and I think it’s something I could spend some time doing.’

I nod my head. ‘And I could carve my name in a tree or two here as well,’ he says.

I give him a farewell wave and say, optimistically, ‘I’ll talk to ya later.’

We walk back past two mums with prams who are doing their power walk by the river talking house extensions and beauty treatments. Both sort of preservation of household heritage, I think.

With Cook navigating we soon end up at the beautiful railway station, rather than the library, where Carolyn Chisholm says, ‘Oh dear, this reminds me of all that fuss over the different gauge railway lines.’ I know what she’s talking about here. For decades travellers from Sydney to Melbourne by rail had to get out at Albury and swap trains as the different states in Australia had different gauge railways. That wasn’t fixed until 1962. And previous to that there was a strange system whereby trains travelling south to Melbourne would change at Wodonga and trains travelling north to Sydney would change at Albury. State competition played out in many ways here. Before federation there were differences in what goods could be purchased on either side of the river with duty, or without duty and while New South Wales tended towards free trade Victoria tended towards protectionism and tariffs. This led to people crossing over to New South Wales to buy things and having to smuggle them back to Victoria. Women were said to hide sugar and flour and other things under their skirts, until somebody hit upon the notion that while these ingredients demanded duty, if they were made into dough they did not, so dough houses near the river crossings sprang up where you could turn your flour and sugar or whatever into dough to carry across the border duty free.

The first actual bridge over the Murray River wasn’t built until 1861, and before that people relied on a series of punts to ferry them across the river. The first postman who was tasked with carrying mail from Yass to Melbourne was John Bourke, who began the run at the age of 18 and he claimed that over the years he had a horse speared by natives, was attacked by fierce dogs after swimming the Murray River for the first time, and that it took two weeks each way for the trip, camping out each night. Back in the day when such deeds were considered normal rather than mythical.

From the 1850s to 1870s paddle boats worked the Murray River, but that was a relatively short-lived period, and was replaced by rail transport when the Melbourne line reached Wodonga in 1873. The New South Wales side of the rail network didn’t arrive at Albury until 1881, allowing for a combined 19 hour journey from Sydney to Melbourne.

Cook gets the navigation right on our second go and we enter the library, impressed with its size and modernity. I ask the lady at the information desk where the Albury exhibition is and she points me towards the rear of the library where a large sign indicates the Crossing Place – the earliest name for Albury-Wodonga.

‘Let me guess,’ says Cook. ‘There was a riot here.’

‘No,’ I say.

‘There was a prison here then?’ he says.

‘No,’ I say.

‘Then what?’

‘A migration centre.’

He shrugs. ‘The whole country is a migration centre.’

Even Caroline Chisholm laughs at that. In the outer foyer to the Crossing Place there is a large exhibition on Governor Lachlan Macquarie, the man who placed the plinth in Sydney that became the official start of the Hume Highway. I’m intrigued to see how different the existing portraits of the man are and wonder which of them is closest to the truth. Is it the one with blonde locks and a noble movie-star face, or the one with a huge nose and dark hair combed over a balding spot? Probably the one with the most warts and blemishes. The exhibition tells us that the Governor started using the name Australia in his correspondence rather than New Holland, giving official sanction to the name advocated by explorer Matthew Flinders who first circumnavigated the continent. The Governor also instituted the celebration of Australia Day on 26 January, on the 30th anniversary of the colony’s foundation.

‘Good to see you again, Lachie,’ I say to his many portraits and me and Caroline move further in to the exhibition while Cook and Lawson go back to the library to search the catalogue. Along one side there is an exhibition of indigenous artefacts, including and wooden and stone tools and a possum skin cape. I’m impressed by how much work clearly goes into making a possum skin cape, seeing it up close.

One of the exhibition panels tells how white settlement drove many of the Wiradjuri people away from Albury, but in 1972 the town was chosen for the Families Resettlement Scheme that led to disadvantaged and dispossessed indigenous people being relocated here, so that the Albury indigenous community is now a ‘mixed mob’ from a variety of traditions and backgrounds that has “reconnected with country and re-established indigenous influence and culture here”.

We then move onto exhibition cases with Chinese artefacts, including letters, coins and even anti-Chinese tracts. Running through a quick history of migration to the region, firstly settlers and pioneers arrived along the river then in the 1850s with the discovery of gold came many Chinese miners or shopkeepers and gardeners. In the 1860s many German famers arrived and in the 1880s Lebanese families from Melbourne settled here, largely as drapers and haberdashers. After World War Two, the Bonegilla Migrant Reception Centre was built, with many residents later being employed on the Snowy Mountains hydro-electric scheme. While the exhibition states that “in the 1970s a circle was completed by the resettlement of indigenous people to the land given up by the Wiradjuri so many years before”, migration has not ceased, and Afghan and Sudanese faces can be seen around town.

The Bonegilla component of the exhibition includes photographs, children's toys, books and clothing, but the centre piece is a large stack of suitcases of the period that can be opened to see different stories or artefacts of the 320,000 people who passed through the nearby camp between 1947 and 1971. And the stories are so diverse. One wall has quotes from diaries or letters from camp residents. Most have general praise for Bonegilla, and there is one ribald story about how husbands and wives, who might be living in separate quarters, regularly went walking together in the dark, which was invariably followed by strange, but not unknown, nocturnal cries from the bush. One Dutch migrant, Cornelius Vleeskens, had a different interpretation of events though. He stated, “It had not been thought through in terms of people, merely numbers... the place had more the look of a concentration camp than the promised land.”

‘It was a commendable venture,’ says Caroline Chisholm. ‘I’m sure some mistakes were made, but it is of the utmost importance to have strict discipline, particularly over young women in these situations.’ That makes me determined to visit the camp itself and find out more about it.

Heading back out to the library foyer we stop and look at an exhibition about the Uiver aircraft. It’s a fascinating story. In 1934 the Dutch plane was taking part in the London to Melbourne air race, a part of the centenary of Melbourne celebrations. It was carrying four crew and three paying passengers and was only a few hours behind the lead airplane when it left Charleville for the last leg to Melbourne. Unfortunately it ran into a large electrical storm which cut its wireless contact and it drifted off course becoming lost.

The RAAF were aware that something was wrong and were trying to contact the plane, and hit upon the idea of contacting all towns along its route to be ready to help. Signal lights were switched on at railway stations and radio stations broadcast messages to people to look out for the lost plane. Albury's municipal electrical engineer, clearly a bit of a bright spark, used the entire town’s lighting system to flash the word ALBURY in Morse code so it could be seen from the skies. And just after midnight the local inhabitants heard the lost plane circling over their town.

The local ABC radio station, 2CO, then broadcast an appeal for listeners to drive their cars to the Albury racecourse and line up making out a landing strip with their headlights. The locals leapt to the challenge and at 1.20am the Uiver dropped two parachute flares to illuminate the ground and landed safely on the racecourse. But that wasn’t the end of the story, as the next morning 300 townspeople helped dig the plane out of the mud it had skidded into, and set it on firmer ground to take off and resume its flight. The plane took out second place in the race, and won the handicap. A story like that can’t but make you smile.

We go back out the library foyer to look for Henry Lawson. He is busily going through the catalogues to find how many of his books are there, of course, and when was the last time they were borrowed. Cook is looking both confused and disappointed, holding open a MasterChef book at a section on the shelves labelled “Cook books”.

I ask the helpful lady at the information desk about the Bonegilla exhibition, and she tells me they get a lot of former Bonegilla residents visiting the library exhibition, and the site out of town, and they get mixed reactions from them. ‘The kids tend to remember it well,’ she says, ‘But some older ones are filled with anger. You can feel it from them and conditions were pretty harsh.’

Caroline holds up a book she’s reading and says, ‘Now here is a wonderful example of educating and raising young women without families.’ I take up a copy of the book too and look at it. It’s about a place called St John’s and I ask the helpful information lady where it is.

‘Ah, yes,’ she says. ‘It was just outside of town. A catholic orphanage that ran for something like 100 years there.’

Caroline, a convert to Catholicism, who might have established such an institution herself, looks very pleased. ‘It was a pity about the accusations of brutality by the nuns though,’ the helpful lady says. ‘And the two-dozen or so young girls that had been removed from their families in Britain and passed off as orphans after the war. But I’m sure there were many girls who benefited from it nevertheless.’

Caroline puts the book back down and walks away to find something else to browse through. I wait until there is absolutely no trace of a smile on my face and gather the others up and tell them it’s time to go. Outside the library I see a group of young Aboriginal kids walking sullenly along the street. I wave at them. They just stare back at me. We walk up and down the street. There are many cafes and clothes shops and it is a very pleasant bogan-less day in Albury. ‘A nice town,’ I say to Cook.

‘Every town we stop in you say is a nice town,’ he says.

I shrug and wander up the street looking for a cafe. The Green Zebra is a mark of modern Albury, serving up the types of coffee varieties and cakes that you’d find in most capital cities, and smells of many types of brews and baked cakes, and it’s where I find Martine. She tells me that she came to Albury from England as a teenager, went to boarding school in Sydney, but she considers Albury her home. She worked in the Commonwealth Bank for 23 years, moving from Albury to northern Queensland back to Albury and then to Canberra, before getting a job in the Public Service there. But she has always looked at returning to live in Albury, and has recently organised things so that she can return here and work from home for much of the working week. The benefits of modern technology and flexible work places.

‘There is a sense of community here,’ she tells me. She also has a large extended family here, and as her – and her husband’s parents are getting quite old and they wanted to be near them. She has seen a lot of people who grew up here and move away, but when they have their family they come back to Albury. ‘Family is a big thing here. And there are a lot more families here now,’ she says. ‘There are still the old farming communities and old families here that are well off too.’

She says that Albury seems quite in touch with its heritage these days. She remembers a time when the main street seemed to be filling up with two dollar shops, but it now has new boutiques and cafes, yet there are also dress shops that were here when she was young. ‘Having the main street rather than big malls outside town makes a difference,’ she says. ‘I think what defines a country town is its main street.’

Martine tells me that she feels it is not so much historic events that characterise Albury as its lifestyle, and it is family, and there is a good range of cultural activities. Sport is big, like in most Australian towns and cities, with AFL being the leader. The local Ovens and Murray League, and other local leagues, all have a big following on the border, she tells me. There is also a big hockey tournament each year, and the town is very proud of Australian basketball champion Lauren Jackson, who hails from Albury. There are also lots of community events happening here regularly, such as a big wood-fired pizza cook-up by the paddle-steamer on the river, farmers markets and outdoor markets and an outdoor cinema.

And she agrees that the river is a large part of Albury life and there are many sporting or recreational activities, such as kayaking and water-skiing, linked with it. But during the drought years Lake Hume was down to around two per cent of its size, before the rains returned in 2010. ‘Since the waters came back it has lifted people as well,’ she says.

On Albury-Wodonga competition, she agrees it can get a bit fierce at times with both the similar-sized towns vying for new businesses and to grow their populations, but she is working with her yoga group to bring the World Peace Flame to the region, to place between the two towns as a symbol to try and get them working closer together.

And as to Albury’s aspirations, she feels that it should be about how to grow and not lose its sense of heritage. She tells me that Australia Day in Albury consists of activities and ceremonies down at the park by the river, where we had spent that morning. And to her mind, what defines Australia, or being Australian, is the sense of freedom, lifestyle and choices we have.

Martine then tells me that her husband, who was born just outside of Albury, has hiked a section of the Hume and Hovell walking track, in 2011. ‘They did the Tumbarumba to Woomagarma section, which was a five day walk. They encountered people doing day trips and others doing longer sections, carrying everything with them.’

It makes me think that driving the Hume every few weeks and walking it are such entirely different propositions. As she does the drive up and down the Hume Highway to Canberra regularly she tells me that she tries to time her drives to avoid the clusters of trucks. The new highway feels a lot safer to drive on, she says, ‘especially when you’re by yourself. But while the bypasses make it easier driving, they make it a bit mundane as well.’ And, she tells me that, while she knows the highway extremely well, there are bits of the road that just seem to stretch at night.

Martine also tells me that doing the Hume drive regularly she gets to see lots of the small towns that are thriving and those that are dying. ‘Albury is thriving,’ she tells me. Just in case I haven’t got that.

I head back out on the street and find my companions sitting by the road watching the locals stroll up and down. ‘Okay. Where to next?’ asks Lawson. ‘Are we going to do the grand crossing thing over to Victoria?’

‘Not just yet,’ I tell him. ‘We have a few Hume and Hovell footsteps to retrace first.’

‘Didn’t we do that this morning?’ he asks.

‘Not quite,’ I tell him. ‘When they got to the river they thought it too wide to cross and so went downriver for a bit and then upriver until they found a good crossing place, so we’re going to follow them and see what it’s like.’

‘Land travellers,’ says Cook with disdain.

Our first stop is the Albury Botanic Gardens, a charming garden at the end of the main street that boasts a tree that is a cutting from the Lone Pine from Gallipoli as well as a Hume monument. It is a plinth, of course, that was originally erected in 1858 by the site of the tree that Hume had carved his name into that had later been destroyed by fire and that nobody had taken a cutting of. The plinth was moved to the gardens in 1884. Also of interest, the original plaque had read that it was erected by the inhabitants of the Hume River, which has been amended to read Hume River District after it was pointed out that the inhabitants of the Hume River were the fish.

We walk around the gardens for a bit and then jump back into the car and head out of town, driving to the west, following the course of the river. We drive for about five kilometres or so and pull in at the Wonga Wetlands. There is an information centre there and we watch a large group of school kids go past, led by a guide taking them bird-watching it seems. The guide looks over their heads and asks if he can help me. I tell him I’m after the Wiradjuri camp site. He tells me to walk through the old cabin and come out the other side and follow the path, and then is enveloped in kids again.

So I do as he says, walking into the old house, glancing at the pioneer exhibits and Aboriginal artefacts and step out the back door onto an old veranda. It’s like one of those movies where you pass through a portal and go back in time. Out the back we follow the path and up ahead see some bark huts. I look at them carefully to see how they are constructed. An upright pole at each end with a single support pole and the thick bark laid against it on either side, like an A-frame tent. There are several of them in the clearing and I walk around then see the figures of the people. They are made of black metal tubing welded together in the shape of stick figures. Some are standing and some are sitting. There are more huts and figures a little further on and then I figure out how the camp is set up. There are rocks with words in English and Wiradjuri on them. One says Welcome. (Gawaimbaana-Gu). Another says Wiradjuri Family Community Camp (Waraang-Da). A third says Women’s Business (Ballaagunda). And another says Young Women’s Place (Yinaargung-Nguurraang).

The camp has areas for different groups of people. A place for families. A place for women. A place for kids. ‘What do you think of this?’ I ask Cook who is standing beside me. He sniffs and looks around. ‘It would not be much fun living in one of these,’ he says pointing to a hut. It would be frightfully hot in summer and terribly cold in winter.’

‘But this is how people would have been living when Hume and Hovell came through the area,’ I tell him. He nods, like he gets it, but doesn’t quite get why he has to get it. After I’ve contented myself with basking in the past we go back to the car and drive back to Albury and then head out of town the other way along the Riverina Highway. We follow the winding road past some beautiful properties and holiday houses, until we suddenly reach Lake Hume and the Hume Dam. The lake is huge. Many times larger than Sydney Harbour and it’s hard to imagine that it was down to two per cent of capacity recently. The dam itself is long, though not high, and it is hard to imagine it was once considered one of the mightiest Australian structures, alongside the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The dam was originally completed in 1936, but was extended in the 1950s, adding electric gates and then a hydro-electric power station.

The Murray River is the major water source of the Murray-Darling Basin, which supplies 40 per cent of our nation’s agricultural output and supports about two million people. The river has run dry several times since European settlement, including during the 1890s and in 1903. The dam was planned to prevent that happening. The water in the lake is blue, blue and the grass on the embankment by the dam is green, green. It looks a delightful place to spend a day or a holiday.

‘Can we drive across to Victoria?’ Caroline asks. ‘There is a road across the dam.’

I walk over and see that the road is blocked by huge concrete barricades and there is a sign there that says it is possible to cross to Victoria by foot or bicycle only. There is no mention of skateboards, scooters or roller-blades that younger people seem to favour. ‘Where did Hume and Hovell cross exactly?’ Lawson asks me.

I point out into the waters of Lake Hume. ‘Out there somewhere,’ I tell him. ‘Back in the drought years it might have been possible to follow their footsteps, but not today. We’ll have to go back downstream a little. We climb back into the car and drive downstream a kilometre or two. There is a bridge there that just seems to appear and we are suddenly glancing at the dam to our left and are then across the river before you’d know it. We pass a tall orange pillar welcoming us to Wodonga and that’s it. I barely have time to ponder a story I once heard about a man who was murdered on a boat in the river and the two states having a protracted legal dispute about whose jurisdiction it happened in before deciding the border was on the Victorian bank of the river, when we are a few hundred metres down the road beyond any jurisdictional doubt. I don’t know about my travelling companions, but I’d been expecting something a little grander. Musical fanfare. A change in the air. Something. We have now left Wiradjuri country and are in Wavaroo country.

The waters of the river flow behind us, slowly and deceptively peacefully past, making their way hundreds of kilometres, through the politics and passions of water distribution schemes all the way down to the sea near Adelaide.

We’ve only gone a few kilometres down the road when I have to step on the brakes and pull off the road. ‘What is it?’ asks Caroline Chisholm, a little distressed.

‘The past,’ I say. ‘This is Bonegilla. Or what’s left of it.’ We drive along a short road into the camp, past the obligatory signs of which Minister commemorated what and when, and find the visitor’s information centre. We are greeted by Moses, a “humanitarian migrant” from the Democratic Republic of the Congo who works there. He tells us that he’s only been in Australia two and half years, and hopes to have more of his family come to join him soon and then he lays out a map of the camp to show us in careful detail what we can expect to find as we walk around. He outlines what each building was used for with an aura of awe, like he is just discovering it for himself and clearly has some sense of wonder at how it might have been when it was full of people. I wonder what an empty refugee camp feels like to somebody who may have been through many versions of overly-full modern camps. He tells us that the two dozen or so huts we see in front of us represent Block 19, which was only a small remnant of the camp that covered over 24 similar sized blocks and housed over 7,000 people. In fact at its peaks, using tents for extra accommodation it housed up to 10,000 people, making it larger than the then population of nearby Wodonga.

Moses asks if I have any relatives who spent time in the camp as they get many visitors who had been here. He then tells me that some people who return become very sad in their memories, while others become angry, but some have happier memories too.

Then he shows us all the different publications they have and Bonegilla merchandise which we can come back and look at again after we’ve been around the camp. I thank him and wander over to the first hut. There is TV monitor there playing a claymation story of different figures telling the different stories of different people who have spent time at Bonegilla. I watch the video for a bit and then look around the hut. There was a sign outside that said: “If you were here, you know. If you weren’t you can imagine.” But can you really imagine it?

I’m intrigued to feel what it might have been like to live here by just walking through the empty huts. They remind me a lot of the prison huts you see in World War Two movies or on Hogan’s Heroes. Rows of bunks and a low open ceiling with minimal insulation. We walk through huts that show the entertainment rooms and the kitchen and the communal showers that could only be described as “rustic” no matter how generously, and some of the smaller individual family rooms.

There is some information about the food served up here, which was described by The Border Mail in 1949 as “plain, but nutritious and plentiful”, but described by an Italian resident as “atrocious”. For the first arrivals, refugees coming from post-War Europe, they were impressed with the large amounts of meat and fresh vegetables, but as time passed and Europe recovered, and more of the arrivals were assisted migrants rather than refugees, expectations changed and good food was no longer just about quantities. A typical menu for the week was porridge and milk with bread and jam for breakfast, boiled meat and potato salad for lunch and roast mutton with baked potatoes and vegetables for dinner. There were set variations for each day of the week, so much so that one resident said, “there was always plenty to eat, but every now and then it got boring. You only had to look at your plate to know what day of the week it was.”

In an effort to adjust to complaints there were gradual changes and attempts to match meals to national tastes – with over 20 different ways of cooking mutton gradually adopted, including not just boiling and roasting, but Italian lamb shanks, mutton curry, mutton and okra and mutton meat balls.

The next hut we wander into has an exhibition about a scheme to bring out migrant Greek farmers. An initial plan to bring out 500 rural workers in 1953 grew to 15,000 assisted Greek rural workers coming to Australia, many who then brought out their extended families and friends as assisted or unassisted migrants. By 1961, the number of Greeks in Australia had increased six-fold and by 1971 it had doubled again.

On another wall there are black and white photos of Christmas, community meetings, English lessons and day-to-day life in the camp. It uses to have its own churches, banks, cinema, hospital, police station and railway platform. I stare into the photos intently, trying to grasp some feeling of the past. All these different ways we try to bridge the distance, through animation and placards and photos and exhibitions and old newspapers.

‘Don’t you ever wish you could just step back into the past?’ I ask Cook.

‘God no,’ he says. ‘The past was a ghastly place really. I always wanted to find a way to step into the future.’

‘What do you think?’ I ask Caroline, knowing that Henry always romanticised the past and that Caroline would have a more pragmatic view of things.

‘Well I think this is just marvellous,’ she says. ‘Look at the scale of things. Thousands of people being resettled at a time. Families and women being found work in the country. Contributing to the moral balance of the nation. It’s just grand.’

She’s clearly comparing this to her own migration hostels that held up to a few hundred people maximum and more often just a few dozen. Something on this scale must have been just a dream to her. But the scale of it was also one of its problems. Living in a town of 6,000 or more people is one things, but living in a camp is quite another. For many migrants camp life was unutterably boring, the diet was dull beyond imagining, and when work was finally obtained it sometimes meant having to travel a long way from family and friends here.

I flick through one of the booklets I got from Moses and then say, ‘Hey, you’ll never guess what happened here in 1952 and 1961?’

‘Riots?’ asks Cook.

‘How did you know that?’ I ask him, but he just casts his hand wide around him, clearly doing a better job at the imagining thing than I am doing. The two riots both had similar causes, with largely southern Italian men rioting against the lack of availability of work in Australia, which was due to economic downturns at the times. In 1952 about 2,000 mostly Italian men threatened to burn down the camp and the army were called in. Officials later claimed they were actually called in to conduct ‘exercises’ in the vicinity. For an angry Italian migrant suddenly seeing a tank roll across the landscape in front of them the distinction might have been a little too subtle to grasp at the time though. The 1961 riot was also due to people having spent overly long in camp with no work being available and involved Italian, German and Yugoslavian migrants. They marched on the employment office and threw stones until they were forcibly dispersed by police.

According to some of the migrant stories, there had been a series of suicides before the riot, which had been listed as deaths by “natural causes”, which sounds just a little bit like military “exercises”. We stop at one small room in a hut and I put my head inside and then stop. I can feel some sort of sadness there. Something I hadn’t been able to feel in that tiny room in Hamilton Hume’s house at Yass. I wonder if I’m becoming more attuned to the past, or just more attuned to imagining that I’m more attuned.

There were over 300,000 people living here over the nearly twenty years the camp operated, but numbers that large are difficult to break down into individuals. But that’s what they each were – men and women and children coming from around the world to a new life in a new land, and while this place mightn’t have been much of an introduction to what life in Australia could actually offer them, likewise the records of migrants who were here do not well convey how the majority of them went on to settle in communities all across the country and raise families and have careers and lives that enriched the nation.

‘Do you know what this all reminds me of?’ Caroline Chisholm asks. ‘Do you see any similarities between the camp here and the Wiradjuri camp we looked at earlier?’

‘How do you mean?’ Cook asks.

‘Well,’ she says. ‘These huts were frightfully hot in summer and terribly cold in winter. There are huts for families. Community cooking spaces. Separate huts for men and women. See?’

‘You draw a long bow,’ he says.

‘To better hit a distant target I think,’ says Caroline Chisholm.

‘Did you say Strongbow?’ asks Lawson. ‘Now there’s a decent drop of cider.’

Back in the car and I look at our map. From here, if we went back over to the Hume Highway it would only be about 300 kilometres straight down the freeway to Melbourne. Less than three hours driving to reach the outskirts of the city. But that’s not the way that Hume and Hovell went on their outward journey and so we’re not going to see much of the Victorian part of the freeway. If we did, we could compare speeds with some of the notable great drives along the Hume. The first recorded car driven from Sydney to Melbourne took ten days for the trip. At an average speed of 13 kilometres per hour, the steam-powered kerosene-fuelled automobile manufactured by Herbert Thomson of Melbourne, detoured via Bathurst and Wagga to reach Albury and then on to Melbourne, establishing the time to beat. It didn’t take too long as new petrol-driven cars hit the roads (or tracks as much of the Hume still was then). In 1909 a record of 21 hours and 19 minutes was set by G. I. White and F. Custance. Four years later this was cut to 19 hours and 2 minutes and by 1923 the time was down to 12 hours and 59 minutes – this by Norman ‘Wizard’ Smith, who was a keen record-breaker. By 1935, when police pressure led to automobile clubs withdrawing official time-keepers to restrict the dangers of long-distance racing, the record stood at 8 hours and 56 minutes. Not bad considering that Google Maps estimates the time taken to drive between Sydney and Melbourne along the 876 kilometres of the modern highway as 11 hours 48 mins. Yes, you can drive it in one day, stopping briefly at service stations for petrol and take-away meals, but you won’t see much of the country except through your windshield, and you certainly won’t have walked and talked the land.

The record for actually walking – or running – the Hume Highway is held by Cliff Young, a 61-year-old potato farmer who won the first Westfield Sydney to Melbourne Ultra Marathon in 1983, with a time of five days, 15 hours and four minutes. Although a very slow runner, by continuing to run through the nights while the other competitors were sleeping, he won the race, shaving almost two days off the existing record.

A little-known notable drive, going from Melbourne to Sydney, was the escape by Great Train Robber Ronald Biggs, in 1969. After breaking out of England’s Wandsworth Prison in 1965, having served only 16 months of his 30 year sentence he made his way to Australia and was living in Melbourne with his wife and three children. Interpol finally tracked him down though and they raided his house in October of 1969. They discovered he had fled the previous evening though, heading up the Hume Highway to Sydney where he caught a flight to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.

At the edge of Lake Hume we find a stone plinth by the side of the road. It is another one that looks like it has been made from the rocks that a farmer dug out of his field over twenty years that have been concreted together. The plaque on it says: “Hume and Hovell passed here 21st November 1824, erected November 1924.”

‘They would have emerged from the lake about here, I guess,’ I say. ‘Before there was a lake I mean.’

From here we can either keep driving around the lake to the east or drive back towards Wodonga and the Hume Freeway. I decide to go around the lake and try to find the path that H&H took. We drive past trees up to their knees in the water and there are black and white cattle grazing on thick green grass. It’s hard to believe there had been several years of severe drought and a near-empty lake here recently.

At the tail end of the lake to the south it starts looking like river again – the Mitta Mitta that gave Hume and Hovell such grief after crossing the Murray. There are nice little farms here with sparse tall gums and dark cows like freckles on the green hills. Cook, who has been looking at the map, says, ‘You’d be better abandoning the roads from here on, because who ever planned them seems to have built most of them at cross angles to the path the explorers would have taken.’ He shows me the map. I tell him I see his point, but I’m still going to stick to the roads. He shakes his head a little and mutters something about me never making a useful ship’s navigator.

So we drive on.

There is a mountain range now before us with a valley on either side to suggest that H&H would have taken either one, but would have had trouble doing both. We drive right up to the base of the mountains and see there is a pass ahead of us. We also see up close the mountains are really just tall hills. ‘That’s the way they would have gone,’ I say.

We take a few back roads and end up on the Yackandandah-Wodonga Road that takes us to Staghorn Flat. There is not too much there but there is another Hume and Hovell monument. This one is a stark concrete plinth that just says: “Hume and Hovell 22.11.1824”. Next to it is a rock with another plaque on it that lists the locals who served in World Wars Version 1.0 and Version 2.0. That’s it. A rock with a plaque. No war memorial plinth or soldier statue or anything like that. Staghorn Flat was settled by squatters about 15 years after H&H came through the area and by the 1850s was attracting large numbers of miners seeking gold.  As the gold petered out selectors moved in during the 1870s, growing fruit, running dairy cows and grazing. It is now famous for its minimalist way of commemorating heritage.

We drive on down the road to nearby by Allen’s Flat, another ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ community, and we almost do miss it, so I stop to turn the car around – at exactly the same time a van and a truck hurtle towards us from different directions. The truck driver slams on his brakes as I quickly try to get out of his way. ‘Ya fuckin’ idiot!’ he yells out his window as he zooms past. I notice he is hauling natural spring water. “Soothing and calming” it proclaims.

‘A rather opinionated chap,’ says Caroline Chisholm.

We drive into Allen’s Flat but fail to find the Hume and Hovell monument that should be there. We find vineyards and hay bales by the road and a strawberry winery though, so I return the road, looking carefully for approaching traffic, and we continue southwards.

Our next stop is Yackandandah, a small scenic town that has been hacked out of the mountains, where there’s meant to be another Hume and Hovell memorial, but we drive up and down the main street without seeing it, and the guy in the suit in the visitor’s information office doesn’t know anything about it either, but suggests I go down to the old museum and ask there. I walk back down the street to the museum and taking the time to travel at a walking pace I start to notice this town is different in some way. I stop to look about me. Really look about me. And I’m struck by how lovely the place is. It is small, but the main street is well decorated and people are sitting out the front of cafes drinking coffee and there are coloured banners outside other shops and the newsagency has a sign in the window saying they have been voted the best newsagency in the state and I can see that many of the buildings are historic like the Athenium directly across the street from me. There’s something about this town that I can’t quite put my finger on, but it has a real charm to it.

Up the road I notice that the local primary school is having an outdoor assembly. There’s lots and lots of kids there I notice too, not like most small county towns. I smile to two ladies with nose rings who are having a coffee who smile back and I cross the road to the old museum. Inside I meet Sue and start up a conversation about Yackandandah. She tells me that the town has a population of only 700 or so, and that many of them are yuppies. However she is trying hard not to use the word yuppie, and we agree on the term “professionals”. Many of the townspeople work in government occupations or healthcare, she says, and are employed in nearby Wangaratta or Albury and have chosen to come and live here for lifestyle reasons. The town has a lot of people with diverse interests and they put their energies into folk festivals and the arts and there are many renowned artisans living in the area.

Originally owing its prosperity to gold mining, Yackandandah’s population has grown and shrunk according to the changing times, and is now clearly experiencing a period of growth.

‘Lots of young families are moving here,’ Sue says. ‘At four o’clock the secondary school buses will come in from Beechworth and the streets are suddenly filled with children.’ Given the number of kids I saw at the primary school that certainly makes for a very young town. And I wonder why it is that Victoria seems to do rural village living so well? Then I ask if they are a village or a town and Sue tells me that they are definitely a town. They have resisted being called a village. ‘It’s how people like to sell it,’ she says. ‘As a village. But we won’t be having a bit of it.’

Known alternatively as Yack by older residents and the Dandah by younger ones, Sue says that many of the longer-term locals are finding they can’t afford the cost of living here as easily as they used to. The town’s popularity has greatly increased house prices, both within the town and the rural properties around it.

She says she is pretty sure where the Hume and Hovell memorial is, at an old school site, about five kilometres south of the township. But before heading back to the car I take a quick tour of the museum, discovering that Australia’s first Australian-born Governor General Sir Isaac Issacs grew up here, his family following the gold trail like so many others.

So we follow the Back Creek Road south from Yackandandah and run into a large herd of cows blocking our path. They walk right up close to the car, as if wanting to check out their gums in the wing mirrors, before ambling past on their way to get milked or slaughtered or wherever they are off to. Once they are gone we keep driving, way past the five or so kilometres we’ve been told, and just when I’m about to stop and turn around I slam on the brakes again. There is the top of a plinth peeping over some bushes, with a metal rod like a lightning fork sticking out the top of it. This memorial is dark rock in a tall thin pyramid with a plaque that is so weather worn it is hard to read clearly, but it definitely says: “Hume and Hovell, November 23rd 1824, Erected 1924.”

I wonder about that, because according to one of my maps they should have been near to Beechworth on 23 November, which was further to the west. In his journal Hovell goes into great detail to describe the land they passed through on the 23rd, stating:

“... stopped at the foot of the last highe range we had but a little before, ascended, and descended again, beside a fine running stream of cold Water, All the land We have gone over this afternoon, is of a more inferior quality then that which we passed over this Morning, and in parts worse than any land we have seen since leaving home, but perhaps that is occasioned by the opening coming to a Close (that is, we are drawing toward the top of the range) but were there is a flat forest Country of a few miles extent, Notwithstanding it is near to the Mountains... the appearance of the Country to the Westward, is low, with few, or no hills, to the S.W. it appear like the end of the ranges falling off to a level, but to the Eastward immence Mountains appear to view...”

He also waxed lyrical on the “devil Fly and the Misketo” that plagued them, and the necessity of bringing a tradesman who could shoe horses on any similar expedition as well as a shoe-maker to similarly make or repair the men’s shoes.

The old school looks long abandoned and I wonder how many generations of children grew up believing that Hume and Hovell had walked through their play ground, which is unlikely that they actually did.  No matter, I’m sure they would have come this way if they had an opportunity to.

We’re now confronted with another one of Cook’s navigation issues, the direct line of travel from Yackandandah to Beechworth has no roads on it, so we find the closest thing that looks like a road on the map, and turn around and drive back through the cows from the other direction. Lawson makes the obvious remark that the cows were a lot prettier up close front on. The cows turn off the road following a sign into a Christian Youth Centre, which gives me pause for thought. We ourselves turn off onto Schmidt Lane, which is actually a dirt track, barely deserving of the appellation Lane, and start bumping our way along at a greatly reduced speed. ‘Now this is what I call a real road,’ Lawson says.

‘And I dare say we are now travelling at exactly the same speed that Hume and Hovell would have been travelling at,’ adds Caroline.

Bushfires have been through the area in the past few years, but ferns and undergrowth have grown back thickly. The road, or track, or lane, is winding and steep off to the side at some points, and I’m glad to be ignoring Cook’s advice for turning left or right at random moments. Eventually the road turns back into something like a road, alongside some pine plantations, with a wider dirt road that has been gradered and watered quite recently.

We reach the small township of Stanley – which is a long, long way from Yackandandah – despite being not a very long way from it at all. Or to put it another way, if Yackandandah does old as heritage, Stanley just does old and old. I wind down the window and ask a young woman walking by the road side if she knows of a Hume and Hovell moment in town. She says she doesn’t know and so I describe what it would look like, a plinth and plaque and so on, and she tells me that she does know it after all, and tells us where it is, but when we get there we find she has sent us a memorial to fire fighters.

We drive around the town a few times, but it is clearly another memorial that is going to evade us. ‘Why don’t we ask somebody at the local pub?’ asks Lawson, but I tell him, ‘There’s another memorial just along the road a bit in Murmungee. Just along the road turns out to be another dirt road, that is like a real rough bypass around the town of Beechworth, yet not only are we not able to find the memorial at Murmungee, but we can barely find Murmungee.

‘Hey, aren’t you going to stop in Beechworth and do that thing you do, giving us local facts and figures and talking to some random locals like they represent the whole community?’ asks Cook. I glare at him in the rear-view mirror. ‘I won’t complain about your navigation if you don’t complain about my choice of where we stop,’ I say.

‘He’s got a point,’ says Caroline. ‘Don’t you feel obliged to stop everywhere? How can you write about places if you don’t stop at all of them?’

‘I got a lot closer to Beechworth than Shakespeare ever got to Verona or Denmark,’ I say.

Caroline folds her arms. ‘That’s just being smart-arse,’ she says. I’m surprised at her language. ‘Alright’, I say, and stop the car. I pull out my notebook and read from it. ‘Beechworth has a population of about 2,600. It won the 2009/2010 Australian Tidy Towns Awards. It was originally known as Spring Creek and was named Beechworth in 1854. It prospered during the 1850s due to gold and Robert O’Hara Burke was a police inspector here before he got lost in central Australia. Beechworth has a lot of heritage about because it missed out on the development booms of the 1960s and 1970s when lots of heritage was replaced with brick and concrete things. Ned Kelly spent some time here and each year they hold a Ned Kelly festival attracting a plague of amateur historians who come close to fisticuffs in public over points of Ned Kelly history. Descendents of the Kelly family or the police or lawyers or almost anyone living in the area at the time, come along and sit in a family block with arms folded tightly to make sure no one disparages their family name, or takes liberties with their heritage. The whole thing is the Ned Kelly equivalent of Bundanoon is Brigadoon. Having half the town dress up as Ned Kelly extras is a little less strange than having half the town dress up as Elvis Presley extras though, which happens in the New South Wales town of Parkes each year.’

‘How do you know all that?’ asks Cook.

‘Well he’s clearly been one or two of the festivals, isn’t that right dear?’ says Caroline.

I decline to answer and say, ‘Now let’s find this Murmungee Hume and Hovell marker.’

We ask at a Murmungee store and the lady and the girl there both ponder if it might be at the school, or by the tennis court, or who knows where really, and after a little bit more driving around we give it up as another lost memorial. This is all repeated once again up the road at Everton, and I’m starting to wonder who is stealing all these Hume and Hovell monuments? Are they sitting in people’s gardens like old Mile Posts or something? Or could somebody be trying to remove all the evidence that the explorers had ever been here? I suspect the evil forces of ennui.

‘Next town Wangaratta,’ I say.

‘Will there be a missing memorial there too?’ Lawson asks.

‘We’ll be back on the Hume Highway again,’ I say.

‘I thought they didn’t go on the highway,’ he replies.

‘Are there any road that follow the way they went?’ I ask Cook.

‘Not really,’ he says.

‘Wangaratta then,’ I say.

Some of the roads into Wangaratta are closed due to flooding and water is up close to the roadside as we drive into town. Suddenly the car in front slams on its brakes and then pulls off onto the verge. ‘Ya fuckin’ idiot!’ I shout as we swerve around it. I notice that it’s a pathology car, probably carrying blood to give to people who run into the back of it.

Caroline gives me a long hard stare. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ I say. ‘I’m considering becoming a truck driver.’ Wangaratta proclaims itself the home of Olympians. It is a busy place and we have to pay for parking on the main street outside the tourist information centre, which is next to a gun shop. You don’t see many of those on main streets, I think. Another nearby shop has a sign that says, “Rat and mice traps now in stock”. I can see a solution to keep both the mice and rats down and the gun shop owner happy, but I’m not going to be the one who suggests it.

Inside the tourist information centre there is a Ned Kelly mannequin, dressed in a helmet, pointing a pistol at you as walk in. I’m surprised to see it doesn’t have a small plaque advertising the gun shop next door. The closer we get to Kelly Country Central, the more Kelly monuments and merchandise there is. Everyone wants a bit of him or to make a bit of money from him, it seems.

I talk to the lady at the desk about attractions in town and she tells me about their Jazz Festival and the fact that musician Nick Cave came from here and she also corrects me that they are not a town, but are a city, because they have a cathedral. She also shows me on a map where Mad Dog Morgan is buried in the local cemetery. I pick up a copy of the local paper, the Wangaratta Chronicle and note that it is full of stories of flooding and bad weather. The front page story laments the fact that the Essendon football team had been unable to come to town for “the city’s biggest ever football match” because the plane they had chartered could not land at either Wangaratta or Albury due to bad weather. The team they were playing against, the Saints, came by bus. Rainfall for the past week in the area, of over half a metre, almost totalled the entire yearly rainfall for 2006, causing quite a bit of flooding and road closures. A local caravan park manager lamented financial losses caused by the seventh flood in 18 months, with a picture of him rowing a dingy through the park.

I return to the car to find that Lawson has shoplifted a CD of his poems read by Jack Thompson. He’s keen for us to play it, but when he opens the CD case there is nothing inside. He’s furious and I explain to him that they take them out to prevent shoplifting. He sulks and says it’s undemocratic. Un-Australian even!

‘How do you define being un-Australian?’ I ask him.

‘Obviously anyone who doesn’t appreciate a Lawson poem,’ says Cook.

‘I can’t even figure out what it is to be an Australian anymore,’ says Caroline Chisholm. ‘It used to be much easier.’

‘Look,’ says Lawson. ‘It’s simple. If you’re a bit embarrassed to stand up and shout out that you’re Australian, then you’re probably a quiet patriot. If you’re proud to shout it out you’re a nationalist. If you say Ozzie, Ozzie, Ozzie you’re a dickhead.’

So I promised to tell more about the bushranger Mad Dog Morgan and his scrotum, so here’s something to get your teeth into. While he had ranged around Tumba-bloody-rumba, his final shootout occurred nearby Wangaratta. After he left New South Wales he plied his trade up and down the Sydney Road between Benalla and Glenrowan. On 8 April 1865, Mad Dan Morgan held up the McPherson family at their station at Peechelba, about twenty kilometres out of Wangaratta. However a nursemaid who was employed by the family was given permission to leave the lounge room where everybody was being held, to tend to a crying baby, one-year-old Christina Macpherson. The nursemaid then escaped the property and was able to raise the alarm and the next morning, as he was leaving, Dan Morgan found himself surrounded by locals and police. He was shot twice and died and both his head and scrotum were souvenired and the rest of his body was buried at Wangaratta cemetery.

His grave is in a very scenic far corner, but obviously the other residents think he has brought down the property values as there are no graves close to his. And his marker is another rock with a plaque on it, like at Moonlite’s grave. But his headless and scrotumless body doesn’t seem to attract the types of devotes that Moonlite attracts.

I also remember a history talk I once went to by a lady who gave graveyard tours, telling that a woman once told her that they had M.D. Morgan’s scrotum in her family, as her ancestor had been the doctor who souvenired it, and asked what they should do with it. Now I’m sure there is some lesson we can all learn from that to apply to our understanding of being Australia, but as I’m not too sure what exactly it might be, here are two more interesting asides. Firstly, Morgan, whose real name was believed to be John Fuller, was born in Appin (where Hamilton Hume had his property), in 1830, only five years after Hume returned from his expedition. And secondly, the young baby who helped end Morgan/Fuller’s career, Christina Macpherson, grew up later on Dagworth Station near Winton in Queensland and one day a guest, A.B. Paterson, wrote the words to Waltzing Matilda in response to a tune that Christina hummed for him. But we don’t need to discuss that in any more detail or Lawson will tell us in great and protracted detail why one of his poems would surely have made a better national song.

1050 kilometres – Glenrowan – the Keeping Place of the Kelly Legend

Barely after getting back onto the Hume Highway after Wangaratta I turn off it again to enter Glenrowan. The road sign says: “Keeping place of the Kelly legend.”

‘Just as well Graham Bennett isn’t with us anymore,’ I say. ‘He’d not be impressed with what the world has done to Ned Kelly compared to what it has done to Moonlite.’ I indicate up ahead to the giant Ned Kelly statue that stands over Glenrowan – a huge six metre tall man with no neck as the large grey helmet sits so low on his shoulders.

‘People are just forgetting him at a slower rate,’ says Caroline Chisholm.

‘Forgetting Ned Kelly?’ I ask. ‘Never!’

Well perhaps forgetting him as he was and creating him as something new, might be more accurate. Though I’ve been stopping in Glenrowan on trips to Melbourne and back for over three decades and have watched it slowly become quieter and quieter and found it harder and harder to find real quality Kelly things in the shops, more likely being replaced by the types of T-shirts that bad-ass bikers like to wear, or fluffy Ned Kelly dolls and random merchandise. But then many of the museums and historical sights of Australian history have become framed by souvenir shops that don’t so much as sell the experience, but sell any random merchandise with a tenuous link to it.

Welcome to Ned Kelly country, where the tourist operators have reprinted his remains on towels and hats and ashtrays and tea spoons and stickers and you name it. But then again, who are we to deny somebody’s right to earn an honest quid or two and insist they go broke via historical authenticity?

I leave my passengers to wander up and down the street and I got into Kate’s Cottage – which is a gift shop and museum and start up a conversation with Rod Gerrett. He’s been there in Glenrowan for over twenty years, and he and his wife were the ones who had the large Ned Kelly statue built out there on the street back in 1992. After sizing me up for possible interest, he tells me that the business is up for sale. He’s hoping to get a buyer with a passion for Ned Kelly, he says.

I ask about the business and he tells me that his top selling items are T-shirts and hats. I nod my head, telling him I’ve bought a few of both from here over the years, but have generally looked for good books. I then tell him that I was lucky enough to see all the four suits of Kelly gang armour together at an exhibition both at the Old Melbourne Gaol and then again in Canberra at the National Museum recently. And his face lights up and he’s no longer a seller of merchandise, nor a man trying to sell his business – he’s passionate about the heritage. He tells me that he helped put together the exhibition at the Old Melbourne Gaol and had the privilege to hold Ned’s armour. He got to put on white cotton gloves and lift it from one case to another, he said. They also supplied a few things for the exhibition from his museum, he adds proudly, which once you get beyond the merch shop isn’t half bad.

So I ask him a bit more about the business and what it all means to him. He says that he sees all types, from scholars to Kelly fanatics and those after a quick purchase of Kelly memorabilia, before driving on, but he only works in the shop two days week these days, as he is also doing up houses in Wangaratta. That immediately makes me wonder about the business’s turnover, and if needing to diversify is a necessity. He doesn’t strike me as having more renovation passion than Kelly passion – but who can tell from a short conversation?

Then I ask him what he makes of the fact that they’ve just recently identified Ned Kelly’s remains – minus his head – from DNA testing of a skeleton found in a mass grave at Pentridge Prison in Melbourne. That’s an interesting story in itself. Ned had been buried at Old Melbourne Gaol after his execution and it was thought that his remains might still be there, but an excavation of Pentridge Prison found the remains of many prisoners’ bodies that had been transferred there in 1929. His almost complete skeleton was found in a wooden axe box, and after matching wounds in the skeleton to those on Ned, a DNA sample was taken from Melbourne school teacher, Leigh Olver, who is the great-grandson of Ned’s sister Ellen, proving the remains were of Ned Kelly.

The head was another matter though, for the skull long presumed to be Ned’s (which was stole from its exhibition at the old Melbourne Gaol in 1978, and then returned by a bloke who had kept it in a make-up box inside a tree hollow by the river) turned out not to be Ned’s skull at all! That was verified by a long forensic process of matching Ned’s death mask, and early skull photos and DNA, and the fact that the skeletal remains head a chunk of skull with them, cut out at autopsy to ensure the hanging had snapped the vertebra correctly. So Ned’s skull, where ever it is, is going to have a chunk cut out of it at the back of the skull which this skull did not have.

Anyway, Rod tells that it will be up to the family to decide what to do with the remains now. They may choose to cremate them he thinks, even without the head, but he’d like to see a memorial in the park, here, though he acknowledges it would become something of a shrine.

It wouldn’t be too bad for business too, I think, but I’m not going to be ungenerous enough to say so. He’s been very generous in sharing his time and thoughts with me and I can see that while his business is about the past, his mind is clearly on the future.

Stepping back out onto the street I look around for my companions, but they’ve wandered off somewhere. I should be so lucky. I walk down the far end of the street towards Ned Kelly’s Last Stand, which advertises itself as a 8.5 million dollar extravaganza, interactive

theatrical production. It also promises to be “educational, historically correct and entertaining” as well as being “not a picture theatre, but a theme park!” Who could resist? I’ve visited lots of historical-entertainment places over the years, like the old Berrima court house, and have seen some absolutely stunning holographic tellings of local stories, like at Holbrook, so am curious to see what you can build for that much money.

I step in and meet Bob Hempel. He’s dressed in a red Wild West shirt and is standing at the counter of the spacious saloon-looking foyer. He’s ushering a bus tour of retirees from Port Macquarie in, and I jump in and join them. We are moved into a sort of railway waiting room, except it is filled with stuffed animal heads, and are all seated on wood benches and then the show begins. We see and hear people talking behind a glass panel of a door, setting the scene for what is to happen. Police are ordering a train up to Kelly country to capture Ned for shooting Aaron Sherritt. I look at my fellow audience members and they are a little bemused by it all. Wind blows down upon us, then we hear rain beating on the windows and then a projected face on a mannequin cackles like Vincent Price did the filming. ‘A story of ruthlessness and crime unsurpassed in Australia,’ says the outline of a policeman. The Port Macquarieans laugh, treating it all like they are on a ghost train ride at a funfair. It’s moving rather quickly to keep up with and there is more audio than visuals, but when the large clock on the walls starts spinning backwards they all burst in giggles again until the lights come on and the scene ends and Bob leads us all into the next room – supposedly of Jones’ Inn where the final Kelly siege took place. But this is a wild place with animated mannequins set around us, including a boy swinging from the chandelier, a stuffed Alsatian dog that I suspect might be Inspector Rex and a cat on the bar and animals and growling sounds all about us, as well as a trap door banging with somebody trying to get out and one man pissing in the corner. There are rifles on the walls and a plucked chicken and more animal heads and a baby is crying in a crib and Mrs Jones has a bright orange boa on – which I can’t help but wonder about the historical correctness of – and the general feeling amongst the retirees is one of great mirth as things go bang and pow about them. It feels like new things have been added as they have been thought of so the effect is very chaotic on the senses.

And behind the bar, next to Mrs Jones is Ned Kelly, his helmet planted on the bar in front of him. His face is blank until it fills with the projected image of a man’s face, telling us that they have taken up some of the track to wreck the train filled with police that is coming for them. And on cue a small model train runs around the top of the room, setting the tour group off into hysterics again. They are clearly not a respectful crowd, I think.

Then the doors are thrown open onto the yard and we are led out to see the gunfight. All the players are there. Ned’s gang are at the rear of the yard, standing beside a sign that says, “Glenrowan Inn. Ann Jones. Best Accommodation.” And there is a grave yard with a skeletal looking monster in black rising up from the ground, and troopers are jumping over the wall at the rear of the yard, and to the left is an oversized Ned, about four metres or more tall, and also an oversized statue of Sergeant Steele, the trooper who finally shot Ned in the legs, bringing him down. The guns fire and smoke fills the yard and the flashes of the retirees cameras go wild.

Next we are taken across the yard into a dark shed, where we are crammed in and then it fills with theatrical smoke and things fall and bang and clunk about us and the walls fill with bullet holes and still the old folk are laughing, making jokes about keeping their hands to themselves in the close confines. After that we are led up to the more solemn part of the event. Ned is in a coffin and sits up and says, ‘Such is life’ while one of the innumerable Ned Kelly folk songs play, and the retirees find this the highlight. The Australia flag is there and Ned’s body is there, meant to be ringing out their patriotic sentiments but they, who probably consider the grave more regularly than many of us might, still find it hilarious. I’m not paying attention to the animation any more as I notice the ceiling above us has a large hinge in it and I nudge the old gent next to me and tell him to stand back a bit and point at the ceiling. And just as I do it snaps open and Ned Kelly’s body drops through on a hangman’s rope. Some of the old ladies scream in surprise and others burst out laughing and I wonder if anybody’s ever had such a shock that they keeled over to join Ned?

If they do they will at least be able to be moved into the next room for a lie down as Bob comes and shepherds us through into a bedroom full of toys and trains and things, that he says is where his grandkids love to sleep when they come to visit. I peek through a door and see a small kitchen and another living room. We’re walking through a part of Bob’s house. This is where he lives. In the middle of it all. His Ned Kelly world surrounds him. He’s besieged by it.

We finally go into the gift shop and painting exhibition before re-entering the foyer. As the retirees head back to their bus I go over to the counter and say hello to Bob. He asks me how I enjoyed the show. Of course I tell him I did and he beams. He’s a showman. He’s living the role. I tell him that there was a lot of laughter on that tour and he says yes, but some people take it all very seriously. One even threw a punch at him one day. ‘They don’t want to see the police side of the story being given,’ he said.

I ask him about the business side of things and he tells me that he’s been there in Glenrowan for just over thirty years. He’s 77 now and he admits he gets tired, but he doesn’t think he’ll be able to ever sell the business. ‘Nobody wants to buy it,’ he says, with less optimism than Rod Gerrett had. He tells me, perhaps also hoping I might be a potential buyer, that he pulls in over $200,000 net, but he puts a lot of that back into the business. For instance, he tells me he has a new plan for Ned’s head to fold back as he says his head was chopped off after death. But the bank doesn’t understand his type of business he says, and won’t lend money on it.

He tells me that several of the businesses in town are up for sale and these days they are really only busy at Easter and Christmas holidays. He says this is because it’s now so much easier and cheaper to fly between Melbourne and Sydney than drive.

‘This place has become a ten minute stop,’ he says, ‘but a lot of the businesses here don’t realise that. I don’t think the town can support too many Ned businesses. People stop for a photo, a quick look around and are gone again. That’s how it is nowadays.’

But he’s happy to discover people who saw the show ten or twenty years ago are now bringing their kids to see it. He looks up over my head as another customer walks in and he’s back in showman mode again, urging him to come in and enjoy the show, promising him he won’t be disappointed.

I like Bob. His show probably had Ned doing multiple rolls in his grave, which might have made it a bit easier for the archaeologists who uncovered his bones at Pentridge to recognise him – but he’s another man trying to make a buck out of the past, with one cautious eye on the future and what it might bring. And while we may have a lot of self-appointed cultural police in Australia, until someone creates such a position he’s as entitled to try and make a buck from Ned’s bones as the next man (as he’s entitled to being criticised for it). It’s a bit sad though to see so many heritage sites having to sell T-shirts and tea spoons to survive, but if the public purse won’t cover the costs, the merchandise will have to. My concern is when the T-shirts and tea spoons become the reason for being, and the heritage disappears altogether.

Back outside in something more akin to reality I see a bloke walk past me wearing a black Ned Kelly T-shirt, with tats on his arms, dark wrap-around sunglasses, a battered leather hat, a stringy pointed goatee and a “fuck-off-I’m-an-outlaw” attitude. One of the key target markets for Ned merchandise, who probably don’t care too much about the accuracy of the history, but would throw a punch at Bob for showing the police side of the story, I reckon.

I find my travelling companions staring around themselves with their arms on their hips and before any of them starts a discussion about why there aren’t similar towns of businesses for sale dedicated to them, I suggest we go for a walk across the tracks.

‘What’s over there?’ asks Cook.

‘That’s where history really happened,’ I say. ‘This is all just the entrance shop.’ They follow me over the railway bridge and I point out the small railway station and say, ‘That’s where the police train stopped and they surrounded the small pub where the gang were holed up.’

‘Where’s the pub?’ asks Lawson, asking the obvious Lawson question.

‘Here,’ I say. There is an overgrown empty lot immediately on the right after the bridge.

‘There’s nothing there,’ says Lawson, a little disappointed.

‘Nevertheless,’ I say. ‘That’s where the inn was.’ There is a sign at the front of the empty lot that says: “Glenrowan Inn. Ann Jones. Best Accommodation.” And then under that a smaller sign that says: “The above signboard is a replica of the original which was erected here in 1874. The front verandah of the inn to which the police laid siege on June 28th 1880 extended westward from this place to the corner of Siege Street and Beaconsfield Parade.”

Behind the sign is old bath tub with a tap next to it, showing that the vacant lot has been used for grazing animals. And beside the sign are two wooden poles, painted and carved like two members of the Kelly gang. ‘These are rather nice,’ says Caroline Chisholm.

I turn and show them that there are other log figures across the road, between the vacant lot and the train station. There are log bollard troopers and Aboriginal trackers advancing on the inn. ‘But wait, there’s more,’ I say. Around the corner and up the street a little bit, along a little bit of paved parkland is Ned’s capture site. There is another log figure, behind a real log, of Ned himself, wounded, sitting on the ground, propped up on the log – the real log. Beside it is a rather classy sign with pictures from the time and some random quotes, such as: “At first, police could not comprehend the shape advancing towards them in the cold dreary dawn. Some thought it was a bunyip, others a demon – until Ned Kelly revealed his revolver. Within half an hour, Ned’s last confrontation would be over.”

It’s rather poignant I think and a huge contrast from the commercial end of town. The geese and chooks wandering around Ned from his next door neighbour’s place don’t seem particularly impressed though. It’s a pity this side of town is so rarely visited. Most just stop for the ten minutes that Bob described on the main street and are gone again.

But not everybody is impressed with the Ned bollards. Historian Ian Jones, who has written what is widely regarded as the best history of Ned Kelly, says he thinks that the beautification of the site which is not in the actual location, has removed significant parts of the landscape and made it almost unrecognisable from the original site. He had participated in a management plan that was aiming to revegetate the site to resemble how it had looked in 1880, but he says it now looks more like a landscape garden, with paths, rocks and even a small bridge. He has been reported as describing it as an “atrocity” and “dead history”.

‘It may end up a pretty picture, but it will not be the Glenrowan battlefield,’ he said. ‘Sure this is going to bring in the tourists but at what price? Should we set up the Kelly carousel and a McDonald’s as well?’

There has been ongoing discussion about building a classy memorial and museum in town for many years that may or may not eventuate, and may or may not change the nature of the town and the experience for visitors. I look at my watch and say, ‘Time to rejoin the modern era. Our ten minutes are up.’

‘I think we’ve actually been here a lot longer than ten minutes,’ says Captain Cook. I give him a nod to show I’m not going to disagree with him.

‘I’m intrigued by this place,’ says Caroline Chisholm. ‘Can you image a place where we could have little recreations of all the great events of Australian history, and people could walk around amongst them and learn something about them all?’

‘Isn’t that called school?’ I asked.

‘No, I mean an actual place. Like those little chapels at the Pauline Monastery. You could buy some bushland and build little models of things from history. You could make log figures like here if you wished. It would be wonderful, don’t you think?’

Yes, it’s a great idea, but I don’t think it would get a financial backer or great public support and would join the list of attractions like Old Sydney Town north of Sydney, or the innumerable colonial inns that have become modern pubs and bistro to survive. There are some success stories, of course, like Sovereign Hill at Ballarat that recreates the gold mining era so well, but they are the exceptions. I’m not sure what Glenrowan will look like in another ten years, but I’m guessing it won’t have a Kelly Carousel, and even if it does have a monument to Ned’s remains, it will probably have less businesses than it has now and less visitors in a year.

I half expect to find Ned Kelly sitting in the car when we get back to it, but he’s not. I’m not sure if I’m more disappointed or relieved. ‘Next stop Benalla, where we’re going to spend the night,’ I say.

‘What’s in Benalla?’ Cook asks.

‘Dear friends of mine who are rarely short of a considered opinion on things,’ I say. ‘So you should get on famously.’

Donna and Ed live on a cattle property that sits so close to the outskirts of Benalla on the Broken River that it is almost in the suburbs. Ed, interestingly, was born near Western Port, where Hume and Hovell were aiming to arrive at in Victoria, and he came to Benalla when he was six. Donna moved to Benalla about twelve years ago and works in education and the arts. They thrive on asking questions and trying to find answer to them, even when there are no apparent answers.

They tell me that there is an ongoing debate in town at the moment about heritage. There is a proposal to erect a monument to the early settlers of the area and it has raised some awkward sensitivities. The issue is that the Benalla was the site of a massacre of European settlers, and a reprisal massacre of Aboriginals. Depending on which books you look up, and when they were written and who was writing them, the Faithful Massacre will concentrate on the eight or so European members of the Faithful brothers party that were killed by local Aboriginals in April 1838, or the many local Aboriginals that were killed in retaliation.

History has it – as much as history ever can – that George and William Faithful, who had moved south from near Goulburn to Wangaratta to take up land there, sent 18 men further south to find new pastures, with about 400 cattle and over 3,000 sheep, as well as drays and horses. Having gone some way the men noticed some stock missing. There were then reports that an Aborigine was said to have been seen killing a lamb. Then, one of the stockmen, Thomas Bently, was said to have found a cache of 80 to 100 spears hidden in the reeds nearby where they were travelling. The Europeans decided to confront the local tribesmen, and attempted to order them off the land where they were camping, which was said to be a ceremonial or hunting ground. The tribesmen refused to leave and things escalated. John Bass was the first man speared. The stockmen tried to get their guns from the drays as the Aborigines attacked them, but there were well over 100 tribesmen and the stockmen had to flee for their lives. It did them little good. The tribesmen hunted them down, spearing and clubbing them as they ran. Members of the party including John Hargrave, Edward Laycock,  John Freeman, William Macon and William Smith were all overtaken and killed, with the dead said to have been spread out over seven miles.

One of the tribesman was killed, or injured, depending on the story.

Further attacks on stockmen continued in Victoria until the Mounted Police were sent in to track down and recover stolen property and punish those responsible. But there seemed to be a lot more of an emphasis on “punishment” than on either “recovering stolen property” or “those responsible”, with up to 100 Aborigines killed in reprisals over the many months afterwards. Bodies have been dug up around town over the years, confirming the massacre to those few massacre-deniers, who like climate change-denialists refuse to believe evidence until the body count starts mounting.

One outcome of the massacre was that the first building in town was a police post. Lady Jane Franklin, on her own trip along the pre-Hume Highway in 1839, spent a night there and declared it was “as lonely and cheerless as one could imagine”.

Ed says the Faithful massacre actually only happened only about two kilometres from where we sit talking about it. ‘People know all that in Benalla,’ he said, ‘But don’t know what to do with it.’ The question being raised in the community, he tells me, is whether they will be ignoring Aboriginal history by concentrating on a memorial for the early explorers, or whether it is still important to acknowledge what the explorers did anyway.

The name Benalla is said to have originally been Benalta, the name squatter William McKellar gave his run in 1839. He applied to have his land extended in 1848, but the government clerk recorded in incorrectly as Benalla. A pub, the Black Swan, opened in 1840, followed by a post office in 1844 and by 1861 Benalla had grown sufficiently to be declared a town, with a population of almost 560 people and over 100 dwellings. From there it followed a path similar to many small towns along our journey that went something like: farming, railway, mining, light industry, bushrangers, law and order, local government, civic growth, local newspaper, protestant-Catholic divides, the Boer war, World War One, WW 2, drought and floods, McDonald’s and Hume Highway bypass. Benalla was bypassed by the Hume Freeway in 1987, and back in 1973 was said to have had 10,000 vehicles a day passing through the town along the old Highway.

Like most of the small communities we’ve visited along the Hume, the bypassing of Benalla may have removed the town from the view of most of the metropolitan travellers who zoom up and down Highway 31, but it has been steadily getting on with life and the locals have been working hard to deal with their local issues, such as addressing rural disadvantage. Driving around town it is clear that Benalla is not as prosperous as say Albury, and if Yackandandah is a “young” town, then Benalla feels more an “older” town. Unlike many small towns in rural Victoria that are seeing a renaissance due to influxes of younger wealthy professionals who telecommute or work in nearby cities, Benalla has not seen a large wave of urban middle class moving there.

But the community has some visions they are working towards. One is education, known as the ReGeneration project. Like many community visions it will be dependent on some additional funding to ensure its full potential, but Donna and Ed are clearly very excited about it and its impacts for their young daughter.

‘We’re going for a cultural change at schools,’ Ed said. ‘The current system lets a lot of kids down, so how do we change it? You’re going to have to move at least some of your resources to where they are most needed.’

One outcome of the project would be better linking families, community and school closer together, and I can only wish them well with it and hope it proves successful. They are such different dreams than those communities making squillions off the mining boom or tourism and I think that surely we are a big enough country both in size and at heart to see that prosperity is shared around more fairly. I keep quiet about that thought though for I know Caroline Chisholm would be convinced she was responsible for the sentiment, and would recruit me to some hair-brained and disastrous scheme like closing down skateboard parks in the big cities and bringing the hoodie-dudes out to aging rural communities so the old folks would get to interact with younger folks more.

Talking about the character of Benalla, Ed says many people’s lives there rotate around the rituals of footy in winter, tennis and cricket in summer and the cycles of harvest. It sounds fairly ideal, to a visitor with money in their pockets, but day-to-day and year-to-year life for a local can be quite different to that viewed by a car load of opinionated visitors dropping by for one night.

Ed jokes about Benalla being a renaissance black hole. ‘But it’s a struggling community,’ he says. ‘The average wage is way below the national average. People do move here to retire though. It is flat and easy to get around and cheap to buy a house. It is safe and quiet and there is a hospital and a bowling club.’

I actually think that Caroline Chisholm would like to retire here. A really nice town with a strong need for someone like her to roll up her sleeves and get to work on things. And she wouldn’t be alone. Ed says that while many of the town’s problems are chronic, he feels there is still enough sense of community here that you can do something about it, and they have had some people coming into Benalla bringing new energies and ideas with them as well. ‘There is an emerging mentality of trying to turn around rural disadvantage,’ he says.

He also says that he feels the future of Benalla, and small towns like it, are going to be through new opportunities rather than the old ones. He thinks regional sustainability is petering out, though there will be a lot of new alternatives like new fuels and energy production opportunities arising. ‘No one is going to be very wealthy, but there will be real jobs in things like biofuels and alternative crops.

Back in 1970, a Regional Committee meeting in Benalla discussed the future of the region and came to the conclusion that development of primary industry offered the best prospects for the region, with special attention to wine-growing, supported by tertiary training. I’d love to have the members of the committee sit down and look at modern Benalla, and track how their projections had played out or not.

And it is important to note that off the Federal funding highway, that tends to run between Canberra and the capital cities, local communities are both defining their own problems and owning solutions to them. I have always wondered if we were ever going to get serious about abolishing one of our three levels of government, would it be local or state government that should go? But I’ve found that while people tend to have a very strong identity with their state, they live and interact primarily at the community level. So I suppose if there were easy answers to that question something might have already been done about it, and the question would no longer need to be even asked.

Before we turn in for the night, we talk about nationalism and being Australian. David says that national identity in Benalla is generally defined by Weary Dunlop – the town’s favourite son. ‘He is our local national hero. You can’t speak ill of the man,’ he says. Donna adds that like many Australians people would tend not to question what patriotism was – until you actually challenged it.

The next morning we wake up to hears the cows mooing and magpies calling and rouse ourselves for another day on the road. I raise the question about Hume and Hovell monuments that are nearby, and I quiz Ed about one that is supposed to be in town. He is uncertain of where it might be but directs me to a possible location by the town’s lake and bids us farewell until our next visit. The monument by the lake turns out to be a plaque on a rock for James “Tally-Ho” Taylor, a bugler to Major Mitchell’s exploration party, who was drowned here while trying to cross the river on 13 October 1836. Nearby is another plaque on another rock marking the nearby site of the Faithful massacre.

So we go to the museum in town and ask the friendly elderly lady on the desk about a Hume and Hovell monument, and while she phones-a-friend we look through the museum. It is small but well laid out and boasts the bloodied green sash Ned Kelly received for an act of heroism as a youth that he wore at Glenrowan when he was captured, and also the prison doors from the Benalla gaol on which a rather famous photo was taken of Ned Kelly gang member Joe Byrne, tied up to be photographed as if he was still standing, but looking like nothing except a dead man tied up against a door.

And of course there is a room devoted to Weary Dunlop, outlining his sporting achievements, and the manner in which he helped save the lives of so many Australian soldiers slaving on the Thai-Burma railway, protecting them from disease and injury and Japanese oppression. Unfortunately the helpful elderly lady at the museum is not able to help with the location of the elusive H&H monument and I walk back out the car, cautiously peeping in to make sure we haven’t picked up anybody new in town. But, no, the car’s empty, and so we drive out of town along the Midland Highway towards Mansfield.

There are tall handsome gums along the road here, which look like they have been caught in various dancing poses, suddenly becoming motionless as we drive past, waiting until no one is watching to start moving and waving about again. It’s quite nice country around here and I’m thinking H&H should have been pretty happy with the lie of the land. There are numerous small farms off along dirt roads with rows of letter boxes, and even green wheelie bins at the end of some of the roads. Rural suburbia, I think.

We’re making good time, but suddenly, as we’re driving through the small township of Swanpool I slam on the brakes, nearly catapulting my passengers out the front window. ‘What is it?’ asks Caroline. ‘A child on the road?’

‘A pub on fire?’ asks Lawson.

‘A submarine?’ asks Cook.

‘No. Look!’ I say. There, right beside the road is a Hume and Hovell monument. My faith is restored! The monument drought is ended. It is a plinth made up of lots of lawn bowls-sized rocks with a plaque that says that H&H passed four miles south of here on the trip south and passed three miles north of here on their trip north.

‘So why build it sort of just in the middle?’ Lawson asks.

‘I presume it’s built here because the township is here,’ I say.

He shakes his head. ‘So the monuments that are where they actually walked we can’t find, but the monuments that aren’t where they walked we can find, is it?’

‘Don’t be so cynical,’ I tell him.

‘A man with a dry throat can’t be much else,’ he complains. When Hume and Hovell were here it was fresh food they lacked for. Hovell wrote that then men went out hunting but returned without any success. They saw some kangaroos, but the dogs were now too weak to catch them.

So we drive on, past a lake by the road with dead trees doing that dead tree thing they do in lakes, until I repeat the roadside sudden braking at Barjarg, 22 kilometres further south. This monument looks a bit like it was pilfered from ancient Egypt and again it indicates that Hume and Hovell camped nearby the spot. Then on we go again, my passengers finally taking their seatbelts a little more seriously, and into Mansfield.

Mansfield is a nice town. Of course it’s a nice town, as every town we’ve stopped at has been nice. I’d been expecting in-bred rednecks and yobbos to menace us somewhere on our journey, but I’ve only encountered people just going about their daily lives. We are now in Taungurung country, and as we drive into town a cloud of white cockatoos rise on our left. Welcome to Mansfield, they call in their peculiar harsh screech.

Slightly out of town we find the tourist information centre, by the old railway station. There’s the stump of a large tree that has had a canoe cut out of it by one of the Taungurung people. There is also a memorial made up of skis and ski-boards, as skiers come through here in droves in the winter, heading up to the Victorian Alps. The information centre has information on what to do around town and there is a bit of Ned Kelly information too. One of the signs advises that you can get a map and do a heritage walk around town. That sounds the ticket, so I ask for the map. The lady searches, but has to tell me that they’ve run out of them. The disappearance of heritage!

So I’m thinking, well it’s a nice town (did I mention that?), so I’ll just drive around and check it out and see what we see. And then I ask, ‘What was the link with Ned Kelly here? He was held in the court house or something wasn’t he?’

And she says, ‘There’s the monument to the policemen they killed and their graves are in town too.’ And then adds, almost as an afterthought. ‘Or you could go out to Stringybark Creek where he shot the policemen.’

And a gong goes off in my head – gonnng! Stringybark Creek is near here? I thought it was like miles and miles away up in the high country where you couldn’t ever get to. ‘Can you show me on the map?’ I ask.

‘Of course,’ she says and pulls out a local map that she does have, and carefully draws the path out of town, telling me exactly how many streets to go past before turning off and then how many miles to go before the road becomes hilly and where to turn off onto a dirt track and how far to follow it until there’s another turn off towards the site, which is marked. She also tells me that you have to take a bit of walk to get to the actual camp site the troopers were at.

Then I’m rounding up the others, dragging Cook and Lawson away from the large town map where they are searching for streets or things that have been named after them, and am back in the car and like an excited 13-year-old, saying, ‘Oh – my – God!

‘What is it?’ asks Caroline, glad that I’ve finally gotten religion.

‘We’re going to Stringybark Creek,’ I say.

‘Where’s that?’

‘About 150 years ago,’ I say. ‘Hold on tight.’

For those who came in late, in 1878 Ned Kelly had been declared a wanted man for supposedly assaulting one Constable Fitzpatrick, which had been escalated into an attempted murder charge, though there is some doubt as the veracity of the charge as well as being some doubt as the character of Constable Fitzpatrick. One story has it that he was trying to get his drunken leg over Ned’s sister Kate when she clocked him with shovel and he went back to the station with his tail between his legs saying Ned had attacked him and tried to kill him.

Regardless of what happened, Ned was a wanted man an in October of that year four policemen from Mansfield, Sergeant Kennedy with Constables Lonigan, Scanlan and McIntyre, were in the Wombat Ranges looking for them, where they heard the gang were hiding out. The set up camp on Stringybark Creek, not knowing the Kelly gang was less than one kilometre away, at Bullock Creek. On 26 October two of the policemen, Kennedy and Scanlan, were out hunting for game or the outlaws, with the other two left at the campsite when the Kelly’s ambushed them. Constable McIntyre surrendered when called upon to give up, but Constable Lonigan took cover behind a log and when he tried to shoot at the outlaws Ned Kelly shot him in the head. The gang then hid around the campsite and waited for Kennedy and Scanlan to return.

When the two policemen finally returned later in the day, McIntyre called out to them to surrender as the Kelly gang had them covered. Sergeant Kennedy thought it a joke until the bushrangers appeared with guns ready. The two policemen decided to fight and Scanlan was shot dead while reaching for his gun and Kennedy jumped off his horse and ran into the bush. Ned Kelly chased him, wounding him twice and then shooting the fallen man in the chest. McIntyre took advantage of the confusion to jump onto Kennedy’s horse and escape. After hiding the night in a wombat hole he made his way back to Mansfield and reported the deaths that resulted in the gang becoming notorious outlaws, with a huge price on their heads, dead or alive.

So we head out of town following the map directions and taking the turns as marked and are soon heading along a minor road towards some hills and start winding our way up into them. There are a few small businesses scattered along the road, farm stays and such and after a bit we reach the top of the ranges. There are tall thin upright gums here, peeling their bark like shed snakeskins. Coming down the ranges we pass a small pub at the hamlet of Tolmie, and I note it is for sale. Then after that we turn off onto a dirt road and enter a plantation.

There are 11 kilometres of dirt road to drive along and as we bump and jar Henry Lawson says again, ‘Now this is what I call a road!’ We pass a few properties and then enter Toombullup State Forest and the land reverts to something of an untouched wilderness that you don’t get to see often along the Hume Highway.

After a bit more bumping and bouncing we find a turnoff to Stringybark Creek Track and follow it along and suddenly there we are. There is rough car park on the right and a picnic area on the left. I climb out of the car and just stand there and look around and listen. The tall thin gums are brown and grey and don’t appear to shed their bark here. The ground is thick with ferns and undergrowth and I can hear the call of birds. It looks to me like a pretty good location for a hide out, being so remote and quiet, and if you were policemen you’d be pretty stupid to go shooting game to tip off any outlaws you were tracking as to your presence.

I walk across the road to the picnic ground and the first thing I see is plaque on a rock that looks just like another Hume and Hovell marker, but this one says:

“In memory of Sergeant Michael Kennedy No 2009, Constable Michael Scanlon N 2118, Constable Thomas Lonigan No 2423, Killed at Stringybark Creek on the 26th October 1878 during the execution of their duty in a gunfight with a group of men later known as the ‘Kelly Gang’. Respectfully remembered and never forgotten. The Victorian Police Force. Plaque unveiled by Michael and Mick Kennedy, on the 20th of October 2001.”

Nearby there is a shelter with mounted storyboards that provide the basic story and reveal that the Kelly Gang had heard incorrectly that two different police parties were hunting them and scouting the area they came across the policemen, dressed in plain clothes, and suspected they were attempting to ambush them in some way, and decided to act first.

I ask my companions for a bit of time to myself then and follow the path marked to the Kelly Tree. There I find an amazing sight, a huge gum tree with a metal Kelly helmet embedded in the tree near the base with the tree growing around the mask. There is another plaque there that tells me that this tree, long thought to be the site of the police shooting, is in fact on the wrong side of the creek and several hundred metres away from where the shooting took place. It says that a tall gum tree closer to the creek had been marked by a bullet in the shoot out and this was known as the Kelly Tree, but was cut down by saw millers with more of an eye for profit than heritage, in 1908.

A second random tree was selected by the landowner in the 1920s as the Kelly Tree and this was then replaced with the tree that now has the Kelly face mask in it. I follow the path onwards, deeper into the bush and cross the creek. The trees here are tall thin gums, like the logs that were used to make the Kelly gang log statues at Glenrowan. I get this strange feeling that every tree could be him. I continue walking on until I finally come to the killing ground. There is another sign here that gives the detailed layout of the police camp site, and who would have stood where.

I sit on a rock in the filtered sunlight and find that my excitement has ebbed. This is also a very sad place I feel. I listen to the wind blowing softly through the treetops, the leaves whispering something I can’t hope to understand and the birds calling in reply. For all I know they are mocking the fight of modern amateur historians who are replaying the conflict and confrontation here in their fierce arguments as to the actual location of the killing ground.

But I’m thinking that this is what a journey into Australia’s heritage lands needs. More sitting and listening and not demanding to be entertained. Just sitting quietly and hoping to feel something of the past. Something more than a quick pause and a photo and onwards. Rather a moment of reflection. A need to engage with your own thoughts.

All the different journeys I’ve made over the years and all the different countries I’ve visited, and all the roads I’ve driven down and all the things I’ve seen, and all the people I’ve met, they have to at some point be worth more than just a photo. They have to make you ponder just what it all means to you, and hopefully you have something of an answer before you have to turn around and head back home again, or where ever it is that your journey ends.

For three of the four policemen, their journey finished here.

I walk slowly back to the car park and note the signs that state it is unsafe to step off the path as there are many uncovered pits from when gold miners came through the area. I also take it a warning of the uncovered pitfalls of trivialising the past.

Back at the car, Lawson intercepts me before I can reach the driver’s door. He indicates the back seat. There is a scruffy looking large man there with a thick beard and heavy eyebrows.

‘He wants to go to Melbourne too,’ says Henry.

‘I’d been wondering when he’d show up,’ I say.

‘Gidday,’ he says.

‘Gidday,’ I reply. I wait for him to say something else, but he just taps his fingers impatiently on his thighs, and so I shrug and hop into the car.

1350 kilometres – Mount Disappointment

We drive back to Mansfield, along the bumpy dirt roads and then wind our way back down through the ranges to the flat paddocks near the town. There are so many things I’d like to ask Ned about Stringybark Creek. It’s the bit of his life that has not been recreated in some kind of modern theatre, and there are no T-shirts nor tea spoons for sale there. I wonder if he knows what Glenrowan is like, and what he thinks of it. But he doesn’t look like he’s in a mood to talk about much right now.

We reach Mansfield and I say, ‘There should be another Hume and Hovell marker in town. We’d better stop and find it.’

‘A human hovel?’ Ned asks.

‘We’ve done that joke,’ says Caroline. Ned shrugs.

We drive down the main street but can’t see anything. ‘I think it’s up near the information centre,’ says Cook, looking over the map. We drive up there and all we see is sign for the cemetery. That’s where the three policemen will be buried. I look into the rear-view mirror at Ned’s scowling face and think it’s probably not a great idea to go and check it out right now. ‘Never mind,’ I say. ‘There’s another one at the next town we’re stopping at.’

‘I think I can find this one,’ says Cook, wrestling with the map.

‘I think we’ll just go on,’ I say.

‘No, I’m sure I can find it,’ says Cook.

‘It’s such a pleasant day for a drive, isn’t it,’ says Caroline Chisholm, cutting off any further discussion. I turn onto the road south, and before very long we’re sitting behind a huge B-double truck that is lumbering along at a slow pace, and I’m looking for a chance to overtake it. And of course while it’s one thing to overtake a long truck on the dual carriageway of the Hume Highway it’s quite a different thing on a winding country road.

‘Where to next?’ asks Caroline.

‘We are going to make our way, to the village of Yea,’ I say.

‘Don’t think being able to rhyme will make you a poet,’ says Henry Lawson.

‘Then what else does it take?’ asks Cook.

Henry closes his eyes and moment and then recites to us in a slow tone, full of unexpected rhythm and emotion:

“He will dream things and he'll see things, to come true when he is dead.

He will see things all too plainly, and his fellows will deride,

For his mothers they were gipsies, All on his good mother's side.”

Cook pulls a what-the-hell-does-that-mean face, and Lawson continues, emphasising each third word strongly:

“And my dreams are strange dreams, are day dreams, are grey dreams,

And my dreams are wild dreams, and old dreams and new;

They haunt me and daunt me with fears of the morrow—

My brothers they doubt me—but my dreams come true.”

We are all quiet for a while taking that in. Lawson’s poetry was often sadder than Paterson’s but much deeper too. His clearly loves the bush, but it saddens him too. Mother-bush, he calls it. And he celebrates the type of people his sees as his people, the battlers, the dispossessed the lonely, the native Australians – and he denigrates the rich and landed of the world. Or he celebrates the Humes and denigrates the Hovells, like so many of us have subconsciously done. But his writing captured his soul, not just his thoughts.

‘Nice one,’ I tell him. ‘Thanks for sharing that.’

Twenty kilometres or so past Mansfield we are driving past a lake and caravan parks and a sign that welcomes us to Bonnie Doon. I pull off the road, overlooking the water and wind down the car’s window. There are some old fibro shacks to one side of us and some little brick houses on the other. There are gentle hills with sheep on them further back. ‘Can you feel it?’ I ask.

‘Feel what?’ Lawson asks.

‘The serenity,’ I say. But none of them get it. So I pull back onto the road and continue on. We’re on the Maroondah Highway and are soon back behind the truck.

Cook says, ‘I like the lay of the land around here. It reminds me a lot of Yorkshire.’

‘Was it the kangaroos we saw back there?’ asks Ned Kelly. Cook ignores him.

‘Maybe this truck is going to go straight on to Euroa at the next turn off,’ I say.

‘Where else would it be going to?’ asks Cook.

‘Yea verily,’ I say.

We approach the Euroa turn off but the truck doesn’t take the turn. I pull a sour face. Then I pull out a little over the centre line of the road to get a good look ahead to see if I can overtake the truck. But there is a huge truck coming the other way. I pull back in and the truck whizzes past, rocking us. Hmm, maybe best to wait I think. But then a 4-wheel drive overtakes both us and the truck and that gets my hackles up. I stick the car’s nose out three more times before it looks clear enough and then I floor it. I can hear Caroline Chisholm taking a deep breath in and I can hear Ned Kelly urging me to go faster. We’re doing 120 kilometres per hour when we get in front of the truck and pull back in to the left side of the road, just as a sign says, “Divided road ahead.” I curse a little.

We enter Murindidi Shire, Taungurung country, and see some weirdly twisted gum trees about us as we zoom through the small town of Kunumbra, followed by the hamlet of Yark, which I presume rhymes with Faaaark! We are just on the other side when I see the flashing lights in my mirror. ‘Faaaark,’ I say. My passengers all turn their heads and see the police car there on my tail.

‘Run for it,’ says Ned.

‘Pull over,’ says Caroline.

I’m undecided for a moment. It’s like having one of those good angels and bad angels on your shoulders, telling you contrary things. I pull over. Ned sulks down in his seat. ‘Don’t tell him I’m here,’ he says.

I wind down my window as a young copper with curly dark hair walks up beside me. He asks to see my licence and so I dig it out for him. ‘Was I doing something wrong?’ I ask him, as I’m sure everyone asks him, whether they’ve just run a bicyclist off the road or are driving a stolen car.

‘One hundred and twelve on the radar,’ he says. Then he adds, ‘I’m not going to give you a ticket, but just going to check a few things.’ He takes my licence back to his car, undoubtedly to check if I have any warrants for grand theft auto or for running bicyclists off the road.

‘Now drive off!’ says Ned. ‘While he’s out of his car!’

I ignore him.

‘You’ll only get this one chance,’ he says.

‘Shhh, Edward,’ says Caroline and pats his knee.

The young copper sits in his car a while, doing the crossword or checking his horoscope in the local paper, or something, and I start thinking, how cool is this? After all, what kind of a credible road trip story doesn’t have some run in with the police somewhere? And this encounter won’t even cost me a speeding fine!

Eventually the copper comes back. ‘Here you go,’ he says and hands my licence back to me.’ But before he turns and walks away I say, ‘Actually, can I ask you a question?’

He looks at me a little cautiously and then says, ‘Sure.’

‘Well I’m doing a bit of a history tour and I was up at Stringybark Creek earlier and then at Glenrowan before that, and you know how Ned Kelly is lionised so much, but what do the police tend to think of him?’

He smiles. ‘Personally I think he was a murderer of police officers. He was certainly no hero.’

I ask him about how rebels have adopted Ned as a symbol of some anti-police sentiment, and he says, ‘He was just a murderer and a criminal.’

‘Yeah, I thought the police might have a different take on it all,’ I say and thank him.

He hops in his car and drives off and I look back at Ned who is scowling at me. ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Nothing personal. I just wanted to know.’

Just before I pull back onto the road the B-double truck roars past us once more.

‘Faaaark,’ I mumble again.

And so we press on the next twenty kilometres or so to Yea, behind our friendly slow-trundling B-double, as I rant about slow-moving trucks being as much a hazard as overly-fast moving ones, and my passengers look out the windows at the hilly and creeky land. I slow down when we reach the outskirts of Yea and we cruise along the main street looking for the monument. ‘There it is on the larboard side,’ says Cook. There is a thin white obelisk there. I stop the car and get out with my camera. But it is a monument to a local who was killed in the Boer War. I hop back in the car and we do a lap of the main street like we’re a car load of hoons looking for hot local chicks.

‘You’d better ask somebody,’ says Caroline. We all look pained. Even Cook mumbles, ‘I didn’t ask people for directions when we were exploring the coast of Australia.’

But she’s right. As ever. I stop outside a take-away shop, the Amble Inn Cafe, and step inside. There are a few locals sitting at tables eating, including one very well dressed pair of ladies who are sharing a meal. Maybe Yea restaurants don’t open until later. I ask them if they know where the Hume and Hovell monument is. They smile politely and tell me that they are not locals.

I look across to the tradesman getting into a pie and think, not likely, and so I ask the guy working at the counter. He’s got a strong Greek accent and a magnificent white handle-bar moustache. He tells me he’s not sure what I mean. I try and describe Hume and Hovell to him and then his eyes light up and he nods. He does know the monument. He points out the door to the monument we’ve already stopped at. I tell him that’s not it and his rubs his chin. He tells me that he’s lived in the town for 35 years and isn’t sure if they have such a monument as I’m looking for.

Then he goes back behind the counter and has a long discussion with somebody out in the kitchen and comes back says, ‘Maybe it’s across the road and up the hill a little bit.’ He comes to the door of the shop and shows me where it is. I can’t see it, but can see the way to go.

I thank him and jump back in the car. We head down the road and around the corner and up the hill a little bit and there is the monument. Another tall white obelisk. I climb out of the car with my camera. But this one is a war memorial. I stand there perplexed and look back to my travelling companions. And then I see it. On the other side of the road from the car. Your standard H&H memorial made up of grey rocks cemented together, with yellow rocks stuck onto the top, and on one side a plaque which reads:

“Hume and Hovell, the first explorers of Victoria passed this spot December 1824. They induced the subsequent settlement of the colony. Erected November 1924.”

In fact, when Hume and Hovell reached Yea the men and the cattle were so done in that they took a day off and rested up, catching some fish in the stream and then mended their clothes, which had become “much torn with in this last week, first by the Mountains, and lastly by the underwood &c on the banks of the rivers”. The mended clothes only lasted a few days though, as barely a week had passed and they were going through brambles so thick that “one of the men that had got on the only pair of trowsers he had, got an unfortunate tumble, which not only took away every part of his trowsers, but the frunt flap of his Shirt also, thereby leaving him in that state, that had there been any doubt of his Manhood before, these doubts were now removed”.

‘Happy?’ asks Caroline Chisholm when I climbed back into the car.

‘Immensely,’ I say.

We drive around the streets of Yea and I’m thinking, if this little town was here when H1 and H2 came through, they wouldn’t have gone any further. The hills here are ‘rolling’, the paddocks are wide and the sheep and cows around town have their noses down in the green grass. But, like H1 and H2 we too press on, thankfully no longer with the B-double truck in front of us, and we are soon winding up into hills. More reason for the explorers to have stayed in Yea I think. We go up-up-up-up-up, and then down-down-down-down-down and into Woiworung land.

Clouds come down around us and I’m thinking this would be real difficult country to be dragging tired men and supplies through and suddenly we reach the small township of Flowerdale. As soon as I read the signpost I take a short intake of breath. ‘A fire’s been through here,’ says Henry Lawson. He doesn’t know what an understatement that is. The hills have gone from rolling and green to covered in black matchstick stumps, with regrowth around their bases. It’s like nature has given the hills a harsh number one haircut with a blow torch.

On the left of us the bushland is untouched and on the right we can see the bizarre patterns where fire has eaten out the vegetation in some places and left others. The fickle path of a bush fire. I suppose that in another five or ten years you might drive through and not notice any trace of where the fire had been. The locals will be a lot, lot longer in ever forgetting it though.

‘Such a pretty name for a town,’ says Caroline. ‘And look how new everything is.’ She’s right. The school, the community hall, many of the houses, they are all made of new and shining metal. Built to be more fire-wise than the old buildings. The only major building we see that looks like it hasn’t been rebuilt is the pub.

Saturday 7 February 2009 was a hot windy day in Flowerdale with temperatures reaching above 40 degrees and wind speeds in excess of 90 kilometres per hour. Added to that was a countryside dried out by several years of drought and all it needed were a few compulsive firebugs and some accidental sparks, and fires were suddenly raging across several fronts across Victoria, with up to 400 individual fires.

Just tracking their movements was complicated, but in the places where several fires joined to become fire fronts, they marched with great speed and destruction across the landscape. Flowerdale had little defences against the ferocious fire front that descended upon it on that day. The Country Fire Authority brigade had gone off some hours earlier to fight another fire and the sole member of the emergency services on site – one policeman – made the decision that it was too dangerous to stay and told everyone to get out of town.

The community sent the women and children off to the nearby town of Yea, about 30 kilometres away, when they became concerned enough about the approaching fire front. The uncertainty of not knowing if the fire was going to descend upon them or not made planning difficult. But come it did, and by the time the fire had passed five people were dead and four out of every five houses were destroyed. The dead included a mother and her two daughters, found huddled together on a road and two more women were found dead next to their car. Also one badly burned man was rescued by his neighbours, only to die in the back of their ute.

The Flowerdale pub became the centre for operations and survival for the township, being defended by dozens of residents armed with hoses, mops and buckets. News footage from the days of the fire shows the ordinary residents of Flowerdale, just blokes and women, working together to try to combat the approaching fire. Most of them were first time fire fighters, learning on the job really quickly.

One of the survivors described the decision by many of the men to stay and fight the fire as, “We don't have a town centre. We only have the pub and the town hall so it is pretty important to us. It may be a bit Australian trying to hold on to the pub, but it means a lot.”

Another said, “If the school, the hall, the pub went this town would never come back.”

They were so determined to stay and survive that they even parked their cars facing the opposite direction from the way out of town, so as to remove the temptation to flee and die on the road as many others had.

When the fires came they came with a fury, with three different fire fronts descending on the town at once, from the east, south and the west. Survivors described the fireball that engulfed the town as "the devil's breath".

The Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission provided detail on the movement of the fires, with the main fire that struck Flowerdale being the Kilmore East fire. It was reported as having begun at about 11.47am on 7 February, near Kilmore East after a power pole conductor failed, igniting dried vegetation around the pole. When crews arrived shortly after they found a fire that was 80-100 metres wide. It ran south and split into two tongues around a hill there, with one tongue advancing towards the Hume Highway.

With the assistance of high winds it crossed the highway at about 1.20pm near Heathcote Junction, splitting into multiple tongues across about five kilometres. The fires slowly merged again and headed south-east towards the Wandong Regional Park, and from there moved up the slopes of the Great Dividing Range and towards Mount Disappointment, progressing up its slopes between 3.15 and 3.45pm. Spot fires were reported as far as 20 to 40 kilometres ahead of the main fire front.

The topography of the region again split the fire into several fronts, one moving onto Kinglake West and Humevale, and drawing most of the fire fighting crews in the area. A south-westerly wind change at about 5.45 pm, caused the fire to move north and north east, bringing the main fire front down onto Kinglake West township, devastating it. With 38 deaths, more people died at Kinglake than another location. The fire then moved on northwards along the Melba Highway. A separate fire front moving north east reached Flowerdale at about 7.40pm, and was joined by the main fire front at about 11.20pm.

The Kilmore East fire burned 125,383 hectares and destroyed 1,242 houses with a reported 120 deaths, spread across 16 communities – each of them affected in their own way. Each with stories of courage and comradeship and loss and grief. Driving through the area three years later the scars are apparent on the landscape and are also apparent in the people who live there with reports of suicides, depression and post-traumatic stress on the rise. This is consistent with studies that show Year Three after a major disaster is very difficult at a social level for people, when much of the counselling and support has ceased, and other topics dominate the political and social agendas. And this applies not just to the victims of the fire, but to the many emergency services personnel as well. There have been some critics of the recovery processes, saying that it is also a disaster, having become overly bureaucratic and too difficult to negotiate.

The Royal Commission was scathing in its attack on the many levels of senior management who were seen to have not acted quickly or adequately enough in response to the fires. "Responsibility for the failure of the chain of command must rest at the top," the report stated. It also uncovered chronic bureaucratic paralysis, lack of balls to make a decision outside one’s narrow field of responsibility and over-weddedness to the problematic doctrine of “go early or stay and fight”, to the point that many felt to warn communities of the danger of the approaching fires would lead to them leaving late. As a result people weren’t warned and the majority of deaths were people in their homes – usually those who hadn’t done the difficult preparation for being read to stay and fight a fire.

However the Chief Officer of the Country Fire Authority, Russell Rees, clearly didn’t lack any balls, though he expressed it by throwing some of the blame to those “tree changers” living a self-indulgent lifestyle in high bushfire areas, saying, “If we choose to live in this way, then who do we blame?”

The Flowerdale community decided, early on, that they were going to be responsible for much of their recovery, as they had been for defending their town during the fire, and they worked hard to develop a model that other communities could use. At the core was the lesson that if you own your recovery your community stays together. With lots of support the community decided to rebuild more sustainably, which is evident around us, with input from experts like the CSIRO and private sector support and government assistance.

As a part of the Royal Commission community consultations, the Flowerdale residents raised many issues that needed addressing as part of a recovery and preparedness program. These included the fact that they experienced an overwhelming sense of being alone and abandoned with no services or fresh water, food and medical help for two to three days after the fires. And the lack of media attention compared to other towns also contributed to this sense of isolation. There was also an experience of displacement and dislocation, with a loss of connections with members of the community.

The failure of electricity and phone reception and subsequent loss of communications was also cited as a critical problem, as was the fact that too many residents had done minimal fire preparation. Roadblocks were found to have frustrated and hindered the recovery process for local residents, who were reluctant to leave in case they could not return. There was also the finding that brick houses and native vegetation seemed to be more vulnerable to combustion from radiant heat, so there should be careful consideration to the use and approval of building materials and firebreak plantings.

I have a strong desire to go into the pub and talk to somebody about it all, but I’m also conscious of opening old wounds and being another disaster tourist. I know Caroline would love to roll up her sleeves and do something to help, but what can you do during Year Three, just driving through the area? It’s one thing to stop and help fill sandbags near a flooded river, but another thing to waltz into a community three years after a fire and say, ‘I’ve got a spare half hour or so, what can I do to help?’

Henry provides the answer. ‘A drink at the pub would help the local economy, wouldn’t it?’

I finally have to agree with him on this.

So we spend the next hour in the main bar of the Flowerdale Hotel, talking to a small handful of locals, including the pub owner and another guy who were here on the day of the fires. Two of them have that straggly Ned Kelly type beard that you have to look at carefully to tell if they are a bikie or a bushie. I can tell they are a little reluctant to talk to me about it all at first, but when I tell them that I think they’re bloody heroes and that I’d like to buy them each a beer, conversation flows a little easier. We start by talking about communications problems they experienced, trying to get good information in and out before, during and after the fires, and the shithouse mobile reception in the valley. They say the answer is more mobile towers, but also admit that if they get burned down by fires it sort of defeats the benefit.

We then talk about the fire itself. How it came from several directions at once. How they saw the fire from a distance. How it sounded like a jumbo jet’s engine when it got closer. How it randomly left a dry weatherboard house and engulfed a brick house next door to it. I then ask if they get many “disaster tourists” who come in to ask about the fires, and Steve, the pub-owners asks, tellingly, ‘Like you’re doing now?’ I nod. ‘Yes. Like I’m doing now.’ With that conceded, we move on. We talk about the burned bodies they had to deal with, how one of them tried to drive out and then had to turn back. How people were stopped from returning when they wanted to. How it was such a hot day that one of them was only dressed in thongs and shorts – not ideal for fire-fighting. Which directions the fires came from. How they struck and passed by. How the death toll was much higher than that given because if people died in the fire after crashing their car in the smoke while trying to escape, they were counted as a road statistic, not a fire death.

Steve tells me that at least five days out of seven he’s taking part in a conversation about the fires, or overhearing one in the pub, and it’s something he’s often a bit reluctant to go through reliving, over and over. His eyes hold me and I’m trying to figure out how to describe them. This mix of sorrow and strength and pale intensity. Seared is the only word that I can find to capture them.

Our conversation circles back and forwards around the fires and at one point I tell them about my research trip and how Hume and Hovell reached Flowerdale and couldn’t get over Mount Disappointment there in front of them. They joke that they weren’t so tough in those days obviously, as they’ve mostly all been up over the mountain.

When we get on to the recovery of the town they tell me that about 40 per cent or so of the locals won’t be coming back again. They’ve gotten their insurance payouts and have used the money to move away closer to the city. Usually somewhere further from possible fires. But always we seem to come back to the randomness of the fires. The way the dice fell on that day. How the house next door to the pub was burned down. How a whole mountain of gum trees went up but the pine trees at its base didn’t catch alight.

And after the hour I shake each of them by the hand. Two were here on the day, saving the pub. The other was not, but stayed on in Flowerdale. And I tell them what an absolute pleasure it was to meet them. A real bloody pleasure.

We all climb back into the car and I see Henry has a glass he’s pinched from the bar at some point when I wasn’t watching, and Caroline asks if I found what I was looking for and I tell her, ‘I was thinking, you know, that it was like after all the museum experiences we’ve seen, there was nothing as captivating as this. I didn’t need AV or photos to make it more real. There was something in being told the stories by those who were there, just standing there in front of you in the place it happened. That’s a type of heritage that really connects to you.’

‘So is that the type of heritage experience you think is needed to preserve the past?’ she asks.

I shrug. ‘How could you expect anybody to sustain doing that, reliving a trauma over and over and over?’ I ask her. ‘How can you ask the keeper of stories to do that?’

‘What do you think?’ she asks the others. ‘Could any of you settle in to telling your story to tourists day after day?’

Ned says he’d rather be locked up in Melbourne Gaol again. Henry Lawson says he’d like people to read his stories still. Captain Cook says he’d like to be offered the choice and then Caroline Chisholm says she’d love to settle down to a small town like Holbrook and be able to preserve its museum by telling visitors her story, bringing the old artefacts to life. There’s clearly no single answer to this question.

Then Caroline asks, ‘But doesn’t it bother you just a little bit that all these stories you’re collecting, they’re just one interpretation of the story and you’re going to have people saying they don’t agree with what you’ve found or the conversations you’ve had are not really representative of other points of view?’ She’s got a point, as always, but in reply I tell her about a conversation I had with my friend Donna in Benalla. We were talking about where writing and publishing is going to go in the future, and what impact increased online interactivity is going to have on it. We imagined a time when a reader could be reading a text, like this one, for instance, and could add their own comments, or jokes, or correct my statements about their towns, and that becomes a version of the book that somebody else is reading that they are adding to as well, with their own comments, as does the next person and the next, like a multiple comment tracked-change Word document. But would it be something new or just a new part of the increasing static of confusion of data and comments and opinion that makes up the blanket of online information and entertainment? And we also wondered when it might be that we all emerge from the locust plague cloud of online democratised data and start seeking standards and quality control again? I’m sure my travelling companions would have an opinion on this, supporting anything that would allow their works and lives to be read, and for them and their ideas to be considered at least as important as those of celebrity cooks, actors and entertainers – but they just say, ‘that’s interesting’, and look out the windows.

We drive on. ‘Did you know,’ I tell my companions. ‘When Hume and Hovell came through this way they complained of the land being burned in front of them by the Aborigines, and they had trouble even seeing the way forward through the smoke. Hovell wrote in his journal that, “Whatever place it is we go through, whether Mountains, plains, or Forests, we have every proof, that the Natives are very Numerous, we see their Smokes in every diraction, yesterday we heard them, but could not see them”.

Driving out of Flowerdale I see thick clouds to the south, grey and heavy, looking menacingly like thick smoke. I stare at it. It is smoke. No, it’s clouds. No, it’s smoke. No, it’s clouds. I keep driving until it is behind me and we are heading towards Mount Disappointment, so named because Hume and Hovell were unable to find a way over it to the south. Likewise we are unable to find a road to take us up to Mount Disappointment, despite me having read that there are numerous trail bike paths into the area. I dig out the map and see that if I turned to the south east we might find a way up to the mountain if we go via Kinglake, where the fires were more murdersome, but that would be taking me away from the path that Hume and Hovell eventually took to the west.

It is getting late in the day now and I’m not so keen to be lost up in the hills after dark so we follow the road to the west and we are soon passing through Strath Creek. Where there is a Hume and Hovell cricket ground and another Hume and Hovell monument standing lonely in a paddock just out of town, beyond the banner that reads: “Keep Strath Creek Free From Drugs and Its Dealers”. The H&H monument is a concrete pyramid-plinth cross that simply says: “Hume and Hovell memorial, Strath Creek, 1824-1926.” That’s odd, I think. It was two years late for the anniversary year and seems thrown up just to compete with other town’s monuments. If so, somebody had second thoughts as there is a metal sign erected by the nearby Kilmore/Broadford Rotary Club, that tells the Hume and Hovell story, stating:

“... from Yea and Flowerdale the expedition encountered the worst terrain yet and spent four days unsuccessfully searching for the summit hoping to glimpse the sea. Leadership arguments occurred but eventually Hume guided the party back north and then west to Strath Creek and Broadford. The impenetrable mountain was named Mount Disappointment. From Broadford they turned south towards Kilmore and from Monument hill, Hume was able to see a clear passage through the Great Divide, now known as Hume’s Pass, and on December 14th they Climbed Mount Bland (now Mount Fraser) at Beveridge and to the joy of all sighted the sea.”

Two things of note here, firstly, years later Hume stated that he slipped and spiked himself near the groin on a sharp branch which forced them to give up their attempt on Mount Disappointment, though Hovell later stated in reply to this that he had no knowledge of that having happened. Secondly, there’s a question about sighting the sea from Mount Fraser that I’m curious to explore, as it doesn’t really account for why the party then set off not towards the sea of Port Phillip Bay, but down along the western side the Bay, not reaching the sea until they hit Corio Bay, nearly three days further than they would otherwise have needed to have trekked. Thomas Boyd, one of the convicts, later stated that there had been an argument about the appearance of water in the distance which Mr Hovell ridiculed as being smoke.

‘Aren’t you going to stop and talk about Mount Disappointment being a metaphor?’ Caroline Chisholm asks.

‘I think that’s fairly apparent,’ I say.

‘What is?’ asks Ned Kelly.

‘The metaphor of the mountain,’ I say.

He looks to Henry Lawson. ‘Do you know what he’s talking about?’

‘Nor always,’ he says.

I sigh. ‘Alright. Mount Disappointment is a metaphor for the Australian moment. It is like we have faltered in our way forward and have to back track, stepping into the comfortable stereotypes of the past, Gallipoli and mateship and flag waving and all that, without acknowledging that it might have been the weight of our baggage that prevented us from getting over the mountain. And we can make all these excuses about why it was too hard to get over, but we have to acknowledge that there are an awful lot of Mount Disappointments facing us: management of the economy, Muslims and multiculturalism, asylum seeker policies, climate change, carbon pricing, true Aboriginal reconciliation, media fragmentation, social fragmentation, the politics of character assassination.’

‘Hmm. I actually thought that it was the highways and roads that were the metaphors,’ says Henry Lawson. ‘You know, what roads do we choose to go down? The fast lane that goes from Sydney to Melbourne in the quickest time, or the back roads that go through all the small towns where the rest of Australia lives.’

‘Isn’t it more that highways are the metaphors for how we get on through life?’ asks Cook. ‘Do we choose the straight and direct path or the more winding and indirect routes through life?’

‘I was thinking perhaps the metaphor of the roads was one about the fast lane and the slow lane,’ says Caroline Chisholm. ‘In that we’ve all been wanting the fast lane, but now that we’ve got it we are considering all the things we’ve lost as a result.’

‘Holy Mother Mary,’ says Ned. ‘Are they always like this?’

‘Not usually,’ I say. ‘It’s taken several hundred kilometres to get to this.’

He rolls his eyes and then puts his helmet on over his head. ‘Wake me up when we get to the next state,’ he says. ‘The state of sanity.’

From Strath Creek we go up, up, up a winding road to Murchison’s Gap Lookout on Murchison Hill, indicating that we are entering Mitchell Shire, still on the edge of Woiworung country. We stop for a moment at a lookout. It is a glorious view of late afternoon landscape stretching back to the north, and we can’t see the sea from here either, so we press on and pass through the micro-town of Tyaak – which probably also rhymes with Faaark, and so I keep a close eye in the rear-view mirror for any police cars.

Then we are going down, down, down, down more winding roads and are back at the Hume Highway again. We watch the trucks roaring past in both directions underneath us as we drive across an overpass over the highway and into Broadford. We’re out of the wilds again and back near civilisation as there are housing estates here showing how close we are to Melbourne. There is another H&H monument here, this one another concrete plinth-pyramid cross, with a little water drinking platform, or perhaps it’s an outdoors urinal, with the obligatory plaque stating Hume and Hovell expedition blah blah blah blah with exactly the same metal sign that was at Strath Creek, though this one has a short blurb on Broadford stating that they went south from here and found a way through the Great Divide blah blah blah.

It doesn’t tell of the near mutiny that happened here though, when the six convicts refused to go any further, stating they were almost out of supplies and should turn around and retrace their steps. Hume was able to convince them to go on a few more days though, and with the knowledge that they’d be lost without him guiding them back, they reluctantly agreed. I go back to the car, trying really hard to maintain an obvious excitement in finding another H&H moment when everybody else is clearly sooooo over it and just wanting to be in Melbourne already. Perhaps another near mutiny is brewing. But they’re not going to be that lucky. We still have some daylight left and so we still have some of Hume and Hovell’s tracks to cover, and I have this notion that we’re going to see H1 and H2 before we reach Melbourne, along these backroads somewhere.

We’re back into bushland then and drive on to Kilmore further down the road. At this place, having recently found a way though the great dividing range, Hume stated that Hovell broke their perambulator by running it against some rocks. They patched it up, but it fell apart again a few days later and had to be abandoned.

Kilmore is Victoria’s second oldest inland town, being settled in 1837, just two years after John Batman conducted the first real estate scam in Melbourne, buying up huge tracts of land in exchange for blankets, beads and tomahawks. It feels a lot like we are back in a real town again, as it has traffic lights and a supermarket and Chinese restaurants and a taste of Melbourne commuting about it. There is a Hume and Hovell monument here that takes a bit of finding. It is on a hill top along a winding dirt track to get to and Henry Lawson asks, ‘Are you sure this is going to be worth it?’

‘You could just photograph the last monument twice and you’d never know if this was a new one or not,’ Cook says.

But this one is different. It is a square tower overlooking the town, a bit like Goulburn’s tower, but a bit smaller. My companions are suitably impressed enough to hop out of the car and climb to the top of it. We watch the sun getting closer to the horizon and Ned Kelly says, ‘This is like a bloody siege tower. We should have built one of these at Glenrowan.’

Lawson says, ‘This would be really spooky up here after dark. Should we stay and see what it’s like?’

‘You’re kidding, right?’ asks Caroline Chisholm.

‘Of course I’m kidding,’ says Lawson. ‘Do you know how many pubs there are in Melbourne and how many there are right here?’ He leads the way back to the car. We drive past lines of fast food shops and are soon back on a country road again.

‘Anywhere else between here and Melbourne,’ asks Lawson.

‘Beveridge,’ I say.

‘Beveridge?’ says Ned Kelly, lifting his helmet off his head. ‘I was born there.’

‘What? Beveridge just outside of Melbourne?’ I ask.

‘Melbourne where there are more pubs than there are at Beveridge,’ hisses Henry Lawson.

‘Yes,’ says Ned and for the first time on the trip looks really keen to see where we are going to, leaning forward between the seats like a kid might. We follow the Old Sydney Road, which is probably the very, very old Hume Highway and then find the Old Hume Highway and are driving around Broadford looking for the Hume and Hovell monument. But it is getting too late to drive around in circles and so I actually stop and ask for directions at the local pub, which is a very nice grey stone building, built way back in 1845, only twenty years after Hume and Hovell came through and barely ten years before Ned was born here, that serves as the post office, hotel and general store. I ask two bearded locals sitting outside sharing a single beer with a straw if they know where the local Hume and Hovell monument is, and they tell me they don’t have a clue as they are a bit lost themselves but they would be very appreciative of a lift to Melbourne. I have a momentary thought that I’ve found Hume and Hovell, but then I ask, ‘What are your names?’

‘Robert O’Hara Burke,’ says the first in the funny tall hat.

‘William John Wills,’ says the other.

‘You’d better squeeze in,’ I tell them and go inside the pub. The bloke who is working in there knows just what I’m talking about and tells me the monument is further along the old Hume Highway northwards, but is actually on private property, but the bloke who owns the land is a nice enough guy and doesn’t mind people driving in to see it. He comes out to show me the way and looks at the car. ‘You’ve got a full load,’ he says to me.

That also takes me a moment to get. ‘You can see them all?’ I ask him.

‘Of course,’ he says and goes back into the pub shaking his head a little.

I’m not quite sure what to make of that, so I follow his instructions and head along another bit of the Old Hume Highway that no longer goes anywhere except to the past, and soon we enter the private property and see the standard Hume and Hovell marker there. It is built from grey stone like the pub and has your standard H&H plaque on it. I wonder if I climbed the nearby hill could I see the ocean? I could probably see the skyscrapers of Melbourne.

‘Who are Hume and Hovell,’ asks Burke.

‘Explorers,’ mumbles Henry Lawson.

‘Never heard of them,’ says Wills.

‘They found their way home,’ says Lawson. ‘No one remembers you if you’re that successful, right?’

‘That’s it,’ says Cook. ‘You only become famous when you get lost and die or are killed on a beach somewhere.’

Burke and Wills clearly don’t know if they are taking the piss out of them or not. Cook passes them the map. ‘Why don’t you two have a go at navigating? We are trying to get to Melbourne.’

Burke senses a trap. ‘What if we get it wrong and end up somewhere else?’

‘Then you’d be no worse off than Hume and Hovell were,’ he says.

‘Children!’ I say, standing at the window. ‘Stop it or there’ll be no television this evening.’ None of them quite gets that.

‘Who are you talking to?’ asks Wills.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ I say. ‘Let’s try and find Ned’s old house before it gets totally dark. Beveridge isn’t very big, and is largely made up of nice rural homesteads, but we quickly find the Beveridge Community Centre, which is built of red-painted corrugated metal and has a two grey water tanks done up like Ned Kelly’s helmet, and a metal sculpture of Ned Kelly out the front. The sign out the front even has a photo of Ned, without his helmet and says, “Ned Kelly, born in Beveridge June 1855”.

‘That’s nice,’ says Caroline. ‘Don’t you think?’ Most of the other passengers clearly don’t think so, knowing there are no such arty monuments to themselves, but all they mumble is, ‘A little bit patronising.’ ‘Invasion of privacy.’ ‘A bit presumptuous.’ I suppose we’ve found so many Ned Kelly monuments on our travels, mostly without looking for them, while having to search and hunt for Hume and Hovell monuments, that you can’t help but feel he overly-dominates popular history at the expense of others. But Ned, who is the subject of it all, seems embarrassed and pained by it all.

‘Can you remember where your house is?’ I ask him.

‘It’s all very different to when I was growing up here,’ he says. ‘Let’s drive around and I’ll see if I can see it.’

‘There’s a Kelly Street on the map,’ says William John Wills.

‘Let’s start there,’ I say. But it turns out that some helpful local has removed the Kelly Street signs, perhaps in an attempt to deter tourists and Kelly Fanatics. We are still able to figure it out though, as the walled properties have increasing Ned Kelly helmet-shaped letter boxes or Ned statues the closer we get.

Finally at the end of a gravelled street we find it. It is a ramshackle old shack, a little larger than your average ex-govie, but in danger of falling over, except for the grey stone chimney. The outer walls are bare boards, some of the window panes are broken and the metal roof looks quite rusted. The whole place is surrounded by a high wire fence to keep out vandals or souvenir hunters and there is a tall plaque out the front that proclaims “Kelly House”. It says that it was built by Ned’s father John ‘Red’ Kelly in 1859, and Ned lived in it for perhaps four years of his boyhood and his brothers Jim and Dan and sister Kate were probably born there.

It also says that the Kelly family came to Beveridge in 1854 and Red ran dairy cows and did carpentry jobs and also speculated on land purchases with money he’d earned at the gold diggings. In 1859 he bought 21 acres and built this cottage using bush materials. The original house was just two rooms.

‘I remember it was both smaller, but also much bigger, you know,’ says Ned, with the wistful look you have when confronting that huge and fearful playground slippery dip from your primary school in later life and see just how small it was.

‘What happened?’ I ask Ned.

He shrugs. ‘Things didn’t work out for us. The township never took off. We got into debt and eventually had to sell up and move to a rental place in Avenel. There were seven of us there. And eventually we moved to Greta and got into the local trades of stealing cattle and bits and pieces of work as it came along.’

I wonder if that’s a story that has been repeated in Australia all too often over the years. Financial hardships. Family break up. Cycling into poverty and petty crime and then into more serious crime. And it all ends in tears.

I can also remember visiting childhood homes many years later and finding they were so different from my vivid memories of them. Much smaller. Less wondrous. ‘I wasn’t born here,’ Ned says. ‘I just lived here for a bit.’

I wonder if he still lived here would he also become obsessed with the search for the perfect bathroom tile for his renovations, or the perfect Masterchef recipe, or the best investment outlooks for their property as the locals here now seem so taken with. So we drive on, with Burke and Wills handing the map back to Cook to navigate us to Melbourne. He gets us back onto the Hume Highway and I’m able to ignore his directions, suddenly fighting with traffic and trucks and lights everywhere again. It’s only about half an hour to outer Melbourne from here and as we whiz down the freeway I’m thinking that it’s all coming to an end too quickly and I ask if anybody wants to continue on to Geelong with me. Nobody says anything. Okay, see if I care.

As I drive I’m writing some notes on my lap, swerving every now and then to right the car. ‘Uh – what are you doing?’ Caroline asks.

‘Taking notes,’ I say.

‘Are you sure that’s safe?’

‘Probably not,’ I say. ‘But listen to this. It’s the words to a song. It can be our road trip song, and it goes to the tune of Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire.’ Then I sing:

‘Captain Cook at Botany Bay, don’t care what the locals say,

Cronulla and the Ozzie flag, intolerance in shopping bags,

Urban poor and urban rich, never mix cause life’s a bitch,

Fast lane, slow lane, trucks at speed it’s all the same.

All the way with the USA, or China, India or UK,

Weary Dunlop, Bennelong, Oi-Oi-Oi’s our national song.

Bagels, Maccas, fries on the side, Yuppies, DINKS and Bogan pride,

Bushfires, Queensland floods, state politics’s throwing mud.

‘What makes us Australia?

Is it what divides us, or is to what unites us?

What makes us Australia?

‘Right wing, left wing, greens and others in between.

Lara Bingle, Laura Tingle, Alan Jones unleashed,

HD TV, remote controlled reality.

Cooking shows dancing pros, Olympic Games and Jubilee,

Boat People, apology, ‘What he said’ philosophy,

Wikileaks, Facebook peeps, who’se on twitter now?

Media-ocre, political poker, War on Terror, Haneef error,

Parliament’s hung the systems bung.

‘What makes us Australia?

Is it what divides us, or is to what unites us?

What makes us Australia?

‘Manning Clark, Hirst and Manne, Blamey’s being blamed again.

History channel on TV, or docos on the ABC

The future’s not what it used to be, but soon it will be history

Black armband, post modern crap, history’s become an iPhone app!’

I stop singing and look up into the rear-view mirror. Cook is looking out the window. Burke and Wills are studying the map. Lawson is trying to hold a laugh in. Ned Kelly has put his helmet back on. I look across at Caroline Chisholm. ‘Best to just concentrate on the driving for now dear,’ she says with a very maternal – or perhaps condescending – smile.

So now it’s my turn to sulk. I turn off the Freeway after a bit and am back on the Old Hume Highway once more, driving through industrial areas, and the road soon becomes the Sydney Road again, passing through the suburbs of Fawkner, North Coburg and Coburg. ‘This bit gets really interesting,’ I say. ‘As we get to Brunswick, just up ahead, we start driving past all these different rows of restaurants of different nationalities. Turkish. Asian. Greek. Indian. Pakistani. Italian Nepalese. Afghani. And they have all these different scripts advertising halal meats and pizzas and noodles and fish and chips. It’s like a microcosm of world eating and cultures all along the road.’

I look at my passengers who all look a little uncomfortable. ‘What is it?’ I ask.

‘Well I was always in favour of Australia for the white man,’ mumbles Lawson.

‘We are a British people, after all,’ says Caroline Chisholm.

‘You can’t trust wogs,’ says Burke.

‘Nor Chinamen,’ says Ned.

‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I forgot you’re sometimes prisoners of your past.’ I pull the car over to the side of the road and say, ‘This is it then. End of the line. I’m going west from here.’

They look out the car window and Ned says, ‘Is this meant to be funny?’

‘Think of it as a metaphor,’ I say.

They all climb out of the car reluctantly and gather on the footpath, staring at the sombre dark stone Pentridge Prison building behind them. ‘It’s being redeveloped as classy apartments now,’ I tell them. ‘You’d like it.’

Caroline Chisholm presses her hands together and says, ‘This will do nicely, thank you very much.’

‘You’re most welcome,’ I tell her. Then, ‘Will you be alright?’

‘We’ll be more than alright,’ she says, as a young guy on his bike rides past and abuses them for taking up all the space of the footpath. ‘It’s time we stepped out on our own.’ The others don’t agree in words, but shuffle around her for leadership.

I’m almost reluctant to leave them but I wave them farewell and drive off, feeling suddenly quite alone. Heading out of Melbourne is a lot harder than heading into it – towards the airport there is an intricate mess of roads and overpasses under construction and the roads I want to take are blocked off and detours take me to places I’ve no idea of, and exit lanes loop back onto themselves and it takes me quite some time to figure it all out and be heading south towards Laverton, very late at night. I couldn’t have gotten more lost had I had Cook and Burke navigating together. And I find I keep glancing up into my rear-view mirror, half expecting Bennelong or Arabanoo or another indigenous figure from the early days of settlement to sit up and say at last there’s some space in this car.

I’m now on Wathaurung land and I eventually find the Laverton Club Motel, back on Hume and Hovell’s trail, in the outer western suburbs of Melbourne, where I’ve made a booking. The car park is dark and mostly empty and something like I remember the old Viking Hotel car park in Milperra used to be like. I look around cautiously for motorbikes. There are none that I can see. There is a smallish club on one side and a motel on the other, but the motel is locked up tight. There is a sign on the window saying that guests arriving late should see the duty manger of the club. So I head over there.

The Duty manager in the near deserted club looks more like a bouncer but he digs out my room card key and explains to be very carefully how it works, like I might never have used one before. I see a sign behind him that says no hoodies or beanies in allowed in the club – and it makes me recall a clever sign I saw recently that said, “Jesus wore a hoodie!” I thank him and head back across the car park towards the motel, noting a sign outside the club that says, ‘No leaving children in cars.’ Suffer the little children.

The motel has a looong bare corridor that leads to a very small bare white-walled room. But there is a rather audacious door knob sign on the inside that says. ‘Please make up my Suite’. There is another small sign on the wall that says no smoking or cooking or tampering with fire equipment, and there is a $200 fine for being caught smoking in the room.

I sit on the bed and realise how lonely it is without my travelling companions. So I switch on the TV and do the run around the dial thing, but nothing looks interesting, so I switch it off again and stare at the blank walls. I’m feeling pretty tired and think the wisest thing is to turn in early. The bed at least feels really comfortable. I lie down with some pages from Hovell’s journal – the final days before they reach the sea – and try and pinpoint their exact location the night before they reached journey’s end. But I’m falling asleep just after I realise that they probably didn’t stop in Laverton, but a bit further down the road at Werribee, or somewhere along the Werribee River. Bugger! My last thoughts are wondering if I should check out and go on to Werribee to find somewhere to stay so I can be a little more authentic in my research.

If Caroline Chisholm were here she’d have said that unless I planned to sleep outside by the river and not in a motel, then it probably didn’t really matter. I drift off to sleep pondering that moral issues and dream that a nightwatchman sneaks into my room to have a cigarette and that I’m going to have to pay the $200 fine. If Ned Kelly were here he’d tell me to sneak out the window in the morning before anybody found out.

Then I have another dream of winding my way through a forest trying to find a path to the sea, but having to best a series of challenges and perils, getting lost and searching for a Hume and Hovell marker in a small town that will show me the way to go and then finally coming to a cliff overlooking the sea, with a wooden tower showing where H & H stood and watched the waves bashing against the rocks. And I stood there victoriously feeling that I’d overcome in a great quest.

I wake up late and look around for the night watchman before realising that he doesn’t really exist. Well, after sniffing the air I realise he doesn’t really exist. I shower and have some breakfast and check out. There is a bit of a worker’s meeting happening in the reception office, with five middle-aged women in their cleaner’s blue outfits looking very stern about something. They all stop talking when I walk up and wish them all a very good morning. They don’t seem to think it is.

Outside I can see the distant high rise of Melbourne and ponder the fact that Hume and Hovell stood here – well about 12 kilometres down the road from here, at the Werribee River, and had no idea that the ocean was right there beside them. If you look at the map you’ll see that for a while they looked like they were going to end up right at Melbourne, but then they swung a little to the west and walked right along the edge of Port Phillip Bay for over 30 kilometres, not realising it was only about five or so kilometres from them the whole time. I can only give the credit to Hovell’s superior navigation skills.

So I drive down to Werribee, the outer-outer suburbs of Melbourne, where the two-storey police station is larger than most of the factories all about. And instead of a sign saying ‘Neighbourhood Watch’ or ‘Tidy Town’, there is one that proclaims, ‘Don’t let deadlocks block your escape’. I wonder which community group put that up?

I dig out my map which has a circle around Werribee, meaning that there is a Hume and Hovell monument here. I drive around a bit and find it by the river that Hume named the Arndell, in honour of Hovell’s father-in-law. It is the squattest ugliest marker I’ve seen on my trip, a chucky square base of round rocks and a small pyramid of rocks on top of it. Up close the concrete is cracking and in need of repair by the good citizens of Werribee. If Cook was here he’d say, ‘You’re not going to describe that as a plinth are you?’

The plaque on it says that the Hume and Hovell expedition camped here on 19 December, 1824 and that it was built in 1924. I should have slept here, I think. Then I realise that it 19 December was on their return journey. So they slept somewhere around here in a non-specified place that I tell myself might have been closer to Laverton.

I hop back in the car and continue on my way, pondering my map. Things are going to get a little tricky now, as charting their exact course from here is a little contentious and the different books I have read give slightly differing interpretations of where H & H reached the sea. The land here is very flat and I can see how easy it would be to walk along and not know the ocean was right there beside you. I pass Lollipop Creek and Cherry Tree Creek, wondering what sweet-toothed surveyor had named them – and then I cross Little River and a sign announces I am in outer Geelong.

There is another circle on my map at the town of Lara, so I turn off the highway past a sign that says Barwon and Marngoneet prisons, and hunt around the small town of Lara. I end up driving on a dirt road, past a high security fence, topped in razor wire. At first I presume it is one of the prisons, but it turns out to be a palm and cactus nursery. Clearly very valuable palms and cacti. Though I note that in his journal Hovell stated that the local people were very adept at stealing things from them – a trait that perhaps still exists in the area? I eventually find the plinth by the roadside. It has a marker that says in faded dark letters: “Expedition 17 December 1824. Hume & Hovell 17 December 1924.”

And chiselled into the base of the monument, almost as an afterthought, are the names of the other six men of the expedition. “Companions Henry Angel, William Bollard, Claude Bossawa, Thomas Boyd, James Fitzpatrick, Thomas Smith.” Of all the monuments erected to H1 and H2 up and down the Hume Highway, apart from the memorial in Albury, this is the only one that has the names of the convict men on it as well, and it seems a suitable place to ponder what became of each.

First Hovell’s men, Thomas Smith and William Bollard. Thomas Smith finished the last of the return journey being carried in a cart. He went on to become a constable at Campbelltown, married Sarah Dean, had two children and died at Eastern Creek, NSW in 1837. William Bollard became manager of Berry Jerry Station near Coolamon, then for some time ran a pub at Gundagai and then at Picton.

Hovell’s third convict, Thomas Boyd, who was lent to him by Hume’s brother John, went on to become a bushman of some note. After the expedition he went back to the land around Tumut to become a bullock driver and respected member of the early Tumut community. He married, had 12 children and died at 'Windowie', near Tumut, on 27 June 1885, aged 86 years. He is buried in the Tumut Pioneer Cemetery, where a headstone marks his grave.

Hume’s three men were Claude Bossawa, James Fitzpatrick and Henry Angel. Claude Bossawa did not achieve much after the expedition, as he did not achieve too much on it, and in fact had to be carried the last few days of the journey homeward too. He is believed to have died in the Goulburn area in the 1850s. James Fitzpatrick took up land between Cootamundra and Gundagai and became a wealthy man, later buying an estate near Campbelltown. He died at 86. And Henry Angel was granted his ticket of leave in 1823 but had it cancelled in 1828 and restored in 1832. He accompanied Sturt and Hume on an expedition in 1828. He married a widow, Mary Ledwidge, in 1834 and they had eleven children. He farmed near Wollongong and moved around New South Wales, finally settled at Wagga Wagga. He died at the age of 91 in 1881. Hume had tickets of leave organised for all his men after the expedition, which Hovell did not seek for his own men and Hume had to petition for Thomas Boyd to be given one.

Back to the monument before me now, I also note that it is the only one I have seen that has the words: “Illuminati = Enemies” and “Obelisk = Baal’s penis” and “New World Order = Traitors” written in some contemporary scrawl on the information plaque nearby. But amongst these enlightening notes the plaque tells me that after leaving Werribee the explorers reached the sea on 16 December at either Point Wilson, or more probably Point Lillias which was formerly known as Bird Rock. They camped there overnight and then moved westward a few miles to Hovell’s Creek where they encountered some Aboriginal people who told the explorers that the bay was called “Jillong” (Geelong).

So now I ponder my map again. The area I’m looking at you could think of pictorially as being something like the profile of a man with a pointed chin looking to the east, with a prominent outcrop at his nose and chin. Hume and Hovell hit the water at one of three possible places. One is at Point Lillias which is pretty much due south of here – about where the man’s Adam’s Apple would be. The other contender is south of Point Kirk, which is pretty much due east, or the tip of the man’s nose, or that area between your upper lip and the base of your nose, which undoubtedly has some anatomical name of use. And the third possible place would be Point Wilson, which is the pointy end of the man’s chin. Getting to each is made a little bit more difficult by Avalon Airport taking up much of the man’s face though.

My first guess is going to be due south, as there is also a belief that a tree that they marked their names on was there – but driving along Avalon Beach Road, it is clear that the trees here have long been cleared and the land taken over by the Cheltham Salt Ltd Lara Operations. Avalon Road is single lane tarred road that clearly was designed for trucks going one way only at a time. Hovell’s journal is a little vague on the exact location of the tree, as he said: “Mr Hume & self marked each an H on a Tree, the only one sufficiently large for that purpose, it is cut with a Tomahauke, it is about 2 miles from the Water Side, about N 10 W from the tree is the bearing of Mt Wollsonecraft, dist about 8 Miles the Tree bore about N E from the Point Hamilton.” That appears pretty accurate information, if it were possible to find either the Mount or the Point on any map.

Up ahead of me as I drive I can see factories in the distance, and just as I’m trying to figure out how far ahead of me they are, I reach the end of the road and the waters of Corio Bay are there before me. Just like that. I wonder if it caught Hume and Hovell by surprise too, despite what they wrote of it. Hovell described the momentous day, Thursday 16 December 1824, as:

“After Breakefast we carried our provisions across the river... we continued our Course through the plains, about S.W. by S. And at the distance of 6 Miles, we thought we saw water, but at other times we thought it was the Grass on fire ... we bore down, nearly South, and about 4.o.Clock we could plainly perceive that, that which we at times thought was fire and Smoak, was the very thing we were very anxiously looking out for ... it was one immence Sheet of Water, and Continued up as fare as the Eye could reach...”

I park the car by a few cars with boat trailers and look around. It’s nothing like my dream. There are sludge ponds or salt ponds or something around and the air is full of thousands of little mites and it smells of something that I wouldn’t quite describe as bracing and fresh. To the east along the shore is a line of little shacks that look like someone has built a brightly coloured ghetto here. The water is very still, like a pond and across Corio Bay I can see the factories of Geelong.

As I stand there a fisherman comes in and I wait for him to tie up his boat and then say, ‘Gidday.’ He’s happy for a chat and tells me that he’s been out fishing since 4am and caught a few squid, so he’s gotten a feed, but always comes back worrying that his car will be alright. I ask him to tell me what we are looking at across the Bay and that I’m looking for Bird Rock, also known as Point Lillias, which in later years Hovell said was the place where they reached Corio Bay. He tells me that we can’t actually see Port Phillip Bay from here, and that all we can see is the south side of Corio Bay. If I went out beyond that I’d see the Bay he tells me, and I’d see just how big it was. And he points out the landmarks to the south that we can see, as if I might be about to take a boat trip that way, telling me where rocks and dangerous things are.

He tells me it’s possible to reach Point Lillias, which he points out a few miles along the shore to the East. But you can’t drive all the way there he tells me, and it’s quite a trek to walk. And if I want to get to Point Wilson, he also tells me, I will have to go back around the airport. I thank him and drive along past the fishing cabins, where a few people are working on them, but they are mostly empty at the moment. The road runs out very quickly and I get out of the car again. There are more ponds and waterways around and I look out towards Point Lillias, or Bird Rock, disappointed that this is the closest I’m going to get to it.

Hume and Hovell actually reached the bay’s edge at dusk and had to wait until the next day to see what it actually looked like though. If they arrived here I wonder what vision of the future they saw when they stood here. According to Hovell’s journal they went back a bit to the west looking for fresh water and a good place to camp, which would probably have been along Avalon Road that I drove down to get here, or perhaps on the land of the Cheltham Salt Ltd Lara Operations. And as I stand there I try really, really hard to feel their presence. But to tell you the truth what I actually feel is their absence.

So I hop back in my car and head back up the road around the airport towards Point Wilson. The roads on this side are much better, but turn to dirt again once I’m past the airport and I follow it straight ahead to Point Kirk. There is another boat ramp and sign that says, “Victorian Waterway Rules” – but it is too filled with shotgun pellets to actually read what the rules might be. But there are waves, albeit small, and there is the smell of the sea on the air and I can look far, far out right across Port Philip Bay, with a feeling akin to looking out to sea. In fact the Bay is so large the eastern shore is only observable at a few places on the far horizon. Hovell would have felt pretty happy smelling that sea breeze standing here.

He wrote in his journal that there were numerous shells on the beach that would be good for lime, and they caught some black breamto eat. But also, according to Hovell’s description, they reached the water at a point of land that it was about eight to ten miles to the further shore to the South East and about the same distance to the West, which by my map means it probably wasn’t here as you can only see to the East and the South, and it wasn’t Point Lillias as the western side of Corio Bay is only about four or five miles from it. And to confuse things just a little, before they left and headed quickly back north, desperately short of supplies, H1 and H2 rode their horses down to “the extreme point of land which seperate the two branches, to take another view of this fine Bay & Harbour, before we take our departure for home.” Now that just has to be Point Wilson, the pointy chin, between the two places I’ve visited, and according to my map it also fits the description of being about eight to ten miles to the far shore and to the west.

So I hop back into my car and drive back to the tar road that my map says is Twenty Nine Mile Road. But the only sign on the road is a large placard that says, ‘STOP. Authorised persons only. No through road.’

I stare at the sign and I stare at my map. And I stare at the sign and I wish Cook and Lawson and Carolyn Chisholm and even Ned Kelly were in the car with me to have the moral argument about whether I should or shouldn’t go on. On the one hand there’s nothing on my map to mark this as a prohibited area, but on the other hand the sign is pretty clear, but on the third hand if I want to stand where H1 & H2 stood, I’m really going to have to go down that road, a little bit a least.

So I take a deep breath, wrap myself in a cloak of authorial arrogance and historical researcher self-importance and floor it. My heart is beating rapidly and I’m looking into the mirror and ahead to make sure there are no cars with sirens anywhere to be seen. There are many grassy paddocks and bird reserves and I presume the whole area is a protected bird zone, which is the type of authorised person that is allowed to be here. I stop and photograph the land, still not able to see the sea, though it’s probably less than a kilometre away now. I’m going to have to go further south to Point Wilson itself.

I whizz past an open gate with a sign on it that I can’t read with my eyes fixed on the road ahead looking for a sign of the sea. But then I see is another gate – closed, with low buildings behind it and a sign that says ‘Department of Defence Land.’ I don’t need Caroline Chisholm to be my voice of conscience now. I hit the brakes and quickly turn the car around. I slow to read the sign on the open gate and find it says:

“Secure Facility Commonwealth Restricted Area Authorised Entry Only. Public Access to this Site is Prohibited. This facility is under constant 24 hour video surveillance. All security incidents are reported to authorities.”

Double Uh-oh. This book was never meant to be a military thriller. I floor it again, my heart beating harder than ever, perpetually looking up into the mirror for the military vehicle that will be coming after me. They’ll find me with my camera and maps and a lame story about Hume and Hovell who they’ve undoubtedly never heard of. But no military vehicle comes after me. No small dark helicopter lands on the road in front of me – and the one car that does follow me later along Twenty Nine Mile Road turns off when I reach the highway.

I stop by a service station and shake my head. Who’d have thought that Hume and Hovell’s place of sighting Port Phillip Bay was a closely protected military secret? That might console them a little as to why so few people remember them. But it might also be due to the incessant fighting between them after their expedition. They didn’t find the place they set out to find and they spent a lot of effort dragging each other down so they were perhaps not thought of as brave explorers demonstrating mateship and teamwork and the other ideals that we like to parade in public.

After their return to Sydney, they both complained about their lack of recompense from the Government. They were both given grants of 1200 acres (486 hectares), and Hovell was later given a grant of 1280 acres for a subsequent expedition by ship to Western Port (where he discovered that it was not the place they had reached). Hovell in fact had to sell his earlier land grant to offset his debts from the 1824-25 expedition. Hovell kept asking for more recompense though, petitioning Governor Darling in 1828 and 1829, the Colonial Office in 1829 and 1830, Governor Bourke in 1833, and the Colonial Office again in 1839. The closest he got to any satisfaction was when Governor Bourke cancelled his debts to the government in 1837 and Hovell then went to live on his property near Goulburn. Things didn’t really get ugly until 1853, nearly twenty years later when Hovell was invited to go to Geelong and give a speech about the expedition, celebrating its 29th anniversary. Although Hovell’s speech notes don’t record the words, he was reported in the Geelong Advertiser of 19 December (which was reprinted in the Sydney Morning Herald), as having said:

“That I should live to be among the children of the land of my adopting, after so many years' absence, is to me a pleasure of no ordinary kind; but that these children should, with one accord, meet and acknowledge me as the discoverer of their fine country, shows that they can appreciate the services of the venerable parent.”

Hume was not impressed when he read that and said he hadn’t been invited to the celebration and was sick of people calling the expedition the Hovell and Hume expedition, as the title of Bland’s 1831 publication on their journey had it. So Hume compiled a publication of his own, entitled A Brief Statement of Facts in Connection with an Overland Expedition from Lake George to Port Phillip in 1824. By Hamilton Hume. It was released in 1855 and amongst other things it claimed that Hovell played no major part in the expedition and that all the successes had been his own. He also included quotes from three of the convicts who accompanied them, who stated such things as “He (Hovell) was the worst man of the party excepting Claude (Bossawa)” and “But for Mr. Hume we would never have come back at all; we would all have died in the bush had we depended on Mr. Hovell.”

After a bit of arguing via letters to the press, Hovell responded with a publication of his own, entitled Reply to “A Brief Statement of Facts in Connection with an Overland Expedition from Lake George to Port Phillip in 1824,” published in May last by “Hamilton Hume.” By William Hilton Hovell.

Hume responded with an open letter that was published in the Goulburn Herald of 4 September 1855, and then produced a second edition of the Brief Statement of Facts etc... which did not appear until 1873, shortly after he had died. Hovell, not being able to leave well enough alone, responded with Answer to the Preface to the Second Edition of Mr. Hamilton Hume’s “A Brief State of Facts etc etc etc.”

Reading through the documents and letters they start to sound like the petty squabbling of a divorce case, or neighbourhood dispute or office politics, digging deeper and deeper into trivial details to prove or refute a larger accusation. The general feeling of sympathy has been with Hamilton Hume – whether he was more truthful, more believable or had better witnesses to support his cause. Hovell has generally been portrayed as a whinger and Hume as the real talent, evidenced in simple things like the Albury-Wadonga phone book which lists over 40 businesses with the name Hume and only the Hovell Tree Inn under the name Hovell.

It’s a pity that their legacy to history was one of bickering, but as has been pointed out by other travellers along the Hume, like Michael McGirr who travelled it by bicycle and wrote a book on it in 2004, they began the great Australian tradition of arguing along the length of the Hume Highway.

So now it’s time to go into Melbourne (once described as the Paris of the Antipodes or the Chicago of the South, but also called Smellbourne), and visit some of my friends there and talk to them about my trip and see what they make of it all. And of course to have those conversations people of my age always have in Melbourne, like how Sydney might have natural beauty but Melbourne has designed and built its own. Or like where to go overseas that everybody else hasn’t already been to, or home renovations and cooking shows, or how to balance career and child care and aged parent care, and most of all why they aren’t really like any of the characters in Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap.

And as I pull back onto the road, I see two old guys standing at the exit ramp from the servo there, perhaps hitchhiking, but they are too busy arguing to put their thumbs out. And do you know, they look uncannily like those photos of grumpy old man Hamilton Hume and grumpy old man William Hovell. I ponder stopping and going back for them, but then I wonder if they aren’t actually just two smelly bums wanting a lift to the nearest bottle shop.

Caroline Chisholm isn’t here to advise me. Though if she was, she’d also do a really good job of being that narrator character at the end of wholesome television programs, who says, ‘And what did we learn from all that? I think it all shows us that blah, blah, blah.’ Because I’m left wondering what it all means. Everything. I’ve driven down the length of the Hume Highway and I have walked and talked the country and discovered lots of things, and I’m thinking I should be having an epiphany of some sort. But perhaps the understandings are small and gradual ones, and perhaps the importance of doing the walking and the talking is in finding out what Australian means to us individually, and not settling for what other people – through political policies, activists’ rants, yobbo chants or on tea towels – tell us it should be.

I’ve found my version of Australia and it’s a place I am very comfortable with – warts and riots and all. But I am a little doubtful about what it might be like in another decade. And with that thought in mind, I take one last look in the rear view mirror at the two grumpy old men back there and turn my attention to the road ahead – metaphor or not. I put my foot down and pull onto the highway, leaving the past behind and heading instead towards that undiscovered country of the future.

The Outdoor Coffee Bar of Australian Dreams

Henry Lawson stirs his latte with a distasteful grimace and looks across to see Caroline Chisholm is smirking again.

‘This place used to be a pub, you know,’ he says sullenly.

‘I think you mentioned that already,’ she replies.

‘Did I?’ He lifts the cup to his mouth, takes the miserliest of sips, then sets it down again.

‘Good, isn’t it,’ says Caroline Chisholm.

‘Bloody marvellous,’ he says flatly. He turns his head and looks into the busy lunchtime crowds streaming along Collins Street. He looks at the dark suits and briefcases and mobile phones pressed to people’s heads, and says, ‘Drifting past, drifting past, to the beat of weary feet, while I sorrow for the owners of the faces in the street.’ Then he suddenly smiles and holds up one hand, as if signalling a tram. Caroline Chisholm follows his gaze and sees Ned Kelly stomping down the street there. He sees Henry and pushes he way through the crowd.

‘Bloody hell,’ he says grumpily as he sits down and slams his heavy metal helmet onto the table top with a loud clang. ‘Another prick dobbed me in to the bloody terrorist hotline. This is getting beyond a joke.’

‘How many’s that now? About six times?’ Caroline asks him.

‘Seven! I was just out in the back yard doing a bit of target practice, and the coppers are suddenly all over the place. Leaping over the fence and kicking in me door. Bastards!’

‘Were you wearing your helmet?’ she asks.

‘Nah – you can’t see for shit trying to shoot with it on. But the coppers reckon I look like an Islamic jihadist because of the long beard.’

‘What’s that?’ asks Lawson, cupping a hand to his ear.

‘They think I look like a terrorist,’ Ned says loudly.

Caroline Chisholm tries, unsuccessfully, to hide a smile. ‘Well, I have thought that myself.’

‘Piss off!’ Ned mumbles.

‘They let you go?’ asks Henry.

‘I had to shoot my way out of it. Again!’

‘You seem to be getting better at it,’ says Caroline Chisholm.

Ned sighs. ‘And I did my back in jumping over a fence. It hurts like buggery!’

‘Ah, the trials of old age,’ she says, as if she and Henry Lawson had also done their backs in that morning jumping over fences to escape the police .

‘And now I gotta find a new place to live,’ Ned says. ‘Somewhere not so bloody far out in the suburbs. Somewhere where nobody cares if I’m taking target practice at old bottles in the back yard.’

‘Saint Kilda?’ says Henry Lawson.

‘Maybe,’ says Ned. Then he asks, ‘Where’s Burke and Wills? Weren’t they meant to be here today?’

‘Lost again I suppose,’ says Caroline Chisholm.

‘Bloody typical,’ says Ned. ‘He got lost in the Burke Street Mall last week, would you believe it?’

‘What’s that?’ asks Lawson.

‘Burke is lost again,’ says Caroline Chisholm leaning close to him and putting one hand on his arm.

Ned sighs and looks around at the busy crowd. It’s all dark suits and short skirts and long coats pushing past them. The trees along the street have begun losing their leaves already, he sees. Not that anyone trudging up and down seems to notice. He looks up at the clouds. They are thick and grey up there in that thin patch of sky between the high rise buildings.

‘So what’ll you have?’ asks Caroline Chisholm. ‘Cappuccino? Tall black? A latte?’

‘I can recommend the latte,’ says Henry. ‘In fact you can have mine.’

‘Why don’t we meet in pubs anymore?’ asks Ned.

‘None left,’ says Henry Lawson. ‘Only wine bars and bistros, and we’ve been banned from most of those on account of your behaviour.’

Ned rolls his eyes. ‘Just a spot of re-enactment. Lessons in history, really.’ Caroline and Henry stare at him. ‘Get me a latte then,’ Ned says and spits to the pavement. ‘Lotsa sugar though.’

Caroline Chisholm nods and holds up her hand for a waiter. A weary young girl steps up to their table. She’s wearing a large black apron that is gathered tightly about her like dark gift wrap. But at the back Ned can see her g-string sitting above her very low-slung slacks. She takes the order and then sees Ned staring at her. ‘And what’s that for?’ she asks, pointing at his metal helmet. ‘Your rubbish?’

Ned doesn’t even bother replying. When she’s gone he says, ‘They used to say, who are you meant to be? Ned Kelly? Now they all have the same joke about the rubbish bin. Like I’ve never heard it before.’

‘You were staring at her bum,’ says Caroline Chisholm.

‘Course I was,’ says Ned. ‘She’s got that thong thing there at the back like an arrow pointing to it. Look at my bum, it says.’

‘Well she didn’t want you to,’ she says.

‘Then why does she stick it out to be looked at?’ Ned asks.

‘What’s that?’ asks Henry Lawson.

‘Her bum,’ says Ned loudly. ‘Did you look at her bum?’

‘Caroline says I’m not to,’ says Lawson.

And she nods.

‘But did you?’ asks Ned, and Henry Lawson winks at him.

Caroline Chisholm sighs heavily. The young girl returns after a moment with the coffee and puts it on the table. Ned, keeping his eyes high, says, ‘Here love,’ and he passes her a ten dollar note. But before she can take it, Lawson reaches across the table and snatches it from Ned’s hand. Then he gives the waitress some coins.

She glares at both men and asks, ‘So have you decided who is paying?’

‘It’s all sorted,’ says Henry.

Ned nods. Still keeping his eyes high. Almost. The waitress rolls her eyes at them and then turns and walks off.

‘Young girls these days,’ says Caroline Chisholm proudly. ‘They’re so self-assured.’

‘What was all that about?’ Ned asks Henry Lawson.

‘It was one of mine,’ he says.

‘Eh?’ asks Ned. ‘It was bloody not! It was one of mine!’

‘No, it was one of the old notes,’ says Caroline Chisholm. ‘It has Henry’s face on it. He’s very concerned that they’re not much in circulation anymore.’

‘That’s bloody odd behaviour,’ says Ned.

‘She’s as bad when she sees an old fiver,’ says Henry.

‘No I’m not,’ says Caroline Chisholm.

‘Yes you are.’

‘You’re both bloody odd then,’ says Ned.

‘You wouldn’t understand it if you’d never been on money,’ says Caroline.

Ned shakes his head. ‘That’d be the day, Ned Kelly on money!’

‘What’s that?’ asks Henry Lawson, cupping his hand to his ear again.

Ned sighs and looks around. ‘Where’s Cookie?’ he asks. ‘And Batman and Smithy and Bradman and Melba. I haven’t seen them for ages.’

‘Bradman’s on some government board in Canberra I think,’ says Caroline Chisholm. ‘I don’t know where the others are.’

‘At least that fat bastard Redmond Barry isn’t here,’ says Ned. ‘I’m gonna thump him on the nose one day.’ Then he calls, ‘Hey Henry, why don’t you write a poem about him? You could call it – Redmond Barry, you big fat prick. I mean, it’s got a good ring to it, hasn’t it, and lots of things rhyme with prick. Dick. Slick. Thick.’ He thinks for a moment. ‘Arse-lick.’

But Henry just shakes his head. ‘Nobody reads poetry anymore,’ he says. ‘Unless they’re advertising jingles.’

‘You could do one of those rap poem things,’ says Ned. ‘Like they do on TV.’ And he says, ‘Redmond Barry, you big fat prick, your legs are skinny but your arse is thick. When I think of you it makes me sick!’

Henry smiles. ‘I never knew you wanted to write poetry so badly,’ he says.

Ned walks right into it. ‘Well, it’s a just something that has been running around in my head…’

‘Let me assure you that you do write badly,’ says Henry.

‘Piss off!’ says Ned.

‘You know what?’ says Caroline Chisholm. ‘You two have become a pair of grumpy old men.’

‘No we’re not,’ says Ned defensively. ‘We’re just not appreciated. Look about. Hundreds of people walking past us, and not one of them even recognizes us. You’d think at least one of them would stop and say, Hey, aren’t you Caroline Chisholm? But they don’t, do they. If you’re not in Who Weekly you’re nobody anymore.’

‘Well why don’t you get yourself in Who Weekly then?’ asks Caroline Chisholm.

‘Cause I look too much like a bloody terrorist,’ says Ned.

‘You could have a makeover,’ she says. ‘Trim the beard. Buy nice clothes. Have some elocution. Start going to the theatre.’

‘Piss off,’ he says again. But she can resist baiting him just a little more. ‘You could try and get on television.’

‘What’s that?’ asks Lawson.

‘Tele-bloody-vision,’ says Ned, over-loudly, and the people at the other tables turn and look at them. One or two stare at Ned’s beard and his metal helmet.

‘Haven’t you ever seen a terrorist’s rubbish bin?’ asks Ned, staring them down. ‘It’s my rubbish bin laden. Satisfied?’

‘Behave yourself,’ says Caroline, ‘or you’ll get us thrown out.’

Ned sighs and looks into his latte.

‘It’s rubbish alright,’ says Henry. ‘It’s as bad as your poetry.’

Ned looks at them both a moment and then turns to the young couple at the next table. ‘Excuse me,’ he says, putting on his best charm. ‘But you look like a couple who know their money.’

‘Well actually,’ says the young man with spiky gelled hair. ‘Yes, I work in stocks and bonds, and my fiancé, Felicity, is in corporate real estate.’

‘Excellent,’ says Ned. ‘In that case, can I ask you, do you by any chance recognise my two companions here?’

The young man and woman stare at them blankly. ‘Should we?’ he asks.

‘It’s Henry bloody Lawson and Caroline bloody Chisholm,’ Ned says. But there is no sign of recognition on the young couple’s faces.

‘Oh, yes?’ the man says.

‘That’s the problem with this country today,’ says Ned, turning his back on the young pair. ‘They world belongs to the young, but they don’t value it, and sell it off, and don’t even know who we are any more. We’re all fading away and nobody cares.

‘Dickheads!’ he snaps, looking back at the young pair. The young man scowls, but Ned ignores him. ‘It’s the problem with this whole country,’ he says. ‘People like that. They don’t have a clue about anything important. Too busy drinking bloody coffees and talking about fashion and celebrities and real estate and how to steal a pensioner’s life savings.’ He’s getting louder and louder. ‘They spend more on hair products than others spend on food!’

Caroline is shaking her head, but Ned won’t be calmed. ‘They all need a good kick up the arse with a big hob-nailed boot,’ he says, ‘And do you know what? I’m just the one to do it! I’m going to kick all their arses until they stand up for what’s important, starting with this pair here!’

‘They just have different values these days,’ says Caroline Chisholm. ‘If you don’t see that, it’s just verification that you’ve become a grumpy old man.’

‘They’re bereft of bloody values,’ says Ned and thumps the table so that his helmet jumps. ‘They’re pack of big, ugly, fat-necked, wombat headed, magpie-legged, sons of bailiffs!’

‘Excuse me,’ says a tall man in black with an apron, who is suddenly standing over their table, regarding Ned’s thick beard and wild eyebrows cautiously. ‘You’re causing a disturbance and I think you’d better leave.’

Caroline Chisholm sighs and takes Henry’s arm. ‘Here we go again,’ she says. But Ned says, ‘Make me!’ And he folds his arms and refuses to stand. But then two more large young men in black aprons are suddenly behind him, lifting him clean out of his chair. He tries to struggle but they lead him away from the café with ease. The first man brings his helmet and holds it out to him.

‘Do you know who I am?’ Ned shouts in anger.

‘Couldn’t give a rat’s,’ says the young man. ‘You could be Ned Kelly for all I care. But you’re disturbing the other customers and you’ve gotta leave.’

And Ned smiles. Absolutely beams. He’s suddenly so pleased that he lets the waiters cast him into the gutter. ‘Did you hear that?’ he says to Henry Lawson, with the glee of one observing a sudden ray of sunshine cutting through the Melbourne gloom. ‘Did you hear that?’

‘Sorry?’ says Lawson, cupping a hand to his ear. ‘Hear what?’

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