Before the plains

As if to prepare for the forty-two hour trip across the barren expanse of the Nullarbor Plains, a copy of Larry McMurtry’s Roads appeared in the travel section of my used book library. One way to describe this library is dynamic. Another is diverse, though someone given to extremes once described it as an obsession. I concur, and by way of mitigation, suggest there are many worse obsessions, even within my own repertoire.

Roads is a millennial journey along America’s great interstate highways (unquote). In other words, a collection of observations from a 20th century lone ranger in a car, criss-crossing vast tracts of one of the world’s foremost infamous nations. This may not sound like something to get excited about, but the craft of the highly acclaimed author breathes life into every chunk of nine thousand-or-so-mile journeys. One trip each month from January to September when the urge to drive finally ran out at the north end of highway 281, the same road that runs past McMurty's old family home 'deep in the heart of Texas'.


This $7 find in the 5-minute wait for the Waiheke Island ferry on olive harvest morning climbs to the top of a current reading list of Micheal King’s Te Puea, Three Pillars of Zen and Jonathon Raban’s Arabia, and won’t be put down. This is late April. The Nullarbor trip is scheduled for early May.

This cross section of Southern Australia might speak to McMurtry’s lifelong yearning for the big horizons and open plains of a rural West Texas childhood. For him, life in cities and mountains, whether East or West, always felt transient, demanding frequent relief through return to the plains. My own unease comes from spending too long away from the ocean, though I share his unconditional love of travel and the need to return to the landscape, if not the actual land, where the roots of childhood were formed. Perhaps some deep, sub-conscious instinct keeps drawing us back.

I would love to read the impressions of a seasoned traveller like McMurtry on the journey I will soon undertake. The eye of a stranger is somehow more observant, fresher than one familiar. The writer’s craft is transmitting the product of an incurable, curious mind. But my own musings will have to do. McMurtry travelled to write about his own country in 1999, anticipating the restrictions of advancing age. It is sadly unlikely that he could be persuaded to leave his comfortable home and treasured used book collection in Archer City to travel to Australia in 2009 just to satisfy the whim of a reader, however strong the allure of different plains, horizons and landscapes might be.

I've finished the book so happy to give it out on loan :-)