The drive started hours before dawn, but our nine-hour trip to ‘Hay and Hell and Booligal’ was always worth it
It was always hours before dawn when Dad would bundle four slumbering kids into the already-packed car.
I was strapped into the back bench-seat next to one of my sisters using a single extended belt. The two older siblings got the windows.
Mum was in the front with Dad behind the wheel of his 1983 Ford Falcon GL. It was light brown, although someone in marketing would probably call it “champagne gold”.
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These are early, wispy memories of the long car ride from Sydney to visit my grandma, aunts, uncles and cousins on rural farming properties around “Hay and Hell and Booligal”, as Banjo Paterson’s poem goes.
I recall the agonising boredom of the long trip for a hyper-energetic kid not yet old enough to start school.
Broken up with short stops to see the Dog on the Tuckerbox at Gundagai and a stretch of the legs at Junee, the car ride took about nine hours. The early morning departure was designed in part to fast-track the journey for the sleeping kids.
We stop at placenames so familiar to me, like Gunbar, where my grandma lived. She is buried in its cemetery now. I recall Gunbar’s little stone church and community tennis events.
We drive further still, to sheep and cattle country, on the Booligal Road, where it’s too dry for large crops and too flat for handbrakes.
Paterson drew on the hardness of life out here, but the region’s childhood delights are seared into my memory.
My aunt and uncle are there when we arrive, and they’ll let my older siblings ride the motorbikes around their merino sheep farm. I’m disappointed I’m too young to join them.
But I cheer up when I’m told there’s a special job for me. I’m in charge of collecting eggs from the chicken coop.
It was worth the long trip.
