Road trips are the best way to experience country Australia. You can turn on the air-conditioning and you don’t have to be constantly swatting flies. Most importantly, the landscape is experienced as a moving image framed by the edges of the windscreen and not the vast and interminable distance of dry dirt and rough grass (in the case of pastoral areas in Australia). I think an aesthetic appreciation of this land is made more acute by the absence of sensory stimuli (the smell of cow dung, the buzz of flies etc.).
However, another, entirely different view of the landscape is seen from the passenger seat, where you look to your side and watch the world rush past, rather than toward you. The best kind of moving panorama is from a train. I watched a Countrylink train go past on the road. It’s hardly a bullet-train but it clatters past on those old tracks rather impressively. My memory of taking the 12 hour journey to Byron Bay for ‘schoolies’ (I was a 17, I didn’t know any better) and a rather distinct, if not physical memory etched into my bones, of the ergonomically tortuous seats with the head rests that lean slightly forward, prevent me from being nostalgic about train travel in Australia.
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