On the Road Again

Another quick trip up and down the Hume Highway (Friday, to Sydney and Wednesday, back to Melbourne) had me wondering how to distract myself from a monotonous drive.

At this early-autumn time of year the passing landscape is rather tired and bland, in need of urgent work by Picasa or Photoshop to correct the over-exposure of lighting and under-exposure of colour tones. Heading south yesterday, the concrete road ahead blended upwards into a colourless white/grey washed-out sky and outwards into straw-coloured paddocks and faded olive-green patches of foliage, while the distant hills were shrouded in either mist or smoke haze, I could not tell which.

Almost the only visual distraction from the horizontal spread was right beside the road - the narrow trunks of gum trees, some of them like a forest of vertical pencils, others standing like black-uniformed sentries at attention. In his wonderful book The Leopard, Tomasi di Lampedusa describes eucalypyts as the 'scruffiest of Mother Nature's children'. His Italian perspective struck a chord yesterday as I reached the end of that boring traverse across the plains south of Albury, boredom broken only by the hill at Glenrowan. As Violet Town drew nearer those so-called scruffy children suddenly matured into adulthood, becoming bulkier and far more shapely. And very different, again, from the eucalypts growing densely on the sandstone hills bordering the Sydney basin. I felt ashamed of my inability to give a name to most of these trees. How I wished I had Murray Bail's encyclopedic knowledge of our native flora, described in his Australian fairy story Eucalyptus.

The new micro-climate for the trees got me thinking again, about how the trip south west along the Hume Highway from Sydney to Melbourne involves two crossings of the Great Dividing Range in one day. The range runs southwards and parallel to the eastern seaboard of the continent and then sweeps around in a giant curve to fizzle out to the north-west of Melbourne. We might be attuned to this geographic feature as a mountain range, albeit eroded, but travellers to Australia from other shores would scarcely bestow the term 'hills' upon our mighty Great Divide.

Having descended the range for the second time, the road crosses the grasslands bordering metropolitan Melbourne, yesterday's burnt roadside verges providing ample evidence of recent wild fires. After a long day in the car it's always good to see on the far horizon the high-rise buildings of the central city, my destination, reminding me that journey's end is nigh. I know that I'll just have to stay awake, keep concentrating, for another 45 minutes and I'll be safely home again.