I bought this book from Book Fair Australia in February. I wasn’t sure what I was buying, but it sounded good when the author spoke about it. I have made reams of notes about it, far too much to actually write about, and if I use some of these notes for a video I’ve still got too much! No, I’m not going to write 2,000 words although I’m sure I could. Part of what I’m going to write tonight, and also share on a video on YouTube will be quotes directly from the book. I will share different parts, though.
The basic premise of this story is that Peter Rowland was having a hard time. With panic attacks and an ever-increasing problem with crowds he’d been seeing his doctor, but things got worse for him. Ending up in emergency the doctor looked at him and prescribed a proper holiday, he said to take his camera and get out of Sydney. This little prescription escalated into an eight week driving tour around Australia. Thank goodness he took his best friend, Mark. In the prologue we’re told Rowland has trouble navigating his way in a carpark and his mother expresses doubts about his ability to not get lost in a supermarket. There could be problems.
The Author’s Note is really useful for younger readers. While the book was written in 2025 the trip happened in 1992. It was a very different time. There were no GPS or other digital navigational tools. Navigating was done using a book of maps, sometimes the arrows on the map indicated you needed to not just turn the page, but turn several pages. We didn’t have mobile phones until some years later. If you were away from home and wanted to ring your parents you had to find a phone box, sometimes they worked. And calling home from one state to another was a long-distance phone call and you’d need to put a lot of coins in the slot. Both of these things are mentioned in the Author’s Note.
To say I loved this book is a total understatement. There is so much that works I’m really annoyed I didn’t pick it up earlier. There’s birds, scenery, and a friendship that seems to have survived the trials and tribulations of a really hard trip across rugged country. And that’s the thing about Australia. In the past, people from other countries don’t realise how big this continent is. They took fifty-six days to drive around it, from Sydney, west to Perth, north to Broome, east to Kakadu, before starting to head home to Sydney. They did not cover anything of the interior of the country. Some of the distances they covered were mind-boggling. One day they did 983 km, another 900 km and another over 1,000 km. I think the longest I’ve driven by myself is Melbourne to Sydney which as about 843 km, and that’s with a better car and a lot more years of driving experience. Because some of the distances are so vast they might have had hundreds of kilometres between towns.
One thing I’d like to do when I have more time…don’t laugh, truly…is to reread this book with a map in hand. Thanks to the magic of the internet I could do this quite easily. I’d like to chart each place they stopped and look at the entire. It would be an interesting exercise. At the end of the book the author has included a precis of each day including the distance travelled and where they travelled to. I read that avidly. What he’s also included is a list of the birds he saw. It wasn’t a surprise to me when I googled him part way through to find he’s actually been a bird photographer in the years since 1992. I loved the list. I read through most of it, only ignoring the location after the first page.
One thing I’ll show on the YouTube video when I get to it is the separator. It’s not a row of asterisks, but an absolutely gorgeous little drawing. And not only that, but sometimes the little animal faces left and sometimes it faces right. So cute.
I’m going to include a couple of excerpts from the book so you can get some idea of why I loved this book. I dare you to run a search on the internet for some of these things.
There is little that prepares a person for emerging from a tent, bleary-eyed, to be confronted by a fifteen-metre-high breaking wave of solid granite looming practically in their backyard. This is Wave Rock, a frankly theatrical piece of erosion that looks as though it was ordered from a catalogue of ‘Absurdly Placed Geological Wonders.’ The first instinct, naturally, is to clamber to the top. From this vantage point, with a persistent wind demonstrating a keen interest in liberating one’s hat, the tourist can survey a view that confirms what they suspected all along: the planet is mostly flat, mostly brown, and alarmingly vast.
Page 127
Going back to Page 56 I’m giving you the description of my favourite bird, the pelican.
The Coorong, South Australia. A landscape of serene lagoons and windswept dunes, and, on this particular occasion, the chosen venue for what appeared to be the annual general meeting of every Australian Pelican in existence. We’re not talking a polite smattering; we’re talking thousands. A vast, shimmering, black-and-white congregation that stretched as far as the eye could reasonably process.
There’s no mistaking an Australian Pelican. It’s a bird designed on a grand, slightly prehistoric scale, reaching up to an impressive 1.8 metres in length. Its plumage is a starkly elegant affair of black and white, but it’s the bill that truly steals the show. That enormous, pouched appendage isn’t so much a beak as a built-in, expandable shopping basket, capable of holding a surprising quantity of… well, things.
There’s more description, but that’s enough for tonight. I’m sure you get the idea. Rowland has a way of describing birds, animals, plants, and scenery in such a way that it makes me want to do this tour just so I can see what he’s seen. Only, I don’t want to drive across a desert. And if I do, I want someone like Mark with me.