Now and Then: Two Views on Australia
Wind the clock forward now, about 34 years to 1987 and the American journalist Tony Horwitz, in One for the Road, decides to relive his childhood dreams of freedom an the open road by hitching the Australian outback! For this one last parley with the road, he leaves his newly wed wife at home, thumbs out west from Sydney, up to Bourke, Mt. Isa and down to Alice Springs. He rents a car to reach Ayers Rock and rolls it on the way back coming within a inch of killing himself. After two months recuperation in Sydney he flys back to Alice to pick up the trail. South and West to Perth, riding a freight train part of the way, he finally makes Geraldton and covers more or less the same route as the Rees decades earlier.
Any what a change! There are roads now. Not all sealed yet, but at least graded, and real traffic ... well a little anyhow, enough to thumb by. In fact he came across a veritable crowd of thumbers -- a French couple who'd been waiting for three days at Kununurra, two other thumbers in the same spot and one who gave up started walking to Darwin, man things were moving in Kununurra! Horwitz gets the message and catches a bus. Imagine that, a bus! What would the Rees have thought to see all of that? He thumbs into Darwin from Katherine and flys back to Sydney, much the better for the wear ...
Horwitz spent his fair share of nights sleeping in the open by the side of the road, turning later to hotels when the nights got too cold for him. The whole trip 'round Australia, with a two month break in the middle, took him only six weeks! This man was moving, he didn't stick around for long, he was after all engaged with the road, and had a job back in Sydney with limits to holiday time! But it does say something, about how quickly you can thumb around a content like Australia, some 10,000 kilometres or more even when you have to catch a bus at a dead end like Kununurra!
The Rees elegantly avoid any mention of time, and short of counting the days while reading (much like some Biblical studies I've known) it's hard to say how long they took to get around. They started in Sydney, trained to Geraldton, hitched to
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