Nicholas Roland Allbrook and the Big White Car

Much of my young life was spent in a Toyota Hilux, or a “troopy”, which may or may not be the same thing*. To my little boy mind they were towering obelisks dusted rust-red on which you could draw little pictures with your finger in clean white eraser lines. They were hugely powerful - fortresses from the crushing Kimberly heat and cyclones and great dumb Brahman bulls that bolted across the road when they saw a car coming. They stood for hours and days by the road, chewing and gazing into the shimmering heat with flies buzzing around their eyes until a road-train kicking up dust in the distance finally got close enough to give them a fright and they panicked and made the only possible wrong decision at that moment - a last minute gamble that they were safer on the other side of the road.

Sat on the Derby Jetty in my pink thongs

The Hilux even protected me and Mum against some ute that ignored a stop sign and made everything turn weird and time stop - a sensation I always remember when thinking about getting hit by a train while running with my headphones in. Mums arm slammed across my chest and her jaw braced hard and glass went everywhere like in the movies and the noise was louder than thunder. The Hilux ground through that car* like it did through mangrove mud and sand and spinifex and rivers, like a fat, slow mammoth. Dumb, unfazed and never changing pace.

I remember winding my window up as Dad steered us through a river that had a road somewhere underneath it, the car’s snorkel poking up from the bonnet, gurgling, and everything going deathly quiet. Just like swimming, sound sucked away. I feared crocodiles and drowning and death and I could tell my parents were scared too, but I trusted it and them like a small boy does. I was safe in the safest, cosiest space. To some the Hilux represents freedom, but to me it was containment and closeness. Me, Mum, Dad and Lui the red kelpie piled into a smelly box for days at a time drawing, reading The Hobbit, counting kilometres before the next bit of Allen’s Party Mix, farting, laughing, sleeping, driving. Three days with almost no turn in the road. Three days drive to Perth (the “big smoke”) for Christmas with stops in Newman or Meekatharra or on mudflats where my sister told a joke I can’t remember, but the punchline was “Uranus” and I laughed so hard I vomited in my swag, by virtue of 12 months of whooping cough. Maybe the year off school had dulled my senses enough to piss myself over that shitty joke or maybe I just really needed a laugh after so long staring out the window at school kids throwing boondies at each other every afternoon around 3.30. It might also have been a good one, dear Sair bear.

True then, and still true today, the person in the drivers seat of a Hilux is imbued with a mystical authority, the captain of an ivory hulk sailing over the iron desert. I sat in the back wedged between eight very fat old desert women with grey whiskers - tiny and white with blue eyes and blond hair - a “full blood gardiya” they said. I was too young to comprehend their status and knowledge of song and law and culture, so I caught Mums eye and scrunched up my face, waving my hand in front of my nose. Rude. Later that trip the old women forced Mum to stop the car because they’d seen a goanna scamper off the road. “Barni Barni! Gettim Mary-Anne!” She sighed and pulled over and I watched from the dusty window between the old ladies floral skirts and pendulous breasts as Mum scurried around the spinifex with a big stick trying to bludgeon this great sinewy dinosaur to death to the cheers of all of us in the car. I looked on proud as hell. I shat myself when goanna came in the house, with their big claws and droopy necks like skinny old men. I’d been warned about their penchant for scrambling up a human and shredding your skin like bark when they were scared. Mum was very tough, and I ate Barni for the first time later that day.

Climbing trees in Derby with my cousin Isobel. We used to take our Dog, Lui, for walks there

I was in the back of the Hilux pissing around like a kid - maybe looking at the telephone wires skipping up and down as we moved - when Lisa got a call on the old car radio and hung up saying “Ben’s killed himself”. I was shocked by her callousness then, years before I learned that some times are too raw to be sweet. The car skidded to a stop and my Dad pulled me out of the passenger seat and held me tight by the side of the road under the stupid hot sun and cried. His akubra fell off and gambolled along the tiny red pebbles by the bitumen, down the concave gutters to the dry ditch where we could catch Marin at night in the Wet season. I cried too, waiting for the right time to look him full in the face, with tear streaked cheeks, and say, “Dad, which Ben?”

*a ‘troopy’ is actually a Toyota Land Cruiser

*the driver of the ute was ok