Michael Batson

When I first went to Australia as a teenager I hitchhiked from Melbourne to Cairns, about 3000kms (roughly 1800 miles) by road. You get a sense of the size of Australia when you realise that as far as north as Cairns (pronounced by the locals as “Cans”) is from Melbourne, there is still another 1100kms before you reach Cape York at the Torres Strait across from which is Papua New Guinea. I went for the journey, for what I would see along the way and who I would meet. Eventually I planned on finding some work but did not know where. In the end I wound up back in Melbourne where I got work but before then, I did the trip all the way up and back down again. As a young bloke just out of school there was something very appealing about all those white lines flicking past the window, the sun over the endless horizon on what is the flattest continent on Earth. There were few hills, nothing like what I would call mountains, and the roads were often straight for miles at a time. I did most of that trip in stages with stops in between including a weekend in Eden at Lakes Entrance, and a few days in Sydney. I also stayed albeit briefly in Canberra and in Brisbane but didn’t find much to recommend either. Later, in that same trip, I went from Brisbane to Cairns about 1678kms along the Bruce Highway which runs between the two. You aren’t supposed to do that in one go without stopping but I did just that, by accident. I left Brisbane in the morning walking from the