School holiday season is upon us again, and for generations of Australians that meant one thing – a road trip.
You know, the one where your parents squeeze you in the back of the family car with your siblings and you drive for hours across the country to (hopefully) somewhere warm and fun. Along the way you saw some amazing things – a Big Banana, a Big Pineapple and maybe even a Big Prawn – and you nagged your parents until they stopped at a fast food restaurant instead of the local bakery or fish and chip shop they wanted. And while you whinged at the time you now look back on those trips with fond memories.
But thanks to the rising cost of fuel and the decreasing cost of flying, the ‘Great Aussie Road Trip’ appears to be a fading memory for many of us. To find out why, I decided to take a road trip for myself, hitting the highway from Sydney to Brisbane (and back) with my kids.
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Fortunately for my children, they weren’t stuffed into the back of the Magna (or lounging in the back of a rental Commodore if my dad’s company sprung for a hire car) like I was. Instead our chariot for our 2000km odyssey was the 2024 Genesis GV80, a luxury-laden SUV that made long highway stretches far more comfortable.
It doesn’t take long for Australia’s poor highway etiquette (the ‘Keep Left Unless Overtaking’ signs aren’t for decoration, folks) and the out-dated 110km/h speed limit to frustrate me as a driver, but once we’re north of Newcastle the biggest change on road trips from my childhood emerges.
There are no turns.
For more than 360km from Heatherbrae, just north of Newcastle, until Coffs Harbour the navigation has nothing to do as it’s just a straight run down the freeway. Nearly every town between Sydney and Brisbane (save Coffs Harbour) has been bypassed.
Over the last few decades, one by one, towns like Taree, Port Macquarie, Macksville, Grafton and more have been deleted from most people’s road trip itinerary and replaced by a faster freeway bypass. It’s the same on the freeway south to Melbourne too.
The good news is this makes the modern road trip so much faster and easier, especially for truck drivers who are working to tight deadlines. But on the flip side it does make the drive far less interesting and uneventful for the family road trippers.
It also means former landmarks like Taree’s Big Oyster are no longer a tourist attraction (albeit a questionable one in the first place) and instead have become a Kia dealership. The Big Prawn in Ballina is now nothing more than a landmark to find the local Bunnings.
The last landmark of fun left standing from my childhood is Coffs Harbour’s Big Banana, which has evolved into a small theme park in order to make it a more appealing attraction to all holidaymakers in the region. But work is underway on a bypass for Coffs Harbour, so soon it too will be left out and the journey north will become even quicker.
But is that necessarily a good thing?
As the Disney Pixar movie Cars demonstrated, progress can come at a price for small towns cut off from the flowing traffic of the freeway. My childhood memories of giant roadside features, quirky towns, memorable bridges across striking rivers and winding roads through ever-changing landscape have been replaced by an efficient, monotonous run up and down the freeway, with only the same familiar brands at the carefully placed service centres.
I don’t mean to sound like I’m stuck in the past, and certainly for those of us looking to get somewhere in a hurry our modern freeway network is an upgrade. But for those worried about the journey and not just the destination it’s worth taking the extra time and getting off the freeway to explore some parts of Australia that have otherwise been left behind.
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