Going for gold

I’VE LONG envied my contemporaries’ fond recollections of family road trips from Sydney to the Gold Coast. So as we mourn the loss of car manufacturing in Australia, I figure it’s a good time to catch up on this rite of passage.

My mission is to head north and seek out places still similar to what I may have encountered on a 1970s holiday pilgrimage. As we’ll be flying back, we’ve hired a supremely comfortable and fabulously flighty Holden SV6 for the occasion.

Having left Sydney early, we arrive at the elegant riverside town of Grafton not long after lunchtime. Big river country kicks in here in a big way. The mighty Clarence River is spanned by a bridgeopened in 1932 which, uniquely, features rail lines on the understorey and kinks at either end. At the time rivalled only by Sydney Harbour Bridge,