Always One Step Ahead of the Storm: An 8-Year-Old’s Down Under Adventure

By Phoebe Wilby

With cyclones Wanda and Tracy acting as bookends, the O'Briens swap their comfortable suburban home in Brisbane for a 17.5-foot caravan and the adventures of a lifetime. Travel along with Phoebe, her mum, Stephanie, and the rest of her family, as she takes us along for the ride, travelling across Western New South Wales, into Victoria, through South Australia and across The Nullarbor Plain into Western Australia - and then back home and up the Queensland coast!

Although decades have passed since that trip, Phoebe relies on her own memories, flavoured with a little Google research and seasoned with her mother's memories, to describe travelling across the vast country of Australia. In her owns words: "When all is said and done, my memory of 1974 is of a fun-filled, educational trip across the bottom half of this great country I still call home, wherever I happen to live."

Perhaps her story can inspire you to live your dream, whatever it is, and wherever it will take you."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Sep 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781664112759

Book preview

Copyright © 2020 by Phoebe Wilby.

Photography © Stephanie Hammond, 1974

Special mention to the Mildura Historical Society for their photograph of Big Lizzie.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 09/14/2020

Xlibris

UK TFN: 0800 0148620 (Toll Free inside the UK)

UK Local: 02036 956328 ([phone] from outside the UK)

www.Xlibrispublishing.co.uk

814530

Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

Prologue

1. Rain in a Sunburnt Country

2. Christmas Day, 1973

3. Decisions, Decisions, and More Decisions

4. The Day Before

5. D-Day

6. Wallangarra

7. Crossing the Border

8. South of the Border

9. Entertaining the Trippers

10. Go West

11. Journey’s End, for Now

12. Mildura

13. Irymple State School

14. The Vineyard

15. On the Road Again

16. Adelaide

17. Educational Excursions in South Australia

18. The Nullarbor Plain

19. Eucla

20. Western Australia

21. Kambalda

22. Kalgoorlie and the Ghost Town

23. Perth and the South-Western Tip

24. A Second Helping of Mildura

25. Canberra to Home

26. A Short Trip North

Epilogue

Afterword

To Glen, a great visionary man who gave us the trip of a lifetime. Without your idea, determination, and will, there would be no story to tell.

Acknowledgements

Although these are essentially my memories, they’ve been jogged by photographs and by searching for the places we visited on the Internet. What a wonderful invention that is. So my heartfelt thanks to Messrs Page and Brin for making research by Google possible, to my stepfather for having the ideas, but mostly to my mother, for having the strength to go along with his ideas, despite her reservations, and make the trip memorable.

Preface

I don’t think it’s possible to appreciate the vastness and beauty of Australia unless you do a road trip. And it can’t be rushed. I was blessed to have that opportunity as an impressionable child in my ninth year and would welcome the opportunity to do a similar trip again as an adult. I’m not in a position to do so right now; in fact, I live thousands of miles away on the other side of the world. Instead, I will take you on a journey as I relive the trip my family took forty-five years ago around the bottom half of Australia.

You will see this great country through my eyes as an eight-year-old girl who dreamed of being a gypsy, and for that year, I was living the dream.

For the most part, these are my memories. No doubt my brothers and sisters will have different memories, which is fine. We all remember things differently, and our separate memories can only enrich each other.

Included at the back of the book are some photos of the trip. For the most part, Mum was the photographer. It was rare that she would be in the photo, but there is one of her on her own and one of her with us girls. Very rare, indeed.

I’ve asked Mum to include her memories of the trip at various points along the way. They appear as italicised inserts under the heading Stephanie and are dotted randomly throughout the book, wherever she felt she could either add to my memories or share memories of her own.

I hope you enjoy the memories of this trip of a lifetime. Perhaps you will feel inspired to record your own thoughts about our trip. I wish I’d had the presence of mind to do that myself, as the trip unfolded, instead of looking back through the years to where the memories were born, now fleeting and faded.

Prologue

A road trip of around ten thousand miles has to start somewhere, and for the O’Briens, it started with a trampoline.

It was 1973, and I had turned eight at the beginning of September, spring in the land Down Under. We did nothing out of the ordinary all year, and as the school year drew to a close, my siblings and I were looking forward to Christmas. This year, we were promised a trampoline.

There were five of us at this time. My older sister, Babette, was ten. I came next at eight, followed by Benjamin (Benny), who had turned three in April, Rebecca (Becky), who was two in June, and Daniel (Danny), who would have his first birthday a week or so before Christmas. They all had hair of various shades of blonde or light brown. Mine was black.

We didn’t have a huge back garden, although to be fair, to our young eyes, it certainly looked like it. We lived at 9 Thomas Street, Chermside, in an old brick bungalow that had, long before we moved in, been added upon to include three rather large bedrooms upstairs and a room at the back downstairs, effectively turning a tiny two-bedroom cottage into a suburban mansion.

I should note here that this house no longer exists; instead, there is a block of serviced apartments in its place. I was sad to see my childhood home vanish, but it’s really a metaphor for the innocence we shared in that home.

We loved the house; we used to read in the sunroom, play silly games sitting in the closed-off fireplace in the lounge, slide down the carpeted stairs on pieces of cardboard, and play hide-and-seek in all the nooks and crannies this curious house presented, such as the loft of the lower story accessed by the stairs, spacious cupboards in the upstairs hall and the blue bedroom, and a cupboard under the stairs where we stored food preserved in mason jars. We also had a playroom full of toys.

In our garden, we had balance beams in the form of the fences between our garden and our neighbours’, a small but somehow sturdy frangipani tree to climb, a sandpit, and lots of empty space to run around. But we didn’t have a trampoline.

The trampoline was going to be our Christmas present, and we imagined all the fun we would have learning to do tricks and seeing who could jump the highest, who could do the most somersaults, who could have the most fun. We couldn’t wait for Christmas.

1

Rain in a Sunburnt Country

While drought conditions are more common in the region, the Bureau of Meteorology records that the spring of 1973 was exceptionally wet for Brisbane. By October, the rivers, dams, and waterways of South-East Queensland were nearing their capacity. In November, Brisbane had experienced a tornado, and more rain was on its way.

Having just turned eight, and being full of the vim and vigour of life, I don’t remember the rain being a problem. We used to play outside in the rain all the time. The rain was usually warm and provided a welcome relief from the normal heat and stickiness.

I remember walking to school barefoot. There was no point wearing my school shoes, and I didn’t own a pair of gumboots. Even if I had, I would have preferred to go barefoot. The only real problems were the sharp stones embedded in the bitumen roads and the very real possibility of getting a sole full of bindi-eye prickles, despite the slushy green verge. Neither situation was very inviting, and