"Almost all Australian highways are still just two lanes wide, and what a difference that makes. You’re not cut off from the wider world, as you are on a superhighway, but part of it, intimately connected. All the million details of the landscape are there beside you, up close, not blurred into some distant, tediously epic backdrop. It changes your whole outlook. There’s no point in hurrying when all it’s going to do is put you in the feathery wake of that old chicken truck half a mile ahead. Might as well hold back and enjoy the scenery. So there’s none of that mad, pointless urgency-gotta pass this guy, gotta keep pushing, gotta make some miles-that makes any drive on an interstate such an exhausting and unsatisfying business. When you come to a town on such a road it is an event. You don’t fly through at speed, but slow down and glide through, in a stately manner, like a float in a parade, slow enough to nod to pedestrians if you wish and to check out the goods in the windows on Main Street….So, you drop back and take it easy. You lean an arm on the windowsill, lay a finger on the wheel, and cruise. You haven’t one this for years. You haven’t been on a drive like this since you were a kid. You’d forgotten motoring could be fun.”
Bill Bryson - from "In A Sunburned Country"...in the spirit of that passage, here's a song from Slim Dusty, one of the most popular Country singers in Australia, whose music is full of references to the Great Australian Road. Search his name on YouTube and hundreds of homemade music videos come up, most of them elaborate montages of big road train trucks barreling across the outback as Slim sings lyrics about the journey and lonesomeness of it... Driving in Australia, apparently, is not like driving anywhere else...
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