Before smartphones and aircons: Take a (road) trip down memory lane

Before dawn on a late December morning, Mum and Dad would rustle me up in my PJs, herd me and my three siblings out to an already jam-packed van and we'd start our summer road trip.

We'd be dozing among pillows and doonas as the sun came up, the yellow Mitsubishi Express chugging along on its major outing of the year from Canberra to Queensland.

The goal that first morning was to be at Dubbo before Maccas finished serving breakfast, a big incentive for all concerned. Some days we cut it fine.

This biennial trip to our grandparents' farm in south-east Queensland held both amusements and privations unfamiliar to most kids today.

We relied on conversation, card games, a book or whatever Dad had playing over the tape deck to get us through what felt like never-ending days on a scorching hot Newell Highway. Photo-stop highlights were wheat silos and fields of sunflowers.

Dad compiled themed cassettes for trips like these. Christmas music dominated, of course, but when we couldn't bear another version of All I want for Christmas, the Australiana of Slim Dusty or Geoff Mack ("I've been everywhere, man") ruled.

But for all his efforts, you had to accept stupefied boredom as part of the deal. Heads against the window, staring out into the flat, endless expanse of scrub and the occasional roo or emu to note lethargically as you zoomed past.

As for air conditioning, are you kidding? This was the 1980s. Sanity depended on scooping out pieces of ice from an esky ("Quick, shut the lid!") or mopping our brows with wet wipes.

Mirages shimmered in the distance as the day dragged on. "A couple more hours, kids," Dad would say when heat-addled nerves frayed up the back, where bare legs stuck to vinyl seats.

The real oasis was the swimming pool waiting at the Country Comfort motel in Coonabarabran. You know the kind, smack bang in the middle of the motel carpark, not a bit of shade to be seen. Feet-burning bitumen from door to pool fence. Bombing in was heaven.

Yet, for all the endurance and trials of these trips, the pictures in our albums invariably show happy, freckled faces.

The reason was the destination, the promised land of a farm near the one-pub town of Rathdowney. Set in grazing country inland from the Gold Coast and ringed by national parks, it was, and is, an idyllic scene, where mountains named Barney and Lindsay impressed onto a child's mind with all the significance of an Everest or Etna.

Just a few years ago we made this same pilgrimage midyear to celebrate Dad's 80th birthday with his siblings and their families. He flew up, but our family drove in convoy with one of my sisters and her brood. We took the let's-make-a-trip-of-it approach, spending a night in Orange, another under canvas at Dubbo zoo and a third in Armidale. A trip to echo an earlier time.