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At a glance

On this drive you will see a transformation from urbane major city to solitary tundra:

• Travelling in convoy excites the children and gives a family a rhythm to the drive
• Red dirt and tough, sinewy shrubs
• This country is holy with a great deal of personal longing and significance
• Leave at dawn on your raod trip so you can watch the day ripen along eash side of the Clader Highway
• This route of early exploration and gold discovery is carved deep by wheels of two centuries and is a pure experience

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The Calder Highway - Road of dreams

Jacinta Le Plastrier Aboukhater

04 January 2010. Posted by WellBeing Natural Health & Living News

We are back on my road of dreams, one of the roads I can almost chart on the back of my hand. Its a road into Australia’s interior, the edge of it at least, the Calder Highway, which begins timidly in Melbourne’s outer suburbs but which, close to 600 kilometres on, drives flat through the mother country desert, sister, brother pitted with the incongruous, remarkable orange groves of Mildura and surrounds.

To drive this road, and it only takes eight hours or so, is to enter another place, to watch the transformation of place from urbane major city to solitary tundra, red dirt and tough, sinewy shrubs, into a country that for me is holy with personal longing and significance. We all have these roads of dreams, and their holy destinations.

I’ve made the pilgrimage here often. I used to come with the inner-city bohemian tribe painters, musicians, dancers, writers, lovers of life. I’m still surrounded by those who love life but were a different vintage now; three families with growing-up daughters, a swag of them. We’ve three of our own and the other families have a daughter each. And it’s Easter. Were on another pilgrimage this time to the Hattah Lakes District, down the turnoff I’ve always left behind as I headed further on through Mildura into southwest NSW and the alluring plains and dunes of Lake Mungo.

We set off at dawn on Good Friday. You have to leave at dawn. To watch the day ripen along each side of the Calder highway a highway in the old-fashioned sense, the route of early exploration and gold-discovery carved deep by wheels of two centuries is a pure experience. Today the clouds are heavy; they almost touch the road. On other trips I’ve watched the pink dawn illumine the entire sky, touch by touch. It’s a prayer to see that.

We’re back on the road of my dreams and the towns lick by like familiars. Travelling in convoy excites the children greatly and gives a sensible, family rhythm to the drive, with regular stops around good, healthy food. A jeweller friend, Karl, one of the dads, has his espresso maker perched on the back of the ute outside a fuel stop. It’s already hot, too. Crikey, I think, being immensely impractical and of-the-moment I’ve packed a winter wardrobe. For the rest of the holiday, I wear a miniskirt borrowed from my teenage daughter and, no, it doesn’t flatter me as it once would have (but more on that later).

First stop on this camp tour will be reached around mid-afternoon. Were heading for the banks of the grand river, the Murray. We had planned to go via Hattah Lakes but a gut instinct in Karl has us heading just further north, to Colignan, to a turnoff to the right and 10 kilometres or so on to the Murray River.

I challenge anyone to view the Murray River deceased those derelict grand masters of the waterways, now permanently adrift in deep, unwatered ridges, massive barges and boats abandoned as the river simply disappeared and not weep to themselves: a long, sorrowful kind of baying sound within for what we as colonising humankind have done to this magnificent river.