The Long Drive

Cafe Locked Out

There is so much space out here. It’s like the gods left before they were able to add the mountains and valleys and grand forests. You could hide an entire civilization out here. We did, and they are still lost. On the beaches near Eucla, which you have to climb down cliffs to reach, you can find the mounds of broken shellfish and the handcrafted stone tools they created to open these shells. Mounds that took generations to build, and yet they have been replaced by nothing. There are no resorts here, overlooking the serene ocean, which wave by wave is still carving the cliffs that create the towering Great Australian Bight.

A Nurse Reading The Forest of the Fallen in a Victorian Country Town

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You could scream out here until your lungs gave out, and no one would hear it, except perhaps the odd crow who might prudently fly over to see if you were en route to ending up on their menu. Even the earth-trembling roar of the road trains is quickly consumed by the space and then forgotten in the silence.

How did she not veer off this straight and often endless road, her grief and rage searching the land for anywhere she could escape the loss? A few weeks before, semi-protected by shock, she and her husband had driven this road, heading to Kalgoorlie. They were from Adelaide, and they had just received the news that their oldest son was dead. He’d driven off the road, in Kalgoorlie itself, but witnesses claimed he was already slumped over the wheel before he did. He had just been vaccinated. There was no choice. He was working on the mines, which he loved, and he’d been given the ultimatum. Now his body would be joining these minerals, or at least he would be, when they finally received his body.

The allegation was that the coroner was holding onto it in Perth because Premier Mark McGowan was also visiting Kalgoorlie on a mission to convince a large part of the town, who were reluctant to get jabbed, and the last thing the government wanted was local evidence that the jabs were bad. Like we said, allegations.

In town, she had another son. He had been the family member the police had approached to identify his brother’s body. He believed that it was the jab that had killed his brother, or at least he had seen his brother black out at the wheel before driving off the road and leaving us. But he also had a mad love for karate and soon after his brother’s death, he took the jab so he could attend class. Unfortunately, it left him paralyzed, which meant these grieving parents now had to care for him.

Finally, she was able to arrange for her eldest son’s body to be transported to Adelaide. All she had to do was get back there herself. But times had changed. The state borders were closed, and despite being on the phone to the South Australian Government for days, she could receive no guarantee that when she reached Ceduna, the South Australian end of the Nullarbor, the authorities there would let her in. Meaning she would have to turn around and drive the eighteen hundred kilometers back, alone. That is, if the Western Australian border guards would let her back in. And it would be four hundred and eighty kilometers away.

In Ceduna was a caravan park full of Western Australians who were waiting for the Western Australian border to open. Refugees in their own country, simply for not being vaccinated. It sounds crazy, but that was what she was facing as, alone, she left her husband to care for her other, now incapacitated son and began the long drive home to bury her eldest.

A man in Ballarat Holding up some Forest of The Fallen stories outside The ABC, which ignored him.

The Nullarbor is never that busy. In normal times, every ten minutes or so a car or truck will pass, but in that time, that was not the case. There were very few cars and even fewer trucks. Then, the Nullarbor would not only be one of the longest stretches of straight roads in the world, but also the loneliest.

Even if she had managed a thousand kilometers a day, she would still have miles to go, and swathes of it, with no internet coverage, except near the roadhouses, which on some stretches were almost three hundred kilometers apart. If you were a tourist, in simpler times, you might find the flat view boring, or then again, you might find it spiritual. How often do you travel through a landscape where, if you stood on your car’s roof, you would be the tallest aspect of the view? Where the clouds have enough space to tell their own stories. Dark storms to the right, promising to catch you as you tear along the highway, as above you caravans of cumulus migrate to a horizon you will never reach.

But with your heart torn to pieces, and the only thing keeping you together being your determination to cross a border so you could arrange the burial of your eldest son, the road must have stretched on forever. For surely, if as a parent, you have to bury your child, many roads must look like they stretch on forever.

Unvaccinated, she would be forced to sleep in her car as the roadhouses refused her accommodation and forced her to wear a mask as she purchased food. Would she have found God out here? If she was the only person from horizon to horizon, she wouldn’t have been difficult to find, and there would have been no queues blocking access to his throne, where she could ask him what was the point of allowing this miracle to form in me, then allow him to grow into my young man full of dreams only to leave him forever broken in a wreck.

His name would never be engraved on a shrine, celebrating the sacrifice he, and other victims of the jab, had made for the community. There would be no day to celebrate their loss, or even an apology. Just silence. The same silence buffering her car as she tried to sleep beneath the immensity.

Then finally, she approached the border. But now, all her defenses were primed. There was no way they were going to stop her from entering. She had already made that decision, and the closer she drew to Ceduna, the stronger her resolve grew. She was a grizzly bear mother separated from her cub, and good luck to any official who tried to stop her.

But there was no need to stop her, because there was no one there. The border station was closed. She lost it then, she told me. After all the tension of the long drive, she felt like crashing into it. But instead, she kept driving to Adelaide, still a nine-hour drive away.

She was not rich, not a celebrity, and there would be no acknowledgment from the government about anything when it came to their loss. She was simply a mature woman who would pass you in a mall without you knowing. An Australian suburbanite who had managed to reach this funeral, which her husband couldn't attend, where, with only a limited number of mourners, none of whom would discuss the reason they were there—for that was the rule of the greater silence now shadowing our country—she completed her duties and said goodbye to her son, whose face and story, every weekend, now flow back and forth in the breezes that pass through the people’s unofficial shine, called The Forest of The Fallen.

Michael Gray Griffith

Would you be interested in a novel of these collated essays, if so please contact John Stapleton who will soon publish them.

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A Sense of Place Publishing

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