In my novel Till The Heavens Burst, my protagonists take part in a road trip across Australia. Or, around Australia, as going across the country in a car is still a near suicidal endeavour. Especially if you can’t use the internet, or any tools connected to the internet to navigate your way out of potential dilemmas.
Instead, my crew takes “Highway 1”, the very real network of highways that circumnavigate Australia from state to state to state to state to state to territory and then back to state again. It’s the longest national highway in the world, and following it would take you through six of Australia’s capital cities—though not the nation’s capital, Canberra. And Tasmania’s capital, Hobart, is left out as well.
To make the journey from Melbourne to Exmouth my crew, armed with a national Street Directory, cuts out part of the Highway 1 journey and instead follows the now defunct “National Highway” route, utilising National Highway 94 to cut about 10 hours off their journey. They don’t mention this difference because they’re not big on details. That’s on purpose. I know this will sound flippant and maybe a little convenient, but any time there’s a detail that’s incorrect in TTHB, that’s on purpose because it’s written from the perspective of people who are wrong about a lot of things.
That’s not strictly true, actually. I mentioned making a few edits when I did the Audiobook, but one thing I specifically got incorrect that I didn’t go back to change is in one of Will’s chapters. Will says when he met Bob, Parade was playing, and that Bob asked him out during the sweet guitar solo from Let’s Go Crazy played in-store. Let’s Go Crazy is obviously from Purple Rain and Parade has fuck all guitar on it in general. I can’t quite remember what happened. I’d love to say it’s an indication of Will’s imperfect memory, that even when he uses music to recall things it’s still not exact, but that’s not it. I just goofed.
Anyway outside of that instance any other inaccuracies were deliberate. On purpose.
I’ve gotten so far off track.
What I was originally talking about was the drive from Melbourne (really Brisbane for a portion of the travellers) to their final destination in Exmouth, Western Australia in Till The Heavens Burst.
Now you may laugh, but when researching this drive, I mapped it out using Google’s Street View. It was a long and vaguely annoying process, but anyone who has played Geoguessr will know it is faster than actually driving. You can cover a lot more distance clicking your mouse than in any car, even if you are willing to add “GST” onto the Speed Limit.
I think it was the right idea. You understand a lot about the drive by doing it in Street View. It’s analogous, but not a perfect replica. It’s not “Flight Simulator”, but it is Ace Combat, if you get my meaning. You need to understand the fundamentals of the activity you’re participating in, but it’s not going to prepare you to actually grab the yoke in a professional sense.
But if you have flown a plane professionally, you can take the skills you have from that and translate them to Ace Combat quite quickly. See also F1 drivers playing racing games, or NBA players using basketball IQ in the 2K franchise.
With that in mind, I have driven 11 hours straight before. I’ve been on 24+ hour long non-stop road trips before. I have had those experiences in real life. So I thought I could take that lived experience and translate it to the round-Australia journey of Till The Heavens Burst.
But in the back of my mind, I still really wanted to do it. Like, for real. Properly. Especially the last leg, up to Exmouth. I have an idea for some content based off it, and I also wanted to see how well I nailed the idea at the heart of my road-trip writing.
I wanted to convey a feeling of monotony. I’ve written about it before—that’s why the details of what they eat, who sits where, how often they stop to pee all fall to the wayside. Because unless something specifically interesting happens, these things all blur together. None of it matters, and so none of it exists. It’s literally just hour after hour of the same thing.
In that sense, I think I nailed it. I didn’t want to bore the reader, so I blurred over all that. But over the last two weeks I went ahead and did the drive from Perth to Exmouth (not precisely the route the book took, but close) and there was something I didn’t quite understand about it.
Because what you don’t get from Street View is the existential threat you feel while driving on some of these roads. Especially after hours and hours of monotony. Especially at dusk, and the world around you is flat in every direction until the horizon, and the sun turns into a giant spotlight shining directly across you like an 35.73 octillion lumen high beam headlight.
Because when I did my previous long drives and outback road trips, that information never really reared its head. The road from Perth to Exmouth is not the multi-lane Pacific Highway. It is not dotted with towns to visit and rest stops and coffee vans and sights to see. There is Geraldton, there is Carnarvon, and then there is nothing. And between those, there is nothing. And the entire way, you are driving on a two-lane road at 110km/h (plus GST), where the only objects of note along the way is the roadkill, the caravans wobbling across both lanes in the endless wind doing 90km/h, and the far more terrifying three-trailer Road Trains doing 120km/h in both directions.
A Road Train, if you’re not familiar, is a truck configuration with more than a single trailer. Passing one is scary, because it feels like it never ends. You gun it to 150km/h on a piece of highway that is straight off over the horizon and as you pass each trailer you wonder if a car is going to appear out of the heat haze ahead, and if you’re ever going to make it to the front of this big rig you’re trying to overtake.
Being passed by one is far worse, as the seemingly endless prime-mover wobbles its way into the lane beside you, its behemoth weight uncomfortable with having to shift its centre of gravity sideways to change lanes, its potential in a Mass times Acceleration sense representing a mercifully swift death by obliteration. If the sun is in just the right position when this happens, it is reminiscent of that one scene in every Godzilla movie where a fishing boat is slowly swallowed by an inevitable darkness.
And so once this happens a few times, you begin to watch the endless straight both in front and behind you. When the next Road Train crawls up into your rear view mirror, you find yourself in Steven Spielberg’s Duel, worried that the truck looming behind you is trying to kill you, and you increase your speed to make sure it can’t.
It’s insane to me that these trucks are even capable of such speeds. Not in a ‘they should be regulated’ sense, more in a Physics sense. How are they moving so much weight so quick? Surely it comes down to the straightness of the roads and a slow but steady increase in pace.
All of this is so much more exhausting than I anticipated. And that exhaustion is scary in and of itself. On other, less tiring drives, I often found myself mentally sharp deep into the trip. I have done the trip from Sydney to Brisbane in one 11 hour stint, and partied till early the next morning once I arrived. But driving to Exmouth, I had to invent games to maintain concentration after just a few hours.
I would wave to any other drivers I passed, and to birds on the side of the road. It would keep my eyes peeled, and it kept my hands at 10 and 2 on the steering wheel. Just a quick little hand raise without lifting it, a gesture of goodwill that also helps maintain focus. I guess it’s similar to what cricket players do in long innings—my mate (and the Editor of Blackbirded and Till The Heavens Burst) Nate revealed that to me on one of our walks once, and the idea has fascinated me ever since.
Anyway, if I could do it all again I would insert so much of that dread into the text of Till The Heavens Burst. The chapter where Adelaide wakes in a haze and sees a nearby accident would be a perfect spot for it—a little bit of looming, never ending dread that could pay off in a small way later with a near-miss before it paid off in a bigger way as it was revealed to be the primary reason the trio were tracked by the System.
Ahh well. Art is never finished, only abandoned, right? I cannot endlessly tweak my novel, lest I never move on to the next thing.
I am glad I did the drive, though I’d probably not do it again. And I wouldn’t recommend others do it. If you are lucky enough to be able to head to Exmouth to swim with Whale Sharks (genuinely one of the most amazing things a person can ever do), I’d strongly recommend you fly into Learmonth and hire a car from there.
Anyway, one other thing I really felt I nailed from my Street View Recon was the sense that you have ‘reached Exmouth’ when you’re actually still two hours away.
Too true.
I’ve been watching Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont Spelling Bee on ABC iView. If you’re not in Australia, I think you’ll have to acquire it some other way, but I strongly recommend it. It’s an incredible show, although Season 2 isn’t as good as Season 1. I can’t believe this needs to be said, but comedy-focused game shows are better when the focus is on the comedy. In Season 2, there are a few episodes where competition takes hold and chokes out the life of the show. Guy and Aaron are still incredible, but I think it’s a bit telling when, in Episode 7 I think, the host and cohost have to beg a contestant to engage with the round gimmick instead of simply spelling words.
I’m a words guy, but I’m not trying to watch a fucking Spelling Bee, you know? I don’t give a shit if you spell things correctly—everyone competing is a comedian, so why aren’t you all being funny? Bananas. The solve is to pick words the comedians can’t spell, and maybe to sit them down before the show and tell them “NOBODY IS GOING TO THINK LESS OF YOU IF YOU CAN’T SPELL THESE WORDS AND EVERYONE WILL HATE YOU A LITTLE MORE IF ALL YOU DO IS TRY TO WIN.” I thought Kirsty Webeck, who won six episodes of the show (spoiler alert) was very funny in the few moments she remembered to do comedy, which made her insistence on winning so much worse.
Over in video games, as always you can listen to my podcast to hear all my thoughts on what I’ve been playing (and the thoughts of my PIC Luke Lawrie!) I wrote a review of The Alters for the site, which you can read now too!
In the reading department, I (finally) read Untitled Goose Game by my friend James O’Connor and I thought it was a great read. I, personally, did not enjoy Untitled Goose Game(the game), but the way Jickle filters his long-form criticism through the lenses of auto-biographical self-reflection and expert interviews with the House House… house, allowed me to see the game in a brand new light and appreciate what it did a little more. Which is fantastic. James has always been one of the sharpest critical minds in video games, and I thought the book also provided a little peek behind the curtain on why that is as well. It’s available at Boss Fight Books, if you’re so inclined to read it.
Taking a big break put me a little behind on writing, but I still think Final Final Girl is largely on track. I think it’s really good. I’m also working on a TTHB related project that I think will probably be a huge waste of time but I’m deeply engrossed in the idea of it, so I gotta do it. That’s about it! Hopefully next update I will be sharing the first chapters of Final Final Girl with you! But I’m not sure I can abandon my baby yet.
Joabyjojo 
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