One for the Road by Tony Horwitz Read Free Book Online Page B

million years ago, leaving tracks that are “a tourist must.” More recently, a plane carrying Lyndon Baines Johnson touched down on a Winton airstrip. It was twenty years before he became president, but in a place like this, even brushes with fame-to-be are worthy of recording.
    Better still to thrust fame upon oneself. The poet Banjo Paterson was working at the Dagworth sheep station in 1895 when he composed “Waltzing Matilda.” The station is actually about sixty miles out of Winton—close enough for the town to claim the poet and splash his name on every local storefront. There’s the Matilda Motel, Banjo’s Motel, and the Matilda Caravan Park. In fact, there isn’t a business in town that doesn’t somehow get Banjo in on the act.
    Except for the barber, Victor Searle. I find his shearing shed tucked at the back of a menswear store. That’s the first warning signal. The second is a rack of hats by the barber chair, placed, I can only assume, to provide quick cover for customers made sheepish by Victor’s work. The final tip-off is Victor himself, palsied and myopic, wielding the scissors like a pair of garden shears.
    It seems Victor is determined to break Jackie Howe’s old record. The shearing is finished in three minutes flat. But then, at three dollars a head, Victor has to keep mowing the fleece at a rapid clip.
    “Cooler now, aren’t you,” he says, dusting talc onto my neck and down the back of my shirt. Blond locks of hair lie on the chair and floor like so much spilled spaghetti. Cooler, yes, and ready to be done with sheep country, with anything to do with shearing.
    Outside, a hot wind blows across my pale, barren scalp. A decapitated hair tickles between neck and shoulder. The jolly swagman feels for his ears, avoids his reflection in a storefront window, and goes a-waltzing on his way out of Winton.

6 …
Beyond the Black Dot
    D awn. Blinding light. In the back of a ute, trying to figure out where I am. Nothing metaphysical; I just want to know my location on the map, which is blowing around my face as I try to pin it against my knees.
    I am an agnostic on most matters of faith, but on the subject of maps I have always been a true believer. It is on the map, therefore it is, and I am.
    It is, or should be, a town. There’s a black dot a little left of Winton, and a comforting, almost suburban name beside it: Bendemeer. But all I see out the back of the ute is dirt and scrub. There is or should be a major road. It’s called the Landsborough Highway, a nice red line running straight from Winton to Cloncurry. We’re supposedly traveling down it. But all I see is a rutted, unpaved track no wider than a goat trail. And there is no sign at all of the thin string of blue on the map, next to the red line, marked “Diamantina River.” No water anywhere in sight.
    I have entered the twilight zone of Australian cartography. From now on the map will be filled with mirages; there will be un-rivers (the waterless Todd in Alice Springs), lakes that are not lakes (the giant saltpans of South Australia), and towns that are no more than water towers. Mapmakers have to fill up the space with something. So if there are no true landmarks about, ad lib a bit. Sketch in a dry river, like the Diamantina. Oridentify individual properties, such as Bendemeer. It seems incredible to me that farms should make it onto state maps. But there they are, dotting Queensland like the footprints of tiny insects. That’s how much impact man has had on the outback.
    Outback. For the first time the word fits. There is no agriculture out here. No towns, only black dots. And nothing more than unpaved tracks connecting them, bordered by endless tracts of arid scrub. “Out to buggery,” the driver answered, when I asked him where he was headed from Winton. He meant what he said.
    Ludwig Leichhardt was one of the first white men to come this way, on an expedition to Perth in 1848. The German explorer posted a letter from a station