Ricky

Should you ever be passing through the northern New South Wales town of Moree and find yourself in need of some grain harvesting, let me thoroughly recommend the services of Mark Munro, of Munro Harvesting. Mark will look after all your cartage needs for wheat, chickpeas, barley, sorghum and fertiliser. Whether you need a semitrailer, a road train or a John Deere header, this top bloke will get your crops to market. But he’s also a roadside angel of a different kind.

A road trip can be drama-free for only so long. We’d made it from Melbourne to within spitting distance of the Queensland border before it unravelled. I’m not sure why I thought it was a good idea to drive to Queensland. Maybe it was because my partner’s parents used to load her and her sister into the car every year and drive more than 20 hours from Melbourne to visit family in Childers, in the Bundaberg region. No overnight stops, no mercy. I don’t know how they did it, driving through the night, parents taking turns behind the wheel while the girls bickered in the backseat. My partner tells me one of the few acts of humanity her older sister ever displayed when they were growing up was to allow her feet to cross over the backseat dividing line and rest on her side during the dark nights of those hellish road trips. She could never sleep, so would stay awake all night, scanning the side of the road, waiting for a kangaroo or a cow to step in front of the car and put everyone out of their misery.

Not being a complete psychopath, I decided we would take a few days to drive to Queensland. We stayed at a friend’s place in Narrandera on night one, and at a caravan park in Coonabarabran on night two. We were making such good time I decided we should make a short detour for a soak in the Pilliga artesian bore bath. Maybe the thermal water addled my brain, because my next decision – I freely admit this – was poor.

Rather than heading back to the Newell Highway I conferred with Google Maps on a shortcut through the backroads of grain country. I should have known that you must never trust Google Maps in a rural area. The useless app took us along dirt roads so corrugated that our heads punched dents into the car roof. It tried to take us down a road that was closed. It tried to take us along roads that required a ford of flooded irrigation channels. An hour wasted, we turned back and retraced our tyre tracks in the dirt to the hot pools, and the comfort of the bitumen.

But the damage was done. On the outskirts of Moree the car started making a horrendous noise. We pulled over and examined the flat tyre. It looked like a dead squid wrapped round a hubcap. This was bad. It was Easter Sunday and even if we could find somewhere open, the cost would be eye-wateringly extravagant. I doubted we would make Queensland that day.

I’m sure that Scott Morrison would describe what happened next as a miracle, because a guardian angel by the name of Mark pulled up behind us in his ute. Mark wasn’t just a contract harvester, he was also the town’s resident tyre man. He spoke magic words: “I might be able to help.”

I whacked the space saver tyre on and followed Mark to his yard, where he fitted a new tyre with the efficiency of a Formula One pit crew. I could have cried. And what price to put on roadside salvation on Easter Sunday? Very little. I could have cried again. I begged Mark to let us pay him more, but he refused. As we drove off, I looked into the rear-view mirror and I swear I saw a halo appear over his head. I took it as a sign...to crucify Google Maps.

Ricky is a writer, drummer and road worrier.