Life on the West Island - On the road

While we were still at primary school on the West Island, our parents discovered a wondrous new creation – the motel. We lived in a country town at a general store which was open six days a week, but occasionally managed to get away for a road trip of a few days, usually over holiday weekends or in low seasons when staff could look after the business. The first of these was a road trip to Mount Gambier and the Blue Lake, when we stayed in the Grand Hotel, just before the era of motels.

The hotel was quite grand from the outside, but inside you had to take a dressing gown to use the bathroom or toilet, which was usually at the opposite end of the corridor from your room. Meals were served at set hours in the gracious dining room, where the food was mostly overcooked. One memory is of a chunk of tough liver going flying across the floor as we struggled to cut our scorched lamb’s fry and bacon. But we really enjoyed seeing the pine forests, caves and lakes of the south east region, now famous for its Tantanoola Tiger and of course home to the nation’s only saint.

It was a year or so later that we discovered the wonders of an overnight stay in a motel. This was a wholly new and enjoyable experience which cost only $40 a night, including a light breakfast. There was free off-road parking and often a swimming pool, playground or barbecue. We thought we had arrived in the Promised Land!

And we were not alone in our joy. Sydney Morning Herald journalist Richard Glover has just published a new book, detailing the delight of his young family some years ago when they discovered overnight stays at roadside motels:

They had the chance to marvel at the tiny cakes of soap, and the free packets of slightly substandard biscuits, and the bed on which you were allowed to jump (unlike the one at home), and the toilet that came wearing a sash – “sanitised for your protection” – as if it had won first prize at the Royal Easter Show.

To add to this, you had your own room. No grass to mow. No laundry to fold. A TV you could tune to any old rubbish. And then, of course, the motel breakfast, delivered via that slot in the wall. Wholemeal or white? Honey or jam? Coco Pops or Special K? Or, perchance, the full cooked breakfast?

The motels, I must report, now cost rather more than $40 a night. OK, they’re not quite Raffles in Singapore, but, to me, they are glorious.

We still regularly stay in motels on our road trips. One of the joys is to sit outside our room in the smokers’ chairs. We don’t smoke, but as cigarettes are banned inside, most motels have chairs by the front doors for those who do. And it’s while seated there, you meet interesting fellow travellers from all over the continent and even from around the world.

At a recent stop in Balranald, we met a grisly old bloke who travels the roads just for the joy of striking up conversations with locals from Nunjikompita, Kybybolite, Dalwallinu, Eromanga or Metung. He lives in his car and stops at motels along the way, picking up local colour and far-fetched yarns. Here are a few of his colourful sayings:

• My best mate and I played a game of hide and seek. It went on for hours…well, good friends are hard to find!
• She had a photographic memory, but never developed it.
• Don’t spell part backwards – it’s a trap.
• My ex-wife still misses me. But her aim is starting to improve!
• To the mathematician who thought of the idea of zero: thanks for nothing!
• I broke my finger last week. On the other hand, I’m okay.
• Receptionist: Doctor, there’s a patient on the phone who says he’s invisible. Doctor: Well, tell him I won’t see him!
• There was a kidnapping at the local school yesterday. Don’t worry though, he woke up!

And many, many more. But let’s give the last word on the West Island’s motels to Richard Glover:

The ageing narrator of T.S. Eliot’s Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock has tired of spending “restless nights in one-night cheap motels”, so much so he makes a break for it, wandering along a beach and asking whether he should eat a peach. I, meanwhile, sit with pen hovering above the motel’s breakfast menu. Like Prufrock, “I grow old … I grow old”, but for me it will be a restful night in a one-night, quite costly, motel. And I don’t care either way about the eating of a peach. I just need to know this: do I dare order the side serve of sausage?