[first published 11.12.2024 Substack]
Cars – like computers, and so much else these days, if you can’t fix them yourself, they cause enormous amounts of angst, even while they promise freedoms.
A week or so ago I was driving down the mountain into town and heard an alarming dry rattling in the engine of my little white bubble-car, causing that familiar sense of dread and the cold sweat of doom.
Stay calm – temperature gauge is normal, plenty of fuel, still steering properly, no unexpected lights glaring at me in accusation from the dashboard. Be sensible – pull over and check under the bonnet.
This car is the latest in a long line of bomby cars that have transported me – accompanied me? burdened me? tortured me? – along my long and occasionally lonesome highways. It’s not that I don’t like driving: I love driving. And I come from a family of male revheadery and mechanical knowhow. It’s that the many cars I’ve owned and disowned over the years have punctuated my days with a mixture of delight and tears, adventure and constraint, wonder and drudgery.
This particular car keeps scraping through rego checks – a miracle that makes me pinch myself each time – although next year might be different because at the moment it has a piece of Perspex held in with sticky tape for one of the windows. But, before this miracle bubble-car (and before online car registration renewal) running the yearly gauntlet of pink/blue/green slips, friendly and unfriendly mechanics, fed up clerks giving the longed-for stamp of approval on your rego papers, was more intimidating than a job interview, more dreaded than a court appearance.
The white Ford ute that belonged to a boyfriend (he was 400 k’s away, working) which I could barely drive because the gear change was so stiff and heavy, had gaping rust holes below the driver’s door that I had to repair with the lid of a biscuit tin – cut it out with the tin snips (he says over the phone, pre-mobile), rivet it to the chassis, file back the edges then bog it up and sand it back. Should I get some spray paint (pre-Bunnings), will that make it look okay do you think? No time, he says – you’ve got to get the pink slip today or we’ll be up for a blue slip (the ultimate rego nightmare that descends like a hangman’s hood once the car becomes unregistered).
I cut the edges off the biscuit tin lid, pop rivet it to the door sill (another phone call: I don’t think I’m strong enough to squeeze the rivet gun. Yes you are, you’ll be right and ask Trevor next door if you have to), file the edges, mix up the two-part smelly pink filler and slap it on.
A grey kitten, surrounded by orange flowers against a bright blue background, peers up at me as I sand back the pink bog to a satiny smoothness. I make it to the garage for the inspection – wrestling with the floor shift, having to lean on it with both hands to get it into first gear – and the guy barely reacts to the tin kitten repair job. A brief glance before signing his approval. Back in the car to the rego office, making it to the counter (and the fed up clerk) just before closing time.
The Volkswagen ‘beetle’ that gained pink and purple leather patchwork seat covers – another boyfriend’s work (he was good with an industrial sewing machine) – as it lost side mirrors, door handles, doors and legality. Crossing the several causeways that separated our rented cabin from the main road into town, the water could, depending on recent rainfall and therefore creek level, be observed through the holes in the floor under the foot pedals: the green slime raked by the water, some tadpoles wriggling against the flow. Sometimes in the summer, when driving to and from the swimming hole at the creek (pre-Instagrammed ‘wild swimming’ popularity) we packed the vee dub with kids and drove slowly down the hill with a couple of them sitting on the bonnet. Wide-eyed, they laughed breathlessly and we said ‘don’t tell your mum’. Other times a madcap friend lay on their belly on the roof (their fingers – we passengers laughing at their white-knuckles – gripping tight to the tops of the windows) and ‘surf’ as we wound down the dirt road for a swim.
The red Mitsubishi station wagon which broke down almost immediately, bought on the recommendation of a pub acquaintance and which thereafter until its final trip to the wreckers, made me good-humouredly but relentlessly harass the poor man whenever I crossed paths with him at the local pub. After a few beers (pre-avoiding pubs) I couldn’t help bringing up the red wagon with him and all its failings. I look back on the car, that guy and that time with a wince of embarrassment.
The brown Holden Kingswood, my beloved, which ran out of oomph in the middle of a summer downpour. It had to remain parked next to a friend’s yard for a couple of weeks while I figured out which bomb to turn to next, and when I got back to it, to jump start the battery and limp to the wreckers, I opened the boot and it was full of toadstools and moss – a contained fairyland of damp lushness – with tufts of pale grass sprouting gamely up, the product of seeds from the last bale of mulch I’d bought.
The white Falcon – was it a John Goss Special? and why is it that I remember that detail when so much else is forgotten? – that had a huge green bonnet, like a vast plateau, and a sinuous orange stripe down the sides. Another boyfriend pushed it to over 230 k’s an hour to show me what it felt like (that familiar straight road by the river flats blurred to abstraction as the speedo needle stuttered further and further to the right and the bubble of fear in my throat turned into the thrill of not being dead); it felt great. That car was not a bomb; it was beautiful. It wasn’t mine! It wasn’t even his.So I pulled over and, sensibly, checked under the bonnet of the white bubble-car. Next to the tray where the battery sits, was a mound of small black unopened walnut shells surrounded by drifts of beige granules. Each shell had two parallel grooves on either side – so neatly done they looked like they’d been machined with a tiny router – that breached the innards of the shell and allowed a persistent rat to get to the good stuff inside. How they made the nut into powdery residue I do not know and really, don’t like to think about too much. But the reassuring part of this story, for me – as the owner of the latest in a long line of final owners we get to the wrecking yard – is that the rat, or rats, were too busy gorging on walnuts in the cosy warmth of the engine bay, to be chewing through the wiring. Rodents: let’s keep it that way.