A Baby, a Breakdown, and Fifty Years

Before we said our goodbye to the Balonne River, we sat down once more and reconsidered where we were headed next. The decision was to veer a little further west, out towards the small town of Hebel, and it was there, behind the pub, that we eventually pulled up. Hebel turned out to be barely a town at all, more an intersection with ambitions, a single crossroads with a pub standing on one side of the road and a general store facing it from the other, and not a great deal else to declare itself. The sort of place you would pass through in a blink if you were not minded to stop. We were minded to stop.

We wandered across the road to the general store and ordered ourselves lunch, a pie and a coffee each. The pies had a reputation that travelled further than the town did. The reviews we had read all sang the same tune, that these were pies full of great honest chunks of steak, real meat you could set your teeth into, a world away from the thin grey apology that passes for a pie at so many roadhouse counters. The reviews, for once, told the truth. The coffee, it must be said, did not live up to its neighbour on the plate, and left a good deal to be desired, but a fine pie covers a multitude of sins and we ate well and were content.

After that we drifted back, we to the bus and Grammy to her van, and let the afternoon take its own slow course. As the hours wore on, more caravans rolled in off the highway, and the modest patch of ground behind the pub filled and tightened around us, rig by rig, until the quiet little stop had become quite the gathering. Having already treated ourselves at midday, we reasoned there was nothing for it but to see the indulgence through, and we resolved on dinner at the pub as well. First, though, a drink. We stepped into the bar for a quick one, Grammy with a rum in her hand and Sal and Anth each with a Diet Coke, and it was there, in the worn and friendly dim of the old outback hotel, that Grammy told us her story.

She had been to the Hebel Hotel once before, she said, a great many years ago now, back when Anth was no more than a baby in arms. Their car had broken down somewhere out in this unforgiving country, and stranded with a small child and nowhere else to turn, they had been given the floor of a room here to sleep on for the night. It is a strange and tender thing, to stand in a place as a grown man and hear that you had passed a night here before you could even walk, carried in by parents long since young. The walls of the old pub had held that night and given it back to us now, and for a moment the decades folded together, the baby on the floor and the man at the bar one and the same, his mother beside him still, the two of them out on the road together once more.

We wandered back across to the general store for our dinner and ordered a parmy apiece, that most quintessential of Australian pub meals, crumbed and cheese-topped and entirely unnecessary after the pie, which was precisely the point. For Sal it was a small first, her first real outback pub, the genuine article, and there was a pleasure in watching her take it in. And as we left the store and started back across the road to the bus, the outback obliged us with its finest trick: the whole western sky caught alight and burned a deep and silent red, the kind of sunset that needs no mountains or sea to make it, just the flat unbroken land and all that sky above it. It was only the one night we spent at Hebel, and the most that was asked of us in it was to sit and watch the road trains thunder through on their way to somewhere else. But it was an experience, and out here, that is enough. That is plenty.Read more