Can Subaru’s new wagon live up to its name? We drove to Canberra via central NSW to find out – and rediscovered the joys of a ‘real’ road trip. By Kris Ashton

When you hire a car you usually get some paperwork suggesting you familiarise yourself with the controls. If I get to know every bell and whistle in the 2010 Subaru Outback 3.6R Premium, I’ll never leave the driveway. There’s a reversing camera, fully adjustable seats with memory, electric everything, and a touch-screen sat-nav with more functions than I know what to do with. It’s almost intimidating, like an aeroplane cockpit. The Premium’s premium is eight grand over the base model 3.6R Outback, and you get plenty of extra luxury for the price.

As we coast through the rolling hills and orchards of Kurrajong, just outside Sydney, I wonder what Subaru would think if it knew what my wife, Kellie, and I have in store for its sparkling new wagon. I also wonder how many Sydney-siders, like us, have never seen this beautiful stretch on Bells Line of Road. We’re addicted to motorways, it seems, and only when you break the addiction do you realise what you’ve been missing.

The Outback’s torquey 3.6-litre engine makes mincemeat of the hills, although it has a touch of body roll on sweeping bends with its relatively light load. The landscape starts to flatten out as we head west through Bathurst on our way to Forbes. Our destination is a country art gallery – odd, since we’re not art buffs.

That night we stay at the Plainsman Motel. It’s only a minute’s drive from McFeeters Motor Museum, a family-run operation. Around 30 of the 60 cars on show belong to Bill McFeeter and his wife, Jan. The rest are on loan from other museums or enthusiasts.

“My wife and I were driving back from Bundaberg and she said, ‘We should build a tin shed for our cars,’” Bill tells me on a guided tour of the display. “Three million dollars later... This is her idea of a tin shed.”

The eclectic collection includes everything from a Model A Ford to a Jaguar E-type to a Japanese hearse.McFeeters has a gift shop – of course – but it also has a spacious café and small ‘cellar door’ where you can try local wines. The best bit? You can buy a bottle and drink it with lunch in the café.

We have driving to do, though, so it’s just a coffee for us before we’re back on the road. Ahead is the seed from which this road trip germinated: the Utes in the Paddock exhibition at Ootha, about an hour west of Forbes.

It’s a relaxing drive along Condobolin Road – only rail crossings, silos and the odd town break up the gentle curves wending through hectares of farmland. Our Outback has Mazda Tribute-like clearance – 213mm – and it doesn’t grumble a bit when I take it into a gully to photograph it next to the welcome sign at Bogan Gate. It’s also perfectly at home on the unsealed road leading out to a corner of Burrwang West station, where the Utes in the Paddock await.

Each ute bears the work of a noted Australian artist. When we arrive, 14 of the 19 Holden models from the 1948 FX onwards are represented. Since word of the project got around, its founders Graham and Jana Pickles have been flooded with requests from artists who want to be involved. But they are adamant the collection will end at 19.

Don’t be afraid, though – this is not the artsy-fartsy world of Paddington galleries and something’s-art-if-I-say-it’s-art self-indulgence. When Jana told the artists a journalist would be in town, five of them made the trip out to Ootha to talk about the project. I walk along the fence line with Greg Brennan, who created ‘Golden Valley’. If you didn’t know better, you’d think he was a farmer. He tells me he painted his ute in the shed across the road, sometimes bent over for hours to do the sideways sheep or painting upside down on the bonnet so the picture would be the right way up when the ute stood on its tail.

I’ve already got the title for this story rattling around in my head, but there’s a possible catch: is Ootha the outback? Greg is a local, so he should know. Where does the outback start?

“Anywhere west of Nyngan,” Greg reckons. I look it up later. We’re probably only 20 or 30km short. Near enough.

Over lunch, we talk about my favourite work, ‘Clancy Stops the Overflow’, a 1991 VS Holden that depicts a stockman and his horse preventing a bottle of Bundy rum from tipping over. The artist Peter Mortimore says the idea to paint a rum bottle came from his wife, Ellen. She suggested it tongue-in-cheek, but it sparked Peter’s imagination.

Initially, though, he was concerned about copyright issues. “But Graham said, ‘No, use the rum bottle – if anyone sues us it’ll be the best advertising we’ve ever had!’” So Peter went looking for ‘Bundy yellow’ paint.

Jana claims 300 cars a week visit Utes in the Paddock. This is amazing, since there has been next to no publicity and there isn’t even a sign on the highway directing traffic to the exhibit.

We depart Forbes the next morning and put some kilometres behind us before breakfast at Cowra. In a café carpark we pull up beside the previous model Outback – same colour and everything. I compare the two cars. The Outback is a big car now. It’s bulkier in the rear than its predecessor and overall has a more muscular physique. But while the wagon’s lines remain stylish, Subaru has done something rash. The twin exhausts, which gave the last-model Outback one of the best looking rear ends out on the road, are now bent downwards. It is probably meant to convey an impression of power, but it has turned sporty into frumpy. You can fit plenty of junk in its trunk (even with the rear seats up it easily accommodates our two large suitcases) but this Outback’s back ain’t bringing sexy back.

It’s a soggy morning in Canberra and somehow the Electric Vehicle Festival is at odds with the damp lawns that it occupies near Old Parliament House. But Canberrans are nuts for everything eco-friendly and the marquee teems with visitors eager to see what’s new in alternative energy. Several modern cars have been converted to electric and there are a few old electric cars on display. One, the Detroit, came out in 1915. Its almost soundless engine seems to whisper conspiracy theories as it creeps past.

Later we check in at the Diamant, a boutique hotel in Canberra’s CBD. Its décor is best described as ‘quirky urban chic’ – the walk to our room is through a dim, twisting rabbit warren and we take a wrong turn or two as we try to find our way back to the restaurant for lunch. The staff wear funny hats (a propeller cap, for instance), which makes an amusing contrast to the professional service and the menu’s resort-style prices. The breakfast area is bespoke, too, a cross between a Newtown café and Borders.

The trouble with the Floriade festival is everyone thinks it’s about flowers. True, it has stunning floral art (best viewed from what might be Australia’s fastest-spinning ferris wheel), but that’s only a snippet of its appeal. We browse market stalls that have stuff a body might actually buy instead of yapping mechanical dogs and bad jewellery. We also track down the patting zoo (which is actually called a patting zoo and not the Americanised ‘petting zoo’) to get amongst the baby farm animals. The woman at the gate looks for our kids. She gives us a quizzical smile when she can’t find any, but lets us in anyway.

It’s a good idea to get an early start at Floriade. As we’re leaving, hordes are streaming in and the carpark, while sizeable, is nevertheless a shemozzle. Our next destination is the National Portrait Gallery. I’m here to admire the art, but find myself more interested in the pocket histories that accompany each painting. It would be a good place to bring tourists or fresh immigrants, delivering 220 years of post-settlement history in an hour or two.

When we visit family in Queanbeyan, we’ve done about 1000km in superb comfort. The Outback’s soft leather seats hug you but don’t invade your personal space like the pseudo-racing seats in some new cars. On a 45km round trip to quaint Bungendore, I ask our passengers about the rear seats. They say they’re comfortable and offer plenty of leg room.

Canberra is getting a much deserved reputation for its wineries and for being a less pretentious ‘cultural’ destination than Melbourne. What no one’s noticed is the shopping. Not only does it have a monstrous DFO, like at Homebush, it also has Brand Depot. Similar to DFO, it’s near Canberra Airport and is built at a similar scale – you could probably land a 747 in the carpark. 

We leave Canberra via the Federal Highway, and I can’t help but notice how impersonal and dull this stretch is (the less said about the wind farm that now defaces the Great Dividing Range, the better). A real Aussie road trip is conducted on single-lane highways that are almost empty except for tiny towns, basic motels and mashed fauna. And while the Outback is Japanese, it’s the ideal vehicle for such a drive.

Back in Sydney, we check the trip computer. Subaru’s claimed fuel consumption figures of 14.7L and 7.5L are borne out by our own numbers – we averaged 8.5L/100km from an 80/20 split of highway versus urban roads.

Open Road January/February 2010.