Denis Gregory celebrates the 60th birthday of the first Holden by driving a much-loved FX the length of the Matilda Highway from Cunnamulla to the Gulf It’s 1948 and Prince Charles is born, a 40-hour working week is introduced, Rimfire wins the Cup, Melbourne wins the VFL, Western Suburbs the rugby league, and the first 48/215 Holden, dubbed the FX, rolls off the assembly line.

The six-cylinder ‘people’s car’ aimed at postwar middle-class families sold for $1467 and was an instant hit.

One of the shining symbols of Australian lifestyle, the Holden, long regarded as Australia’s Own Car, was designed and built by Americans with Australia providing the name.

The boss of General Motors-Holden in Australia, an Englishman by the name of Laurence Hartnett, had a dream to build an Aussie car but his American superiors called the shots, preferring a modified version of other GM products.

The first FX, 60 years old this year, had its share of rough edges but these were eventually sorted out. It leaked water and the doors and bonnet often flew open when driving. The vacuum-operated windscreen wipers were about as useful as an ashtray on a motorcycle. The tyres were skinny, there were no blinkers or windscreen washers and no heater, so you had to rug-up or freeze.

But FX Holdens have a special place in many of our lives. People learned to drive in them, they went shopping in them, they carried sheep and calves in them, they went camping in them, they slept in them, they conceived babies in them, they raced each other in them. What more could you ask for from a car?

We decided to go to the Gulf in one, cruising straight up the Matilda Highway which stretches 1700km from the mulga scrub at Cunnamulla, past spectacular ghost gums and bloodwoods and new-growth gidgee (not to mention wonderful pubs) to the deep blue sea at Karumba.

The road, now bitumen for its entire length, has been there for a long time. Born a dusty, potholed track used by drovers, teamsters, Cobb and Co coaches and miners heading for the goldfields, it closely follows the route taken by explorers Burke and Wills on their disastrous attempt to cross Australia from south to north in 1860.

The Matilda tradition has been with us since bush poet Banjo Paterson penned our most loved song about the sheep-stealing swaggie who jumped into a billabong near Kynuna and drowned as the law moved in to nab him.

Along the Matilda route, tiny McKinlay is still basking in the glory of its most famous asset, the Walkabout Creek Hotel, used in Paul Hogan’s film Crocodile Dundee. At Longreach, The Stockman’s Hall of Fame is an impressive national tribute to the people who pioneered outback Australia.

The Flying Doctor Service was established at Cloncurry and the Labor Party was formed after striking shearers met under a tree at Barcaldine in 1891. And our best blade shearer, the legendary Jackie Howe, came from Blackall, which also has one of those ubiquitous black stumps. What’s more Australian than all that?

The glorious orange and pink sunsets of Queensland’s outback and dozens of friendly people who said g’day were a bonus. But we could have done without millions of sticky, buzzing flies.

It was fitting to cruise the Matilda in Alf, a 48/215 FX that was built in GMH’s Pagewood factory in Sydney and is owned by Orange nurseryman Roger Kendall.

“You’ll never make it,” people warned. “Take plenty of spares,” they said. “Make sure you’ve got a tow rope...”

But Alf did the job admirably. From the time we set off from Orange and returned 10 days and 3034 miles (4880km) later, the FX never missed a beat, other than a few coughs on the first and second day when the ignition points closed up.

We completed the trip on around 500 litres of fuel, the dearest at the Burke and Wills roadhouse and the cheapest at Fanny Mae’s café at Tambo.

Alf attracted attention wherever we stopped. It seemed that everybody’s father, mother, brother, uncle, aunty or grandfather had owned either an FX or FJ.

Like the bloke at Nyngan, who said he bought one for 80 quid, put it into a dam up to the doors in water one night and then sold it for 40 quid.

An elderly man at Winton politely inquired whether the car was only driven on Sundays, while the young motel receptionist described it as ‘awesome’.

The characters we met along the Matilda were unforgettable. A young carpenter at Cunnamulla RSL Club taught us how to stand Bundaberg rum cans on their edge. ‘Mad Marg’ at Charleville Visitors Centre boasted she could talk in a swimming pool full of concrete with an apple in her mouth (and we didn’t doubt it).

Cruising into Charleville you can see the remains of the unsuccessful efforts of meteorologist Clement Wragge. In 1902 he rigged up six Steiger vortex cannons around the town to try to break the longest-running drought in Queensland’s history. Nothing happened when he fired ‘rain-producing gas’ into the air at two-minute intervals. Eventually nature took control and soaking rain broke the drought at the end of 1902.

We stopped for a quick peek at the two remaining cannons in Bicentennial Park, then piled into Alf and headed for Augathella, the small town of 440 people known as the Home of the Meat Ant.

The Visitors Centre houses the Moonlighters Cinema, which several times a day screens the 1957 movie, Smiley. It’s about a young boy trying to raise money for a bike but who gets involved with smugglers. The movie is apparently based on a local character called Didie Creevy, whose family still lives in Augathella.

We met Tina tending the bar at the Barcoo Hotel at Blackall, and she gave us a full rundown on the town, which has all its streets named after flowers and is one of the claimants of the ubiquitous Black Stump.

The stump is in the local schoolyard and was a Bicentennial project to permanently mark the original Astro station set up in 1887 for survey work aligning the borders of Queensland. Back then it was considered that the country west of Blackall was ‘beyond the black stump’.

At Barcaldine we called on the mayor, bush poet and motelier Rob Chandler and his wife Deb at the Liars, Larrikins and Legends restaurant at their Ironbark Inn Motel. Rob’s been in Barcaldine all his life and likens himself to Brer Rabbit because he reckons he was born and bred in a briar patch.

“The Matilda Highway concept is really working. If government keeps supporting local regional tourism authorities, we’ll keep promoting the area. It would be a sad day if the city ever lost its affinity with the bush because I believe this is the real Australia,” he told us.

We topped up the fuel tank and headed for Ilfracombe and then Longreach, with Alf’s lazy six-cylinder engine making easy going.

After crossing the Thomson River, which makes up part of the drainage system for the Channel Country and Lake Eyre, we drove past spectacular ghost gums, bloodwoods and mulga on the way to Winton.

This bustling little town’s chest-puffing claim to fame is the birth of an airline and the death of a swaggie. Qantas held its first board meeting in 1921 at the Winton Club, still a popular watering hole, and A.B. (Banjo) Paterson wrote the lyrics near there for Waltzing Matilda and first performed our unofficial national song with friend Christina Macpherson in the North Gregory Hotel in 1895. The hotel has burnt down and been rebuilt three times.

The new Waltzing Matilda Centre is a unique experience and the only high-tech display in the world dedicated to a song.

And just down the street is probably the only open-air cinema still operating in Australia. Owned by Winton chemist, air charter operator, former councillor and tourism promoter Peter Evert, the 90 year-old Royal Theatre still shows old movies and advertising slides from the days when an Akubra cost 25 shillings.

Pressing on, we reached Karumba at sunset. On the banks of the Norman   River, 69km from Normanton, it is the centre of the Gulf’s prawning industry.

Karumba is a busy port, with a few shops, several hotels, cheap rooms for fishermen and a river front which abounds with wharves, refrigerated storage areas and engineering services.

Sgt Mick Jones invited us in to his backyard for several cold tinnies. He said Karumba was a great community with wonderful people and little crime.

He lives for fishing and he and his police offsider have five or six boats and regularly fish for barramundi. Despite being a busy man with many responsibilities, Mick helps with the family tackle shop on weekends and cooks fish and chips on a Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

On the way home, Alf gets a breather beside the Blue Heeler Hotel at tiny Kynuna, on the Diamantina stock route. A gaudy, flashing blue sign of a cattle dog on the roof of the pub lights up so brightly, a previous pub owner claimed jumbo jet pilots used it for navigation.

The Blue Heeler’s fame has spread since James Blundell took out the Australasian Song of the Year Award with his tribute to the pub. It’s had only six owners since it was built in 1889, including the colourful Barry Patrick, who boosted business by bailing up passing tourist buses with a shotgun.

Robert, a Kiwi shearer, is doing a haka and the rest of the bar is singing Happy Birthday to a visitor from Newcastle. A young English backpacker working behind the bar shakes her head in disbelief at what is happening. Everyone is having a top time.

Yep, as the tourist brochures say, Outback Queensland is larger than life!

Open Road January/February 2008