Chapter 6: Mataranka

Bitter Springs at Mataranka is our favourite place.

We’d come across the top of Queensland and over the Barkly Tableland to get there — long days of genuine nothing, the kind of driving where the land gives you nothing to look at and you start to understand why people talk to themselves — and then turned north at Three Ways, onto the only road that runs up to Darwin from most of the east coast.

I do not understand how the one road to Darwin is in the state it’s in. Although I suppose the floods don’t help. It keeps the engineers humble.

It is a strange drive. The authorities have put signs along it to keep you awake, and the signs play I Spy with you — actual I Spy, “I spy with my little eye,” mile after mile, the government gamely trying to stop you dying of boredom at the wheel. There’s a sign that bravely advises you that if you’re tired, you should sleep — positioned, helpfully, thirty-five kilometres from the nearest place you can actually pull over and do so. And there is, near a town called Larrimah, the single most Australian thing I encountered on the entire lap: Apple Maps lists a place of worship there called Pad’s Place.

Pad’s Place was the home of Paddy Moriarty, who lived in Larrimah — population eleven — until one evening in 2017 when he drove home from the pub and was never seen again. No body, no answer, no Paddy. One of the great unsolved disappearances of the outback, in a town you could fit in a minibus. And somewhere in the machinery of the internet, the dead man’s house has been quietly canonised into a place of worship, and there it sits on the map for every traveller to find. A murder mystery in a town of eleven people, consecrated by Apple. I don’t think you could manufacture a more perfectly Australian artifact if you tried for a year.