How many of us as kids enjoyed – or were forced to undergo – family road trips? Mile after mile of boredom stuck in the back of the car while the dreary landscape went past and your parents bickered in the front. Occasionally your mother would squeak with joy at the sight of some distant vista and your dad would try to revive your interest with a game about number plates, but that soon palled. Wherever you were going you couldn’t get there quickly enough was the consensus among kids I knew.
At least in those days no one sought to buy us off with patronising rubbish like the Great Aussie Road Trip. This brightly coloured booklet is a product of the supermarket Coles and describes itself as a ‘unique travel guide’ for the ‘Little Adventurer’, introducing him or her (or presumably ‘them’ in progressive families) ‘to a wonderful land that is our home (redundant exclamation mark)’. The booklet is full of ditsy games and puzzles to make the time fly by for the Little Adventurer in the back seat during the long hours of dodging road trains and even longer ones waiting for the family EV to charge or finding somewhere to charge it.
‘Let’s get on the road and have some fun!’ it cheerily begins – but just a minute, before we do, haven’t we been naughty and forgotten something? There it is on page two: ‘We acknowledge and pay respect to the past, present and future Traditional Custodians and Elders of this Nation’ etc. etc. – the hallowed words of that ancient ritual whose origins go all the way back to the 1970s, when this tedious practice was invented.
It’s odd that a kangaroo is pictured uttering the acknowledgment, given the treatment the Traditional Custodians and their forebears have meted out to that species over the centuries. As for getting on the road, too many of them do, literally: you see kangaroo corpses lining our highways. And while we’re at it, which nation is meant by ‘this’? Isn’t there quite a number, all listed under ‘First’?
In case you’re unsure where you are on your trip, the booklet includes a map, though so vague in detail as to be practically useless. It has happy smiling animals all over the place, but to remind you that in an imperfect world our wonderful land has its less wonderful side, there’s a red-back spider too. Coles must think this is an amphibious creature because they’ve put it out in the Great Australian Bight. And they’ve messed up the Green Party line when it comes to the Great Barrier Reef. It’s shown as bursting with colourful coral.
One point the map is not vague about is place names. There they all are, our big cities – Ngambri, our national capital, Warrane with its famous opera house, Tarntanya and the rest… It must have been an annoyance to Coles to have to put the real names in smaller letters underneath. No doubt they’ve explained it to themselves as a consequence of ‘systemic racism’.
One wonders in passing why those who promote this sort of stuff don’t go the whole hog. Why stop at names? Why not immerse themselves in pre-Coloniser life rather than a theme park version of history?
Such a move would take courage. Aboriginal life was bleak – no electricity, no gourmet restaurants, no Guardian or Saturday Paper, certainly no cars to take on exciting road trips. It would be interesting to see them put their money where their mouth is, all the ABC journalists ‘broadcasting from Gadigal country’ and other poseurs who declare they are living on Aboriginal land.
Why stop at road trip booklets? Coles could stock didgeridoos, spears, nulla nullas, frozen sugar ants, possum cloaks, and DIY kits for smoking ceremonies and bone-pointing (made in China of course).
The Great Aussie Road Trip is a cheapjack little publication – you can see why it’s free – and it’s an indication of the way the corporate world has been drifting for some time now. Perhaps having shamelessly promoted the ‘Yes’ lobby in the Voice referendum and lost, culturally meddlesome corporations feel they should direct their campaign at the kids in the hope of a better result in future cultural questions. Kids get the same stuff in larger doses at school. Besides, who goes to a supermarket for politics? Most people go because they have no choice, supermarkets having put so many small shops out of business.
If supermarkets insist on trying to appear virtuous they should concentrate on genuine virtue such as paying their suppliers more and not buying up land in town centres to forestall competition. That would make them fitter corporate citizens of the ‘wonderful land that is our home’.
