Plain mister.(Bypass: The Story of a Road)(book)(Book Review)

Bypass: The Story of a Road, by Michael McGirr; Picador, 2004, $30.

FATHER MICHAEL MCGIRR, sometime editor of the Jesuit journal Eureka Street, decided at the age of forty to resign from the priesthood. The temptation of a literary life was, it seems, too much for him. He bought himself what he describes as a "three-bedroom fibro chateau" in Gunning, New South Wales, beside the Hume Highway. Then he set out from his mother's home in North Sydney on a Chinese-made bicycle, intending to pedal the entire length of the highway to Melbourne.

At first the defrocked priest rode on his own, dismounting to wheel his bike up the Razorback near Picton in a thunderstorm, but by the time he reached his home in Gunning he was joined by his "friend" Jenny. "The world is a disbelieving place," he writes, "full of doubters, the worst of them sceptical that I had cycled so far already. I needed a witness." When his journey is over, Jenny has become his wife, so this book has a happy ending.

All the same, McGirr undertook his journey in order to write about it, and in particular to write about the Hume Highway, for he had discovered in his new home that "Every story in Gunning seems to touch the road." The stories he recounts begin in a prologue which introduces the marathon shuffler Cliff Young, whose improbable epic race victory forms a recurring motif throughout the book. Another motif concerns the explorers Hume and Hovell, and their bickering progress along the route which was later to be named after only one of them.

To prepare myself for this review, I drove the length of the Hume Highway again, just to see if there were any features, landmarks or curiosities McGirr had overlooked, and thus it is possible to say conclusively that he has been perfectly comprehensive in his research, and in the process he has answered many questions which had always nagged at me in the course of several decades of trips back and forth between Sydney and Melbourne.

What made the cafe proprietor in Gundagai name his premises the "Niagara"? Why is there a submarine in Holbrook? Who do such placenames as Tubb's Hill and Burton's Bridge refer to? Racing past at 110kmh these queries occur to one briefly, only to be replaced by something else as another roadside monument or signpost passes by; only a traveller on a bicycle would have time to discover the answers.

It is only at the halfway point in Tarcutta that I am able to fault McGirr's research. Like many other travellers, he is moved by the National Truckdrivers Memorial in the ...