National Route 32

I’m working on a series about petrol bowsers, so I’m trawling googlemaps for memories.  Decay in the desert.

This is a photo from the roadhouse at the border of NSW and SA, on Highway 32. I stopped there once, late at night, and they wouldn’t let me use the toilet because I allegedly hadn’t bought anything (except about $500 of petrol!) and water is scarce.

So I bought a cheese sandwich – white bread, cheese and butter, a healthy smorgasbord of monochrome beige. I filled up my waterbottle. It tasted like calcified dust, and I wished for a brief moment that I’d bought a bottle of water instead, mined from some important spring far away.

But I really like these two little petrol bowsers, huddled together in the heat of nowhere. And their powder blue bin friend, in a frame of red lights.