Who Was Rod? Where is Rod?
Sunday, 14 September 2014
Back in 1972 Maureen – at the tail end of the Asia trip which led to the very first Lonely Planet guidebook – Maureen and drove from Perth to Sydney. We shared the petrol costs to cross the continent in an EH Holden. Recently we’ve got back in touch – 40 years later – with the Holden’s owner Brian Haddrick.
He and I did the driving, Maureen didn’t have a driving licence at the time, nor did the fourth person in the car: Rod. But who was Rod? We don’t even have his surname and we’ve never seen him again.
◄ left to right it’s Brian, Maureen and Rod in front of the Dog on Tuckerbox memorial, ‘five miles from Gundagai.’ Gundagai (where that famous dog sat on the tuckerbox) is on the Hume Highway (now bypassed by the freeway) between Melbourne and Sydney. In our case it was between Adelaide and Sydney.
▲ And here – again Brian, Maureen and Rod from left to right – is the old EH Holden in the middle of the Nullarbor between Perth and Adelaide. At the time a long stretch of the Eyre Highway was still not sealed.
We picked Rod up in Perth on 15 December 1972 and dropped him off on in Sydney 18 December. Maureen and I continued up to Newcastle to stay with friends. Anybody know Rod or know what happened to Rod?
