The Big Lap

THE BIG LAP

Perth, 1986. Tony Friday is eighteen, with eleven hundred dollars in his boot, a second-hand ex-police motorcycle under a tarp, and a future he cannot stomach. His father, a maths teacher, has spent eighteen years selling him one article of faith: a maths teacher will never be out of work. Tony wants none of it. Before dawn on a cold winter morning he rolls the bike down the driveway so the engine will not wake the house, and rides east into the sunrise to put the whole of a continent between himself and the life laid out for him.

The Big Lap is the story of the fifteen thousand kilometres that follow, and the three years it takes to ride them.

He does not ride alone for long. Somewhere in the wheat country a scruffy fox terrier named Bill adopts him, claims the tank as her own, and travels the rest of the way in a cut-down leather jacket, the best and most loyal company a running man could ask for. Together they fall in with a travelling sideshow, pour drinks in a goldfields pub guarded by a bad-tempered goat, and very nearly die of thirst on the longest straight road in the country. They pick grapes with a caravan full of misfits, work the door of a Melbourne nightclub for a woman with a heart of gold and friends nobody asks about, and drift through an endless Bondi summer that could swallow a journey whole.

The further north the road runs, the harder the country pushes back. A flooded river takes almost everything Tony owns. A stretch of forbidden country he had no right to cross takes the last of his pride. And in a strange town in the wet season, broke and hungry, he finally does the one thing his father raised him never to do: he knocks on a stranger's door and asks for help.

This is a coming-of-age story with red dust on its boots and a larrikin's grin on its face, funny where you least expect it and quietly devastating when the laughter drops away. It is a book about the difference between running from a life and choosing one, about a country that will kill you by accident in the south and on purpose up north, and about the plain enormous kindness of strangers that holds a person up when nothing else will. Under the adventure runs the oldest question of all: whether a boy so busy escaping his father can ever learn to come home.

Tony sets out believing that finishing the lap is the whole point. The road spends three years teaching him otherwise. What it gives him instead is a lifelong love of the horizon that will one day carry him to a hundred and fifty countries and back, and it all begins here, on a battered old motorcycle, a dog in a leather coat, and one unbroken line drawn around the edge of Australia.

For readers of Tim Winton and anyone who has ever wanted to point a wheel at the horizon and just go.