The height of glamour? Look no further than an Australian motel

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When I was a young father, the motels on the New England Highway would cost $40 a night. It was a good price, especially for a place with a pool – even if the sign advertising the pool was often larger than the pool itself.

Our children were little and we were determined, whenever possible, to take them on a summer holiday up the coast. We were passionate about this mission. Jocasta’s family had always shunned the family holiday and so had mine. It may have been part of what drew us together.

As university students, Jocasta and I would be sitting with friends in the refectory when the topic would turn to family holidays. All the others at the table would have a funny story to tell. They’d recount the fights between siblings in the back seat – “Mum, David’s knee is on my side and he’s looking out my window” – or they’d explain the thrill of ordering motel breakfast, that first, wondrous time in your eight-year-old life when you’d been allowed to make a choice, tick a box (marmalade) and then live with the consequences. (Marmalade was the consequence.)

Living the motel dream!Credit: Alamy Stock Photo

As the other students hooted with laughter, Jocasta and I would fall silent. Our families had somehow forgotten to be involved in what was clearly a tradition for every single Australian family except for the two families we’d found ourselves within. I’d had a couple of holidays growing up. Jocasta had one.

Neither of our families were poor, but – it later emerged – both households were secretly engaged in a similar quest: the slow march towards divorce. A week up the coast, the family together, wasn’t so appealing. And so we’d both stay at home through the endless slow summers of the ’70s, filling our time brightening a pair of jeans with a Bedazzler (her), or trying to load so much gel into your hair that you could convince yourself you looked like Elvis (me).

Meanwhile, back in the university refectory, the stories rolled on. Like the stories of the fathers who always insisted on leaving at 4am in order to “beat the traffic”, traffic which, alas, included every other car in the street, since every father had come up with an identical cunning plan.

I’ve taken leave from work and am living in a world called Motelville

And how they groaned over the memory of the dads who would refuse to stop anywhere along the way, since it was so deeply important that you arrived before the 2pm check-in, and thus be able to enjoy every second of your accommodation. A five-year-old with a need to pee was not going to sway this particular Jack Brabham from his mission.

Then, as Jocasta and I sat and smiled, our friends would move on to the tinea in the showers at the caravan park, or the locked cupboard in the beachside rental in which the owner had stored everything that made the house habitable.

We enjoyed the stories, even if we couldn’t participate, and the whole thing, of course, left us thinking that Australian motels were the height of glamour. If you are denied something, you love it all the more.

So, Jocasta and I – whenever funds would allow – served up motels to our boys. They had the chance to marvel at the tiny cakes of soap, and the free packets of slightly substandard biscuits, and the bed on which you were allowed to jump (unlike the one at home), and the toilet that came wearing a sash – “sanitised for your protection” – as if it had won first prize at the Royal Easter Show.

Now years on, the kids have grown up, and the family holiday is no more. But, right now, there’s a chance for me to relive the dream – the dream I missed out on when I was eight. I’ve taken leave from work and am living in a world called Motelville. I go from town to town, talking about my new book to anyone who’ll listen. At the moment, it’s a couple of towns on the New England Highway. The motels, I must report, now cost rather more than $40 a night. OK, they’re not quite Raffles in Singapore, but, to me, they are glorious.

Your own room. No grass to mow. No laundry to fold. A TV you can tune to any old rubbish.
And then, of course, the motel breakfast, delivered via that slot in the wall. Wholemeal or white? Honey or jam? Coco Pops or Special K? Or, perchance, the full cooked breakfast?

The ageing narrator of T.S. Eliot’s Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock has tired of spending “restless nights in one-night cheap motels”, so much so he makes a break for it, wandering along a beach and asking whether he should eat a peach.

I, meanwhile, sit with pen hovering above the motel’s breakfast menu. Like Prufrock, “I grow old … I grow old”, but for me it will be a restful night in a one-night, quite costly, motel. And I don’t care either way about the eating of a peach. I just need to know this: do I dare order the side serve of sausage?

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