By Phil Jarratt
A bit of a departure this week, since the only street your What’s In a Name correspondent has been on is the Bruce Highway (named after Henry Adam Bruce, the Queensland Minister for Works when the first version was completed in the 1930s, in case you were wondering), slowly ambling south from Ayr in a stream of grey nomad motor homes.
The highway improvement roadworks continue apace almost everywhere, so there’s plenty of time to consider the variety of signs that pollute the view every couple of hundred metres. Being a motorist who doesn’t care what Clive says or what Pauline thinks, I could do without these eyesores – although I do note that at least they’ve thoughtfully taken Mr Palmer’s visage off the corporate yellow billboards – and I could also do without a particularly annoying run of variants on “Are we there yet, Dad?”.
There are dozens of these along the long, straight stretches between Mackay and Rockhampton, posing the age-old question from the bored kids in the back seat, and even answering them, as in, “Still two hours to Rocky, kids”, and so on. These signs are part of a decade-old road safety program to make you laugh or get you talking, anything to lift you out of a straight road stupor. But seriously, if you’ve got kids in the back driving you mad with it, do you really need to have your view of a perfectly good gum tree blocked by the sign version of it?
On the other hand, as a frequent driver between Noosa and Agnes Water, I’m a big fan of the road trivia campaign, which is also nearly a decade old and has been adopted around the state after initial trials on the Bruce. I can see that this real life trivial pursuit actually works on keeping the driver’s mind and eyes active, if somewhat diverted from oncoming traffic. But the main problem is that familiarity breeds contempt.
I not only know every question and answer between Gympie and Maryborough, but I can tell you exactly where the prelude, question, answer and farewell signs are located. What I need is solar-powered, frequently-changing electronic trivia signs, and lots of them. Yes, it will cost a lot of money, but these days that doesn’t seem to matter, we can just print more.
Although I am only a humble journo on Australia’s best free weekly newspaper, I am optimistic that the state government will adopt my ambitious program to make Queensland Australia’s most trivial state by banning Clive, Pauline, anyone called Katter and all the rest of the billboard polluters, and filling our highways with trivia e-signs.
We all know that Stanthorpe is the coldest place in Queensland and Gympie is famous for gold, so the questions need to be upgraded too, perhaps along the lines of Hard Quiz. But I can foresee a day, not far off, when we will all jump in our cars, alert and ready to drive all day and play HARD!
