A Lifetime in the Saddle

Talking with my father on the phone recently, I listened with sympathy while he recounted having been pulled over by the Victoria police for failing to come to a complete stop at a stop sign. Apparently Dad had slowed to a crawl and, seeing the road was clear in both directions, he trundled into the intersection, only to be pounced upon by a zealous patrolman and directed to the shoulder. Now, based on my observations of road-rule enforcement in this part of the world, such an infraction, if it garnered any attention at all, might possibly earn you a good-natured warning. Especially if you were, say, a silver-haired retired family doctor behind the wheel of a twenty-something-year-old Jaguar. But in Dad’s case, by the time he was allowed to go on his way, he was the not-very-proud owner of six driver demerit points, and owed the Victoria Police around six hundred bucks. Admittedly things wouldn’t have been so bad if the gimlet-eyed officer hadn’t noted the absence of a seatbelt—Dad having forgotten to buckle his. But his experience reminded me that the rose-tinted glasses through which I recall my Australian youth, tend to obscure certain things from the picture. Like the displeasure and expense that accompanies most law-abiding Australians’ encounters with traffic cops.

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