I was driving south on the Peninsula Development Road (PDR) in the early afternoon of a dry season day when, ten kilometres north of the Archer River crossing, my four-wheel-drive went into a sidelong slide. Within a few seconds the car came to a shuddering halt, inverted in a ditch, its headlights now facing back towards the Lockhart River turnoff. What happened next escapes me, but some specifics remain: a plume of red dust entering the cabin through the driver’s side window; a line of blood travelling down my arm onto the right hand that held me up against the shattered windscreen; I told myself out loud to get out of the car. Crawling out of the vehicle, my foremost thought was that I had been the subject to a significant clerical error that could be set right through appeal to an unknown cosmic authority. But the accident was tenaciously real and within minutes a couple in a ute—two teenagers in rugby shorts with working dogs—stopped to inform me of as much. One helped me take photos and clean the dust off my face while the other salvaged my belongings out of the four-wheel-drive, now slowly pouring its twin gasoline tanks onto the clay verge. I spent the next hour squeezed between them, re-narrating the crash over booming country music, before parting in Coen, the closest township with a mechanic and a police station. The duty officer told me to come back tomorrow. A domestic violence complaint would take up his afternoon, he said, flicking his head towards a woman sitting behind him. In the meantime, he suggested I recover wreck towed before it was stripped for parts.

I did not need to write-off a four-wheel-drive in order to learn that Cape York’s roads are dangerous. As I was reminded in the pub that night, such roads are the subject of daily discussion and interminable comparison in the far north, conversations where ‘good roads’ and ‘bad roads’ are fluid and relative categories. To some my crash marked me out as a rank amateur, either worthy of contempt or not worth regarding at all. A fishing guide introduced himself only to tell me, with studied disinterest, that he had ‘driven these roads for 30 years and never had a single problem.’ For others, my experience on the PDR rendered me a fellow traveller over perilous terrain. To these people I was somebody worth buying a beer for, somebody to incorporate into their own stories of temporary privations and close calls. Often these were locals who, working in hospitality, had made an occupation of representing the region as environmentally perilous and personally welcoming, or they were members of the heterogeneous mix of pensioners, families and wealthy retirees who comprise the category of ‘tourists’ in the Cape.