The sun bends their bodies across the roadside puddles. Shadows swim out from under their cranks where the playful morning light twists their bodies, bikes and surfboards into a jumble of sharp, angular shapes as they pedal past the muddy sinkholes that border the bitumen leading into town. They are two teenage boys with tangled hair yet their reflection appears like a triceratops come to life; a prehistoric beast waddling down a smooth black sweep of tar, a forgotten curve of the Great Ocean Road beyond the tourist stops and biblical rock formations, brittle like toffee eaten at the edges by potholes and puddles. They reach an 80 sign pocked with rusting bullet holes and follow the burnout marks, reading the tyre tracks, where sunshine dances across the sticky caramel dirt that plasters their wheels and spits on their legs and the arse of their pants.

I slow to a crawl, trailing the spinning spokes into a dead-end car park. There is a Holden Rodeo wedged between two almost identical early eighties XD Falcon utes belonging to local fishermen or farmhands. The Rodeo has a sticker in the shape of Australia plastered across the back window. Black capital letters begin somewhere south of Broome: ‘Fuck off, we’re full’. I park near the exit while the boys ditch their bikes under the shade of a stunted coastal wattle and disappear down a narrow walking track that leads to the deep ceramic blue of the Southern Ocean. The September sun is warm and comforting but it is cold in the shadows so I walk crookedly, avoiding the dark shapes cast by bent tea-tree and wattle and she-oak, trying to stay in the sunlight.