One for the Road: An Outback Adventure by Tony Horwitz

One for the Road: An Outback Adventure Reviews

• 
  Jessaka

  The Pub With No Beer
  
  
  What a fun and entertaining read. And you have to be fun and entertaining if you want me to be interested in any desert, for a desert to me is like looking at an
  Old abandoned outhouse.
  
  So, what does he do for fun? Is hitchhiking in the outback in stopping in towns to have drinks at the pubs. This is because there is nothing else to do in the outback but drink. There is nothing else to do in any small town America either. I spent many a day in the bars in creston California with my husband, a town of 200 people. The people that we met were great characters just like those in this book. My husband drank beer, I drank orange juice. Just in case anyone wanted to know.
  
  And what kind of music did he have to listen to when people picked him up to take him to the next town? Country music. The music that one man played on his car radio was by Slim Dusty. The title of my review is actually the title of a song that he sings. He is very popular there and sounds like Jimmy Rogers, our 1st country music singer in America. To me, both have horrible voices. Had in the case of Roger's. I am more of a merle haggard fan And Keith Whitley.
• 
  W

  This should have been titled,"A Pub Adventure".
  
  My fondness for Australia notwithstanding,I didn't like this at all.To begin with,the Australian outback is not such a cheerful,welcoming place.
  
  But what made the book totally unpalatable to me,was all the references to pubs and drinking.Yes,drinking is such a big part of Australian culture,but that doesn't interest me at all,and that is what this book seems to be all about.
  
  I gave up on this,halfway through.In addition to all the drinking,the writing style is not that elegant.
  
  I was reminded of Bill Bryson's book,In a Sunburned Country.He too travelled the outback,but in the comfort of a train and made it sound interesting.
  
  Being actually on the road in the outback has to be rough going,anyway.
• 
  Mark

  As a recently married transplant to Australia, Horwitz decided that he wanted to see the outback. Now, obviously, the sensible way of doing this would be to rent a car, load up on necessities, and make a detailed itinerary to follow. So, as will be obvious to anyone who has read any of his books, he had his wife drop him on the far side of Australia, and began hitchhiking. It's a pretty good travel book, one of my favorite genres. It was also a gateway to a lot of memories. I went through my hitchhiking phase, some ten or fifteen years ago. And though I never saw Australia in such a manner, I did spend copious amounts of time in the panhandle of Oklahoma. And there is something that haunts me to this day about walking along the road in the middle of nowhere, a land so desolate that you can see forever, where the only signs of the hand of man, beyond the road you stand on, are the ruins of dreams, the decrepit farmhouses and such, abandoned, and weathered in such a way that there is no way to tell how long they've stood vacant. You feel attached to the country, in a way you never could somewhere that man's tenancy shouts to all that someone was here. Anyway, good memories brought back, and I would have to thank this book for that, even if I hadn't been so enjoyable. His discussion of the type of drivers who pick up hitchhikers is dead on, and his observation that people in pickup trucks are more likely to stop than people in sedans- dead on. Recommended.
• 
  Numidica

  I read this book 30 years ago, after finding it in a Dallas library. I read recently of Tony Horwitz's untimely death from heart attack, so I picked up another copy to see if it was as good as I remembered. I have to say, it has aged well; it is not as laugh-out-loud funny as I remembered, but it is wise in a way that's unusual for a young author (Tony was not yet 30 when he wrote it). The book appealed to me because I had been to Australia as a young man, and loved the place, but I'd never gotten far outside Sydney. Tony Horwitz did the full tour, and his account held my attention just as well the second time as the first.
  
  I read Mr. Horwitz' obit in the Sydney paper (
  https://www.smh.com.au/national/tony-...), and I think it explains why he had such success in drawing people out and getting their stories; he was a mensch with a unique ability to disarm people and connect with them, even if they were very different from him.
  
  Someday I'd like to do a tour of Australia, but I think I'd do it the way Horwitz ultimately did - mostly around the perimeter. Broome and the area around Perth sounded particularly attractive. Someday.
  
  
• 
  Bandit

  Armchair traveling is by far the cheapest most stress free way to travel. One might even end up places one would never venture out to on their own accord, like outback Australia. Not the habitable civilized urban east coast, but the rest of the country, scarcely populated, desert like and generally not suitable for comfortable living. Tony Horwitz traversed that area in 1987 and just to make things more interesting(alternatively infinitely more difficult) he did primarily by hitchhiking. The whole concept reeks of masochism, but it was certainly fun to read about. No idea what sort of changes took place there since Horwitz's trip, but at the time the place is represented as a land of crude yet affable backwardy racist alcoholics for the most part. With alcoholism being something of a epic phenomenon. Not sure who'd want to visit the place or live there, sounds like one of Dante's levels, but makes for an entertaining read. Horwitz writes as well as one would expect from Pulitzer winning author, which is very. Recommended.
• 
  Wendy Henning

  I'll never hitchhike around Australia, but I'm glad Tony Horwitz did so that I can read about it. Smart and funny. That country runs on beer and dust though.
• 
  Ensiform

  The author, an American ex-pat living and working as a newspaper reporter in Australia, gets the wanderlust and decides to hitch around Australia. He circumnavigates the continent, nearly, and travels deep into the Northern Territory and South Australia. (He wisely avoids the utter emptiness of Western Australia.) He meets a variety of Australians: truckies, anti-environmental loggers and tourists, racists, Aborigines in beat-up “utes” (utility vehicles, like pickup trucks), and professional wanderers. He hunkers down in a ditch during a cyclone, wonders at the oddities of Australian cartography (“rivers” and “lakes” are plentiful in name, but dry as dust in reality), and watches as his chauffeurs down dozens of beers per hour. It seems that the Outback, for all its barren aridity, is dotted with pubs.
  
  Horwitz is an excellent writer. He describes the heat and the flies with great detail, finds poignancy in meeting one of the only other Jews in Broome at Passover, and draws humor from the most aggrieving situations, such as the publican who hates serving food or letting rooms. This book is a page-turner, but more than that, it introduces a great part of Australian culture with wit and skill. Great reading.
• 
  Mitch

  This review is totally unfair- it is a review of Australia, not the book.
  
  I read this because I have read and enjoyed other works by this author. He writes well, but here's the thing: I have always thought it would be sooo amazing to go to Australia- and then I read a travel book about it. Like this one.
  
  And then I don't want to go.
  
  Why? That's fairly easy to answer: flies, wasteland, heat and oceans of alcohol. (Oh...and racism.)
  
  Australia sounds, frankly, awful. Hitchhiking around and through it made it sound miserable and unlovely. I'm sure there are many fine things to experience there, but this book served only as a warning: don't go.
  
  Regardless, I fully intend to read more by Tony. This was written in his younger days, when dirt and booze mixed freely in his life. I'm glad he's moved on, and I'll do the same.
• 
  Cheryl

  I pulled this off my unread shelf thinking I had seen it on the wishlist of an attendee at the upcoming 2020 BookCrossing Convention in Gold Coast. When I checked again, I didn't find it. But since this is a book about visiting Australia, it will likely make the trip with me anyway.
  
  I have acquired a new appreciation for the sanity and mild-mannered company of my Aussie friends after reading this tour of the hardscrabble and hard-drinking sections of the country/continent. This tour of Australia was interesting, but not always pleasant. I think the best part was Broome, which I don't know if anyone has ever said about Australia. This book may be more than 20 years old, but I don't know if it is outdated at all -- guess I will find out in a few months.
• 
  Chrisl

  Perhaps because I hitched back and forth from Sydney to Perth and down and around Tasmania, this is a favorite. When I finished reading this, the book was stuffed with sticky notes for passages I wanted to reread.
  
  Might be an interesting companion read to Cold Beer ...
  
  Australia-Travel
  
  
  Cold Beer and Crocodiles: A Bicycle Journey into Australia
• 
  Elizabeth Engstrom

  Loved this book. I'm headed to Australia in the fall, and it was just delightful to read Tony's hitchhiking adventures across the continent. He's very funny, and observant. I'm a big fan of his work and mourn the loss of his voice.
• 
  Alice

  3 & 1/2 stars
  I do like Tony Horwitz's writing style, but I would've liked a bit more of the history of the Australian Outback which he only touched on in the briefest of stories instead of so many stories of stopping at pubs and such in the Outback of today. Also, the fact that this book is now nearly 30 yrs old, it makes me wonder how the Outback has changed. I will admit that a place that sounded at least a bit intriguing to me, has lost most of it's charm! And he wasn't even overly negative--his style is more that of a journalist reporting what he sees. The Outback is about as opposite as you can get to my kind of place!
  It was interesting that he was hitch hiking and talking about how much hitching a ride had changed since he did it in the '70's. I imagine that has changed to almost not even be possible today.
• 
  Sheridan

  It took me a couple of tries to get into this book. In the end it was ok. I expected better - I've read other books by Tony Horwitz and enjoyed them much more, but it was ok.
• 
  jen8998

  Okay but I liked his later work much better.
• 
  Julie

  I think I'd read Horwitz talking about a tour of his own cellar. This wasn't as brilliant as Confederates in the Attic, but it was still a treat.
• 
  Jeff Mauch

  I'm a sucker for amusing travelogues, but this one just wasn't quite that entertaining. There's really two reasons for this: 1. The outback of central Australia is a boiling hot, desolate, lonely place. 2. Tony Horwitz, whom I enjoy, is just not that humorous or interesting on this go around. I think most of us forget that when we think of Australia the majority of us are thinking of the coast. It's because that's where almost the entire population resides. The heart of the continent is a wasteland and what towns survive, if you can call it that, exist solely because they are or were attached to an industry or because they are a stopping point for food, gas, or mostly alcohol between two other sad and dull places on the road. I find Australia fascinating still, but an entire book on hitching around the outback is really just as boring as it sounds. If you want a better travelogue on the continent check out "In a Sunburned Country" by Bill Bryson, which is both more interesting and far more well rounded.
• 
  Olya

  I don't usually give up on books about Australia and travel, but this felt more like a book about the author and cars... with annoying present tense thrown in for no reason.
• 
  Sandy

  I enjoyed this Australian adventure by a young, newly married Horwitz and so glad he survived it. It was a bittersweet read given his recent death. He will be missed.
• 
  Gwen

  I'm at the stage of quarantine where my travel itch is getting bad, so it's time for all the travel memoirs where I can live vicariously through the authors (and hours on Google Maps).
  
  I read a lot of Horwitz a decade or so ago, and I'm re-reading his works. Horwitz hasn't quite developed into a seasoned writer at this point of his writing career, but there's plenty of humor to show you where he can go. His ability to weave humor and history into a deft narrative isn't there yet, and I would have loved to have learned more about Australia than what Horwitz included here. But thankfully, there's now the internet to fill in the blanks he leaves behind amid all (ALL) the drinking of pretty much everyone in Australia, at least as depicted here.
  
  It took me a long time to finish this book because I was jumping over to Google Maps every 2 paragraphs to look up where he was: poke through the town (on street view, even, on rare occasions), marvel at the distances between towns/roadhouses, and attempt to wrap my head around just how truly large--and empty--parts of Australia can be.
  
  Of note:
  - the mostly underground town of
  Coober
  Pedy
  -
  Pink Lake (which is apparently
  no longer pink)
  - the "ghost town" of Cossack
  - the internet deep dive I did on
  Dr. Ian Wronski (and his wife,
  Maggie) from Horwitz's Passover seder in
  Broome. (The sections from Horwitz's time in Broome are some of the best in the book.)
  
  As a fellow Virginian, I loved his commentary on the similarities of a part of Western Australia and Virginia: "The southwest corner of Western Australia is Tasmania without the wild edge. The woods are open, easy to walk through, and never too far from a weatherbeaten cottage or an old stone chimney where a homestead used to be. All the signs of a land gently settled, long ago, that never grew fat enough to attract less gentle development. Only the soft, unmistakable imprint of a rural counterculture: the Old Bakery Restaurant in one town, the Cheese Factory Craft Centre in another, and brightly colored cabins nestled in the valleys. A hard squint and it could be the Shenandoah." (130)
• 
  C-shaw

  Tony Horwitz is the husband of writer Geraldine Brooks. After reading _Year of Wonders_, I recalled that I had Tony's book about hitchhiking around Australian in the 1980s, pulled it out to read. It is short, easy to read, highly entertaining.
• 
  Pamela J

  Set in Australia's outback, Horwitz's narrative traces his own tracks in the great continent. I wanted to love this 'road' narrative, and I was curious to read a Yank's ("Yanqui") perspective on this continent's vast interior landscape. And, maybe subconsciously, I was prompted to learn more about this writer's earlier works after his recent death (going on almost a year since I've read this book--he passed May 2019).
  Written from a young-Horwitz's point of view as a man who has the privilege and freedom of a young white man --for whom it is socially acceptable-- to up and leave to hitchhike around a continent. As our narrator, Horwitz's persona exudes the carefree nature of his predecessors in the American Beat road narratives. One could easily come away from the text thinking Australia is a chain of pubs and a populace of alcoholics. But, one must bear in mind, again, that this is a young man's freedom narrative, which includes the reckless abandon that comes with alcohol and hitchhiking.
  On the writing? Without a doubt, Horwtiz did some research on the early settlers of the continent, which I appreciated most (more than the brotherhood of men... ) There are some beautiful sentences, rich in imagery too. I will probably have a different experience reading his Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide
• 
  Jibralta

  I enjoyed this, it made me laugh out loud a few times. Compared to A Sunburned Country (in the UK the title is Down Under) by Bill Bryson, One for the Road pales. Both books, written by Americans involve the authors hitchhiking around Australia but Bryson's book is funnier, he's just a better writer. After a while, I found Horwitz's focus on drinking beer at every hovel, pub, bar along the road to be tedious because the majority of Aussies he encountered were alcoholic racists. The Aborigines were far more interest, but it was depressing that they're suffering the same fate as the First Nations peoples of the USA; extreme poverty, scarce work, alcoholism.
  I'm HOPING a lot has changed in Australia since the late Tony Horwitz hitched a somewhat clockwise tour of the island continent. I'm hoping that the outback is less racist, the oppression of people of color less, but considering their current Prime Minister, I'm not holding my breath. There are better, funnier travel adventures. Due to Tony's focus on a pub tour, so much of what Australia has to offer (wildlife, beaches, coral reefs, mountains) is missing.
• 
  Chana

  Tony Horowitz is an American living in Sydney Australia with his girlfriend and working as a reporter. He has a case of wanderlust and wants to hitchhike through Australia. Kind of a crazy thing to do considering it is summer and the interior of Australia has a lot of empty land in it. He goes anyway and mostly has a good time. He starts in Sydney which is in New South Wales, north into Queensland, west into the Northern Territory, south into South Australia, along the coast into and around Western Australia, ending in Darwin, Northern Territory. He doesn't give us a lot of information, just brief accounts of each place and the amusing and interesting anecdotes, observations and history. A good deal of the charm is in the characters he meets while traveling. He has a droll and amusing voice, I found his book interesting and entertaining, I enjoyed it.
• 
  Jen

  I love Tony Horwitz's books--this is the 5th one I've read. It's his first book, and although enjoyable, I like his subsequent books better, where he combines history with travel, diving into a historical event/era and visiting the places where it happened to see its current-day impact there. Here he recounts his solo hitchhiking trip into the Australian outback in the mid 1980s, within the context of him sowing his young-single-man adventure oats before fully settling into his marriage. His descriptions of people and places are wonderful, but he doesn't delve too deeply into anything, and his trip was more about moving on from one place to the next. Still, I'm glad I went along on the ride.
• 
  Lisa

  I didn't care for his writing style, which consists of jumping around and skimming the surface of things, while constantly complaining about how ugly the Australian landscape is. Plus, he seems like kind of a selfish jerk. There are so many other Australian travel memoir books that are more enjoyable.
• 
  JoAnna

  Australia is big. Really big.
  
  One marginally effective way to get across it is by hitchhiking. But hitchhiking is never just hitchhiking, a theory solidly proven by Tony Horwitz in his book One for the Road.
  
  Early in this travel narrative, he notes that hitchhiking east to west across Australia is the country’s “answer to Route 66 and the Appalachians.” And then: “I found myself crawling along a scar of used-car lots connecting one smoggy suburb to another.” This is all before he even leaves Sydney.
  
  But once he hits the outback, Horwitz’s tale becomes a hilarious foray into body-biting bugs, relentless heat, dead kangaroos, sketchy travel companions, beer, beer and more beer. He catches a ride with a woman intent on wiping out the kangaroo, wombat and Tasmanian devil populations through the Nullarbor Plain. In Coober Pedy, he chats it up with folks hoping to strike it rich with opal mining. On the western coast, he attempts to lend a hand aboard a crayfish boat, but with the rough waters splashing over the side, Horwitz does nothing but spend the day “calling Earl.”
  
  He catches a ride with a truck driver who rides the road at forty miles an hour on 14 bald or receding tires. In Broome, he finds a Jewish family to take him in for Passover. And he struggles to describe the “un-ness of outback scenery” which he ultimately decides is “flat, bare, dry. Bleak, empty, arid. Barren, wretched, bleached. You can reshuffle the adjectives,” he writes, “but the total is still the sum of its parts. And the total is still zero. Zot. Nought.”
  
  And between it all: “My own grip on sobriety is slipping away, as is my grip on reality, or at least my place in it. Here I am, drunk in the back of a ute with three drunk cockies racing from nowhere to nowhere in the South Australian scrub.”
  
  It’s a hilarious and easy-to-read race. Horwitz masters the art of sharing his experience while intertwining relevant tidbits from Australia’s history and social commentary, especially as it relates to hitchhiking. For example, I love the quote he pulls from Anthony Trollope, who toured the New South Wales bush in the 1870s: “One seems to ride forever and to come to nothing and to relinquish at last the very idea of an object.”
  
  020410 - Angle of bookHorwitz also offers an explanation about why no air-conditioned luxury cars stop to pick him up: “Perhaps they’re simply worried that a scruffy wanderer with a rucksack will scratch a polished leather seat. But having hitchhiked now on three different continents, I suspect there’s more to it than that—some universal law stating that the higher one climbs on the economic ladder, the lower becomes one’s quota of generosity toward strangers. The converse is also true. If anyone ever put together a group profile of hitchhikers’ most frequent patrons, it would come out looking like the lobby of a welfare office: Mexican fruit pickers in America, Turkish laborers in second-hand Volkswagens on the Autobahn, Aborigines and hard-luck cockies in the bush. It is the disadvantaged who are also most likely to offer you a seat at their dinner table or a bed for the night. Meanwhile, those who can afford to share their petrol and tucker very rarely do.”
  
  He also does an excellent job of showing how he’s become a changed person through his journeys. After an afternoon spent with Hazel, who was raised with the Aboriginal clan known as the Kooma, discussing the changes that have come and gone throughout her life in the bush—forced segregation, lost legends, muddled identity for Aboriginal children who have grown up in a white man’s world—Horwitz realizes that what he sees out the passenger window is not just bleak and monotonous land. It’s covered in stories if passersby take the time to find them.
  
  One for the Road isn’t just a story about a man hitchhiking about Australia. It’s an evenly mixed commentary about the open road, self discovery and personal drive in the face of the seemingly impossible. Travelers and home-based folks will both appreciate this lighthearted but meaningful read.
• 
  Prue Mansfield

  Having liked-a-lot to absolutely loved the others of his books that I had read, I was looking forward to this. I had saved it up for the next time I was doing a road trip in Oz, thinking it would be a good read for Broome to Darwin. But our camping trip SA was in my brain, and the book i was currently reading not hooking me in, so I picked this up. And was disappointed. It was his first book, and as it was published in 1985, the hitch-hiking trip must have been in about 1983. The age of the book shows. The analysis of place and character must surely be outdated by now, but which bits and by how much I cannot tell. His curiosity, ability to strike up conversations with strangers and get beyond platitudes, get himself invited to places, were well evident already. But to read it now is to reinforce some outdated stereotypes; and left me wondering if in some instances, lives had got worse.