Songs and Moments #3 – The Tuna Can on Wheels and Talking Heads

Have you ever heard a song that can take you right back to a memorable moment in your life? I can think of three.

It’s 1983 and I’m twenty, living in Toowoomba sharing a house with two fellow army aircraft mechanics, Ray and Danny.

Our place of work is the Army Aviation Centre in Oakey, approximately half an hour west of Toowoomba.

Only weeks prior I have traded in my old Renault sedan for a new Mitsubishi Express Van, a car with the weight and aerodynamics of a tuna can.

I have bought the car on finance in order to drive to my home town of Perth for Christmas, and I have already acquired a slab of two inch foam for the van which will be my bed for the trip.

One morning I drove to work around 7am on the two lanes leading out of Toowoomba towards Oakey. There are two lanes on the opposite side divided by a long median strip.

Naturally there are gaps in the median strip to allow cars coming from the other side of the highway to cut across and enter your side of the highway.

This particular morning a ‘P Plater’ in a Commodore clearly needed to ‘scoot’ across the opposite highway having left it a bit late to avoid the traffic heading into town.

As a result he reached the gap in the median strip at speed but was still expected to brake and give way to the traffic heading away from town.

I was driving at the speed limit of 70kmh, and I remember thinking “surely this guy is going to brake and look to his left”. I continued on and just as I crossed the gap he hit me just behind my driver’s door.

My brand new, canary yellow tin of tuna on wheels surrendered meekly to the impact.

The two wheels on the driver’s side of the van were suddenly elevated and the force was taken by the two wheels on the opposite side of the van. There was little resistance and the van toppled over in slow motion on it’s left hand side.

This left me looking through the windscreen sideways and when I unclipped my seat belt, I dropped over the passenger seat and onto the inside of the passenger door.

I stopped the cassette I was playing, Talking Head’s Speaking in Tongues, reached upwards to open my drivers door and appeared like a meerkat coming out of a tank escape hatch, only to find the offender standing there mouth agape and apologising.

The assembled crowd of pedestrians and other motorists I managed to hold up, helped me turn the van back upright and after exchanging details and pleasantries with the ‘P Plater’, continued on to work.

The song that was playing that entire time was Burning Down The House, and it would be a metaphor for what was to come over the next few years of my life.

After getting the van repaired, the trip to Perth went as well as could be expected. Overnight stays in Cobar, Ceduna, Boulder then home to the sweet, sweet smoke stacks of my hometown Kwinana.

A couple of weeks seeing family and friends then off the Melbourne. I picked up an emaciated Japanese hitchhiker in Norseman who was almost dead from dehydration, stayed overnight somewhere on the Nullarbor and dropped him off in Adelaide.

A visit to my sister and her husband in Melbourne then a few days with a friend in Sydney then back to Toowoomba.

The day after arriving home, the dealer who sold me the van turned up at the house demanding I give the van back in exchange for some paltry amount of money.

He told me the Renault I traded in was in fact stolen and that he had notified the police who duly turned up the following day.

Now I don’t think The Statute of Limitations will cover me after 40+ years if I told the whole story but I was charged with ‘receipt of a stolen vehicle’.

The next three years would be spent avoiding a custodial sentence and absorbing a fair bit of stress and anxiety.

It all ended well with a ‘not guilty’ decision in the Brisbane Magistrates Court thanks to a retired QC Mr Moriarty, who was dragged in at the last minute to represent me.

I love Talking Heads, but not that song. That incident seemed to light a fuse that triggered a cataclysmic series of poor decisions by me, and serious outcomes that I was lucky to avoid. Anyway here’s the song.