To the innocent bystander, the dinky wooden bridge across the River Murray at Tooleybuc is just a bridge.

An historic bridge, to be sure, knocked together in 1925 in an era when workers didn’t get paid a $10 loading just for turning up on time.

It was designed with what is now a steel section that lifts to allow paddle steamers to pass.

In 1974, the paddle steamer “Pevensey” didn’t quite manage that, collided with the bridge and was swept sideways into the structure’s eastern side.

The bridge “sustained no noticeable damage” and after a patch up the paddle steamer chugged on her merry way upstream to Echuca. Now, of course, the incident would warrant a royal commission into rivercraft safety and bridge construction.

But here’s my theory about the Tooleybuc bridge. Yes, it’s a bridge alright, but is it also something else entirely? Is it in fact a space-time portal?

The boffins at NASA define such a sci-fi concept as an “extraordinary opening in space or time that connects travellers to distant realms”.

The space agency thinks it has discovered a real one in magnetic fields between the earth and the sun, but it should be looking much closer to home because the Tooleybuc Bridge ticks all the boxes as a portal that connects travellers to distant realms.

Tooleybuc is on the Mallee Highway, 919 kilometres southwest of Sydney, 381 kilometres from Melbourne and light years from the rest of the nation.

Drive over it heading east and you’ll eventually arrive at Planet East Coast. This is regarded by our federal and NSW governments as “the real world”.

Drive through it toward Adelaide and you’ll find yourself on Planet The Rest Of Us. To successive Commonwealth governments, and the soon-to-be-ex NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet, we might as well not exist.

After a 2500-kilometre return drive from Adelaide to Bowral in the NSW southern highlands over the past week, I’m starting to wonder if they’re right.

If they don’t think we exist, do we? Are time and space so stretched and distorted on the endless drive across the Mallee that Adelaide has warped off into another reality?

Maybe there’s more to the Tooleybuc Bridge than meets the eye? Image source: Mattinbgn (talk · contribs), CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

From our time living in Sydney and Canberra, we’ve made many motoring journeys across the dead-flat Hay Plains, on the Mallee, Sturt and Newell highways and the many byways in between.

It’s a mind-bending experience. Dead kangaroos litter the edges of the road, their lifeless faceless staring at you, paws frozen in an ugly grimace. Black cows materialise at random. As the day warms, the road shimmers on the horizon. Trucks seem to be floating in this asphalt mirage. It’s impossible to tell if they’re moving away or speeding toward you. You can’t work out if the road bends or runs straight ahead, so overtaking is a guessing game.

Travellers across the Mallee have a lot of thinking time on their hands. Too much thinking time, which is how the Tooleybuc Portal Theory took shape.

We discovered Hay has a free water play park and swimming pool with a lifeguard on duty called Shirley and that the dining room in the South Hay Hotel serves an excellent meal. The Hay Bakery reportedly does a fine cinnamon scroll.

The towns along the way – Lameroo, Pinnaroo, Cowangie, Boinka, Walpeup, Ouyen, Manangatang, Goodnight, Kyalite – roll by like lyrics in a Ted Egan song.

But right now, the highway’s melody resembles AC/DC’s Highway to Hell.

The road is a shocker. I’ve never seen the Sturt Highway in such bad shape. It’s a joke to even call it a “highway”. From around Balranald, for hundreds of kilometres deep into NSW, it’s just one long pothole.

The flood waters along its length have undermined the base beneath the asphalt road surface and the B-double trucks have done the rest, forcing the tar into swales along both sides, as if a giant hand has been squishing black Play Doh.

The speed limit remains unchanged on 110 km/h and the road doesn’t have a single overtaking lane until you get to the outskirts of Wagga Wagga. It is super dangerous.

It was a relief to finally swing onto the smooth concrete surface of the Hume Highway, the 840-kilometre, multi-lane, dual-carriageway that links Melbourne and Sydney.

If you need a reminder of where the people are, where the money is and where the political clout lies in Australia, you’ll find it driving on the Hume. Welcome to Planet East Coast, we hope you enjoy your stay with us, such a shame you don’t exist when you leave.

If a safe highway is good enough for them, why isn’t it good enough for the rest of us?

Free-falling into the lights of Adelaide down the freeway from Mount Barker does feel like dropping in from outer space.

Honestly, turning off the Hume Highway at Junee, beginning the drive home, is like sliding into a Third World Country.

We thought we’d try to outsmart the Sturt Highway so charted a return route from Narrandera down to Jerilderie and Deniliquin to the Tooleybuc Portal.

This seemed like a masterstroke until we encountered the 62-kilometre stretch between Moulamein and Kyalite, on the outskirts of Tooleybuc. Whole sections of the road have been washed away, leaving knee-deep, rocky potholes that will devour a vehicle’s front suspension at anything faster than walking speed.

The rebuilding of these flood-ravaged roads shouldn’t be left to state governments or local governments to do the usual half-arsed patch-up. The Albanese Government needs to tip a big bucket of cash into the holes in the ground where our roads used to be.

The NRMA estimates the repair bill for NSW’s flood-damaged roads will run to $2.3 billion and wants federal government help.

Labor’s federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers has a wacky plan to invent a New Capitalism, code for taking away people’s hard-earned savings, which looks suspiciously like Old Capitalism.

Who knew buying the family home was a “tax concession”?

But if he can tear himself away from penning similarly “deeply insightful” essays for The Monthly, he urgently needs to find a lazy few billion dollars to completely rebuild the Sturt Highway and the many other roads trashed by floods. One nuclear submarine should be enough to pay for it.

It was a relief to roll back into South Australia, after dropping tomatoes and avocadoes in the fruit fly quarantine bin at the border, a ritual offering to placate the Mallee Gods.

Tailem Bend, you’re beautiful.

In his song Adelaide, Ben Folds sings that arriving in Adelaide by plane from LA is like “dropping in from outer space”.

“Here you know the world could turn
Or crash and burn
And you would never know it.”  

Free-falling into the lights of Adelaide down the freeway from Mount Barker does feel like dropping in from outer space.

We made the 1257-kilometre trip home in one 16-hour day.

Tooleybuc has three fine motels. Sleeping in a portal may be fine, but you can’t beat your own bed.

Matthew Abraham’s weekly analysis of local politics is published on Fridays.

Matthew can be found on Twitter as @kevcorduroy. It’s a long story.