It’s been two years since I lost my car to a kangaroo. My partner and I went on a road trip from Sydney to Canberra on a whim, but we didn’t reach our destination. We were fine, but the kangaroo sadly wasn’t. Let our story be a lesson to you: don’t drive out of town at night without a roo bar.
Remarkably the car still kinda worked after we had it towed, enough for it to limp around on some quiet streets near my house at the time, but it was far from roadworthy. I kept it out of the rain at first, but I soon learned that I couldn’t really afford to fix all of the damage, barring some sort of miraculous wrecker dive (for which I had no way to get to, no way to carry the spoils home, and no tools to install). We moved to Strathfield, but left the car parked on the same street in Arncliffe. The next wet season came around, but this time I neglected the matter, sealing its fate.
This car wasn’t my first, but it might as well have been, because I had my first for less than eight weeks. I guess I’ve got a knack for owning and wrecking cars based on the Ford C1. The BK family has a special place in my heart, on multiple levels. At its peak, three of my friends and my best friend’s brother owned one too.
This vessel carried me through my P plates, as far as Perth, Adelaide, Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, and the Gold Coast. It took me and both of the partners I’ve had on road trips far and wide, to countless ComSSA LAN and RFLAN and avaLANche parties, and it hauled me and all of my stuff from Perth to Sydney when I graduated.
I poured a lot of love into this car, including custom plates, good tyres, and 18″ RX-8 rims from someone in Canberra. I really liked the stock aesthetic, and in general I think aftermarket rims are tacky.
My friend Nathaniel took me wrecker diving for a centre console from a facelift and installed it for me, giving me an aux jack. The best part was that my stock pre-facelift head unit — fancy internal 6-stack CD player that I never used and all — supported it natively! You see, the tape deck, in models that had one, was connected to the head unit with a glorified aux cord. We plugged it in, held down two buttons to reconfigure the thing (if I remember correctly), and it worked like a tape deck.
I forgive you for losing air conditioning just two nights before I crossed the Nullarbor, for the very first time, in the middle of summer. I forgive you for your flaky dealer-fitted cruise control (drive-by-wire was introduced in the facelift) that barely worked the first time, dying completely before my round trip back home the next year.
But most of all, I’ll miss you.
