Free One for the Road by Tony Horwitz

nouns straight and she’ll be jake,” he says. The principal rule here is that beer is identified by its markings, not its name. Hence Foster’s becomes a “blue can,” Victoria Bitter a “green can,” and so on through the spectrum. The one irregular noun is Castlemaine XXXX, a beer held in particular contempt by Territorians. If you must order it, don’t ask for a yellow can. Just say “barbed wire,” XXXX. Get it?
    This color and picture coding may reflect a highly developed frontier aesthetic. But I suspect it’s simply a shred of common sense in an otherwise senseless place. After driving a carton or so along Territory roads, you can still lean over the bar and identify the color of the beer can, even if you can’t read the name on its label.
    And if the colors blur, you can ask instead for “a tube” or “a snort” or “a charge.” They all mean tinnie in Territory-speak. The morning after, there’s always a “kicker over” to get you back on the road again.
    I need a kicker over or two by the time Steve deposits me at Three Ways. Like Barkly, Three Ways is an artificial settlement, built around a camping ground, a petrol pump, a restaurant, and a pub. No one really lives here; it’s just a supply point for itinerant miners, oil field workers and Aborigines who wander in from neighboring camps or stations. When I arrive in late afternoon, all of the above are crowded at the bar.
    The first thing I notice is that the Aborigines are much darker-skinned than the toffee-colored blacks I met in New South Wales and Queensland. And they don’t seem to speak English, at least not as a first language. A group of fifteen huddles by the dart board, chatting rapidly in a swift singsong that doesn’t sound like anything I’ve ever heard.
    The miners at the bar speak English, but their faces are so smeared with black dust that it’s hard to tell the two races apart. Pale-faced, and obviously a blow-through, I feel uncomfortably conspicuous—and unnerved enough to forget everything Steve has just taught me.
    “Stubbie of Foster’s,” I say to the barmaid, realizing instantly that I should have said “snort of blue.” But she cuts in before I have a chance to correct myself.
    “Darwin Stubbie?”
    I nod. Apparently, my error has gone unnoticed and I’ve stumbled onto a local brew. Judging from the raised eyebrows of the miner beside me, this Darwin beer is serious stuff.
    A moment later, the barmaid returns with a Foster’s bottle the size and shape of a NASA rocket. In the Byzantine lingo of Territory drinking, Darwin refers to the quantity of the beer, not the make. And it seems five quarts is the going rate for a snort at Australia’s Top End.
    There is no room—in me, or in my pack—for this oversized bottle of beer. So I sheepishly ask for a snort of blue instead. The miner gives me a sympathetic nod.
    “It’s only a six-pack to the next pub, mate,” he says. “One ride and you’re there.”

8 …
Getting Man
           T here is a pause between beers and in that pause a glimpse of something altogether different.
    The break comes in Tennant Creek, one of the few black dots between Darwin and Alice Springs that deserves the appellation of “town.” A gold rush in the 1930s turned the quiet telegraph station into a sprawling miners’ camp; it was the last place in Australia where a man could just peg out a claim and start digging with a hammer and tap. Then most of the mineral wealth played out, leaving Tennant Creek with the raw, ugly face of a boom town gone sour. The low-slung façades of empty stores and takeaway restaurants line the main street. Abandoned shafts and Aboriginal humpies dot the fringes. And the stench of blood from a horse-killing abattoir is the first landmark that greets motorists descending from Darwin.
    When I arrive at sunset, Tennant appears dark and forbidding, except for a bonfire glowing at the northern edge of town. Predictably, I’m dropped off at a