One side of our house used to be exposed to an unsealed road, the ramifications of which we were unaware until about the second day of occupation.

As there's barely a vehicle in this area less dispersive than a LandCruiser, the volume of dust thrown our way was shocking and for years we spent weekends washing the western portion of the weatherboard down with precious water we should've been using for anything else.

Cattle trucks soon became something to fear, as did cattle themselves because graziers on horseback (and in LandCruisers) still drive a large herd of Angus past our place a couple times a year. Baz Luhrmann couldn't conjure a more romantic throwback of flannel and leather if he tried, but as crap as Australia was, at least he could call "cut!" when the bulldust became too much (clearly, a privilege he seldom exercised).

Add all this to the fact we turned up at the tail end of the millennium drought - a time of truly epic transcontinental topsoil transportation - and some days it seemed as though we were doomed to an existence akin to that of moles or asbestos miners.

The miracle was twofold; the return of rain and the arrival of a council crew which extended the tar past the house and well up the road.

Our hearts swelled with similar appreciation a few years ago when our village was finally deemed fit for weekly bin collections.

That first Friday morning we rolled our ripe, cornucopian offerings to the kerb like distrusting pagans, suspicious of this freshly consubstantiated deity and its vows of devotion to even the meekest among its merged flock.

But when those strong, hydraulic arms took our sins and non-compostable onion skins away, we were converted then and there; doubting no more and eager to move from darkness into glorious light.

Six months later, however, our faith was sorely tested when we discovered our amalgamated council had, inexplicably, been using our village to conduct a clandestine "waste audit".

There's not much more upsetting than finding your holiest of vessels housing your most private of relics has been raided sometime between midnight and 6am, and our community became a hive of conspiracy theories; everything from crack teams of 10c bottle redeemers to primary school enemies to dumpster-diving aliens.

The council finally came clean, so to speak, revealing it'd been using contractors to poke around our trash while we were sleeping.

Weird and gross.

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While this admission was a gift of perspective, making us realise our own jobs weren't so bad after all, it still felt like a betrayal and it took us a while not to view our wheelie bins as yellow and red-lidded Trojan horses.

But if there's one way to rebuild bridges, it's to rebuild bridges; something our regional councils have been doing ever since all that wonderful lumber was wasted to the depredation of summer, forcing the closure of some of our most intriguing roads.

After months of engineering grunt work, two of our beloved country conduits - to the mountains and the coast - have reopened; one just this week.

More time tunnels than mere motorways, these corridors of consciousness meander through the tangles of your mind as much as through the bush.

One minute they'll have you contemplating your planetary footprint as you intrude on a Yeatsian "bee-loud glade", then they'll hoist you on high, instilling the arrogant melancholy of Alexander with no more worlds to conquer, then plunge you down again; deep into the simmering claustrophobia of Conrad's Kurtz.

Pondering the back-breaking years it must have taken to open up these arteries is a combat of imagination.

Judith Wright was spot-on to say those responsible were caught in "a mad apocalyptic dream", her bullocky seeming to share the same uncompromising insanity for progress as a protagonist from a Herzog-Kinski collaboration.

And it's not just those of us who remember when the only "super information highway" out there was the billboarded Pacific who enjoy a little back-country action.

Although our kids maintain a disturbingly comprehensive rating system for the many McDonald's playgrounds that pock the east coast, they'd be hard-pressed to differentiate their first salt-laden toilet stop at any of these bland establishments from the last. They can, however, recall in exquisite detail - from bird species to rock formations - each time we've pulled over on the side of a road less travelled for a ute-tray sausage sizzle (salt, it seems, is inescapable).

Such billy-boiling, fireside fantasising is nothing new.

McCubbin captured our lust for unhurried wanderlust in his 1896 cracker On the Wallaby Track and many KitKats were sold a century later as a result.

Overall, terrestrial travel is just one more avenue via which national identity can be explored, a conflict of expedience and experience.

Even though we despise the nasty things, we selfishly applaud the opening of bypasses, tollways, flyovers and carriageways because they'll shave a few minutes off the commute, while the thought of succumbing to a big green sign promising the Bedouin delights of a "tourist route" or "heritage trail" on the same drive home sends a shudder of peripatetic promiscuity through the bladder.

Similarly, as if inhabited by the ghost of Ayn Rand - and in the face of logic such as that bravely meted out by the Grattan Institute - we stubbornly pursue the chimera of high-speed rail, even though a bullet train is completely at odds with the kind of romanticism that has us happily hypnotised by the metronomic Ghan of slow TV.

We welcome with relief the reopening of well-worn roads because it not only represents another means to get from A to B, it speaks to our inherent desire for freedom. The flipside, naturally enough, is their sudden closure can evoke a deep forbidding.

A "road closed" sign is as much an assault on our human rights as an apparatus of public safety and gives rise to that itchy rash of anti-authoritarianism that still comes and goes in this country like ring-fenced ringworm.

So, as we tour our backyards in this unnerving era of exclusion zones, let's give our grizzled grader operators the thumbs-up for getting us moving again.

And spare a thought for those left at the barricades.