Do you want to drive?

One minute she has her hand on my shoulder to steady herself as she steps into her little, navy leggings.

The next minute she’s driving on a country road towards a semi-trailer; the lives of the truck driver and the 420 lambs he’s transporting hang in the balance with my life and her own. 

Four hundred and twenty-three of us relying on her hands gripping the steering wheel to keep our vehicle, whose width she’s yet to grasp, between the white lines in the middle of the road and the crumbling edge of the bitumen to the left.

Days earlier, she’d watched some animated simulation videos of pedestrians and cars and then correctly chosen the order of who gives way to whom in the online assessment.

Today, she has shown her 16yo birth certificate to a VicRoads customer service officer and been handed a learner’s permit in return. We scout the shops for L plates and find a set in the second shop we try.

I pull up on the side of the road once we’re out of town. She’s ready.

We hop out and tear open the yellow magnet plates from their packaging. I brush a few dead insects off the front bumper with my sleeve and hold the L plate in place. 

I let go and it drops to the ground. 

‘Oh yeah. That’s plastic,’ I say, picking up the magnet and rubbing the back of it on my jeans to remove the tiny stones. I clear my throat and slap the magnet on the bonnet, displaying the appropriate level of wisdom and experience I need to be her driving supervisor.

She sticks the other one on the back of the car and I remember to take a photo like the ones I’d seen of other kids holding an L or P plate in front of the car.

We climb back in, she in the driver’s seat and me in the passenger seat. She is adjusting the mirrors when momentarily, our car is pushed away from and then sucked back towards a Kenworth grain truck that has roared past.

‘Woah!’ she says.

‘That’s what it’s going to feel like when we pass one on the road,’ I warn. 

She’s the learner and I’m the supervisor. As she moves her seat forward and raises it up, I adjust the back of mine so that I’m sitting up straighter and clasp my hands in my lap.

She’s done enough driving around the farm that she knows how to drive. But not at speed, not on a highway, not towards semi-trailers and farmers in utes with dogs not tied on the back and workers heading for home and roadside signs warning of rough edges as a wide load approaches with its flashing lights.

I remember getting my learner’s permit and driving home, 20km from town, for the first time. I didn’t have any feel for where the car sat on the road, no clue as to how long it extended out to the left or how far it stuck out the front. Did the bonnet keep curving down further than the point you can see or is the point you can see the actual front of the car?

‘There’s plenty of room over here, on this side of our lane if you’d like to move over a little.’ 

I try not to use my hand to motion frantically to the left.

I’m trying to remember if Mum motioned frantically with her hand or just gently made the suggestion. I can only remember clutching the wheel, my back not even against the backrest, feeling like Fangio as my brother in the back moaned in disbelief and asked if we were going to go the whole way home at 70km/h.