CONFIRMEDEveryone out here knows about the Min Min lights. You grow up with them. Your pop saw one, your pop’s pop saw one, the publican at Boulia has a whole wall about them. The official story, and I have had the official story read to me by Keith Rowbotham with a torch under his chin, is that they are headlights from a car on the other side of the horizon, bent over the curve of the earth by a layer of cold air.
Right. So let me tell you about the night the headlights waved back.
The run
It was the last Wednesday in September. Me, my cousin Deb, and Deb’s then-husband Col, coming back from Boulia where Col had been looking at a bore pump that he did not buy. We’d left late because of the pub, and I was in the back of the ute on the swag because Col smokes and Deb won’t have the windows down.
About twenty minutes out of town, two lights came up behind us. Amber. Round. Side by side like a pair of eyes, sitting about a metre and a half off the road and maybe a hundred metres back. Not getting closer. Not falling away.
I banged on the roof. Col slowed down. They slowed down. Col sped up. They sped up. Col, who thinks he’s funny, stopped the ute dead in the middle of the road. They stopped. They just hung there, over the bitumen, humming slightly, the way a fridge hums when it knows you’ve opened it.
Eleven kilometres
We sat there for a bit. Deb wound the window down, which tells you how serious it was. Col said “it’ll be a car” and I said “a car with no bonnet, no roof, no driver and no road noise, Col” and he said “a quiet car” and Deb told him to drive.
So he drove, and they came too. Eleven kilometres by the odometer. I timed it on my watch and I counted the posts. The whole way they held exactly the same distance, exactly the same height, and the left one was always very slightly brighter than the right one, which I found reassuring, for reasons I’ll come to.
Col tried everything. High beam. Low beam. Hazards. He put the wipers on, I don’t know why. At one point he turned the headlights off completely and drove by the moon for about two hundred metres, and the lights behind us dimmed as well, as if to say fine, we’ll do it your way.
The wave
Around the ten-kilometre mark I did something I’ve never been able to properly explain, except that I had been taken nineteen times by that stage and I was starting to know the feeling of being watched by someone who knows you.
I stood up in the back of the ute, held onto the roll bar, and waved. A big wave. Both arms, like you’d do at a plane.
The left light went up and down. Once. Slowly.
Not a flicker. Not a bounce from the road. A nod. Deb saw it. Col says he was watching the road, which is the first time in his life he’s been able to say that. Deb has sworn a statutory declaration about the nod and it is on file at the Collective, next to the Keno slips.
Then they peeled off. Together, to the left, out over the Mitchell grass, and just went down, like they’d been put away.
Who it was
People ask me how I know it was Gary. I’ll tell you how I know.
The left one was brighter. The left one is always brighter. Nineteen times by then, and every time, the tall one, the gentle one, the one with the clipboard, stands on my left. He’s got a side. We all have a side. That’s what you learn after nineteen times: they’re not that different from us. They’ve got a side, they’ve got a roster, and they check in.
That’s what that was. Checking in. Making sure I got home from Boulia. He has never once asked how I was, never said a word, never rung, never paid, and yet there he is, eleven kilometres of bitumen, holding station off the tailgate so I’d know.
Men.
A word from management
I have driven that road at night and seen the lights myself, and they are extraordinary, and I will not have anyone say otherwise. I will however note for the record that Cheryl's cousin Deb has since sworn statutory declarations on three further matters including a ghost and a horse that could count, and that Col did eventually buy the bore pump, which he says was haunted. — Noreen
Cheryl’s raffle camera is now held in the Collective’s evidence cabinet, which is the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet in the second bedroom. The photograph above is the only one of the roll that came out, which Dr Faraday regards as significant.
Document U8MC-98-0303. Status: CONFIRMED. This file is retained indefinitely, or until the Men in Beige ask for it, whichever is never.