CALL me Lead Foot Lara, after migrating to Australia I clocked up so many speeding offences I ran out of points and was put on a 12 month good driving behaviour period.
I came from a country that at the time, had no points system and road rules were seldom enforced.
Imagine a woman driving home at night, a small child asleep on the back seat wearing no seatbelt.
She’s driving at speeds of around 160km/hr because she’s tired and wants to get home faster.
That was me in the late 1990s and if I could go back in time, I’d slap myself for being so stupid.
Those days it wasn’t considered unusual practice, well in South Africa at least.
Fast forward to my arrival in Sydney, Australia in 2001.
A few things about Australian roads and cars stood out to me as different.
We call traffic lights, robots, in South Africa.
I worked with a man at a daily newspaper on the Gold Coast.
He said he’d been to South Africa.
“I asked for directions somewhere and was told to avoid potential hijacking by slowing down and never stopping when approaching the red signal at a traffic light,” he explained.
“I came up to one and did just that, looked each way, didn’t stop and went right through.
“The next minute there are flashing lights and a police car behind me.
“They pulled me over and said, ‘did you not see the red robot!’”
“What red robot, officer?” he asked confused.
“That red one, the one you went straight through!”
My colleague said a large red robot on the side of the road was something he’d notice.
And going through it? He’d felt no impact.
It was only after a long explanation, he realised the mistake.
Luckily, the policeman had a laugh, and he was off the hook.
Back to Australia and Lead Foot Lara.
My cousin’s car was the first I drove. I thought I’d broken it because it kept beeping.
Nope. That’s the seat belt reminder.
I drove on a main road and thought I’d blown a tyre.
Nope. That’s the ribbed roadside reminder causing the ‘dukka dukka’ sound.
I wrote ‘no speeding’ on a post-it note and stuck it to my dashboard as a reminder to follow local laws.
Five years after migrating, I returned to South Africa for a holiday.
My mum, dad and two younger sisters were at the airport to pick us up.
Dad drove a mini-van, they used it for their carpet cleaning business.
It had two long seats in the back that were loose and able to be taken out and machinery put in their place.
There were no seatbelts.
Five years of wearing seatbelts, obeying road rules and not speeding, caught up with me.
I was absolutely petrified, it seemed insane he’d let us all just float about untethered.
We exited the airport, dad slowed down through red stop lights but never stopped.
He was hyper-vigilant because there had been multiple hijackings and murders on the route we were taking.
There were no safer routes, all routes came with danger, even more so when it was dark.
It struck me that just five years ago, this was the everyday for me.
Australia softened me and I’d become compliant.
I mean that in a good way. There is a sense of safety and comfort living in a country with a low crime rate and robust legal system.
While I enjoyed spending time with family, I felt very unsafe in South Africa.
I realised how I had been living wasn’t normal.
When driving, how fast you go depends on how late you are.
I was often late, always speeding.
I interviewed a traffic officer in South Africa in 2001. It was one of my last stories before the big move.
South Africa was going to adopt the same points system as Australia.
He tried to explain but I struggled to understand how it worked.
I don’t speed in the context of breaking the law anymore, I can’t afford it.
Perhaps I should have asked more questions or listened harder in that last interview.
If I had, Lead Foot Lara wouldn’t have needed post-it note reminders or a 12-month good driving behaviour period.
