Zach Perve has been to Broome and Bindoon. From Albany to Wyndham and everwhere in between. But you don’t need to ask him – he’s got a bumper sticker from every last one of them.
Zach, 39, drives a silver Ford Everest with a rear end that looks more like a billboard for the state’s Department of Tourism than the daily driver for him, his wife and his four kids. And doesn’t it just look awful.
“Yeah I love ’em,” he said with the smile of a simpleton when confronted in the Karratha City Shopping Centre car park this afternoon.
“It’s good to just show where you’ve been, ya know?”
Our reporter, a little bit confused, glanced back and forth beween the sweet honesty of Zach’s contented smile and the monstrosity of the advert-on-wheels he calls his car.
Didn’t it seem a bit much to have several dozen stickers plastered over the back of your car?
“It’s all about the memories, mate,” he said while looking across the stickers.
“Honestly I’d put more on if I could. We’re heading down to Meeka[tharra] in a few weeks for the Outback Fezzie [Festival] and I reckon there’ll be some new ones collected along the way.”
Zach then went quiet. Still looking at the stickers, seemingly in a trance, he appeared to be travelling down memory lane, studying each one after the other.
This momentary distraction allowed Zach’s wife Mariah to pull our journalist aside and rush a few exasperated lines.
“I think it’s an illness – but tacky bumper stickers are better than meth,” she stressed with the look of a woman on the verge of a mental breakdown.
“A couple of years ago we’d pretty much visited every major town in WA and I thought he’d stop buying the fucking things.
“But then he started getting ones from individual truck stops.
“Who the F cares if you went to Nanutarra Roadhouse?”
Who indeed, Mariah. Who indeed.
