If I were to count up the proportion of time spent in a car, I'd likely be horrified. These days I navigate the dense traffic of the city as I get children to school, sport and parties and to work and back.

In the past, it has been more long-distance, endurance driving. During my years at the daily newspaper in Bundaberg in north Queensland, it was a four-hour jaunt one way to Brisbane and 12 to 14 hours or more to get home to visit family.

Fatigue and microsleeps were known about but long-distance drivers and truckies just dosed themselves up with caffeine (or something stronger) and kept going. There were no excellent initiatives such as 'driver revivers' then.

Sometimes I went off the beaten tracks in a bid to add diversity to the trip, which was not always a good idea. I once had to be rescued by burly truckies on a remote track when I ran out of petrol.

Maybe it was my country upbringing. Distance and driving was a part of life. To get anywhere, one had to drive or ride or walk. Public transport was not even a concept. As school kids, we faced a long walk and bus ride to school and back.

I learnt to drive on steep hills and muddy tracks in an old Blitz army truck, in which gear changing was a skill in itself; and I learned 'defensive driving' on country roads swerving to miss kangaroos and wombats that would shatter a car grille and radiator within seconds.One of my proudest moments remains (to this day) when my father commented casually as I navigated frenetic inner-Sydney streets, that I was "a good driver".

In a recently replayed interview with motoring personality Peter Wherrett, who died recently, Wherrett took umbrage at the interviewer describing him as a rev-head. "I'm not," he said. "I just like driving, I like the skill and strategy."

I know what he means which is partly why, as I sit in the passenger seat with my teenage son behind the wheel, I fidget endlessly. Some of it is because I like to drive, but mostly it is because I am anxious for him.