Before she was a Walkley-winning documentary-maker and author, Anna Broinowski was a precocious seventeen-year-old who believed in Australia’s idea of itself as a classless utopia. But when she arrived at the University of Sydney in 1985, she found herself in a strange new world of preppies and punks, an ivory-towered microcosm of the warring factions that defined ’80s culture: jacked-up capitalism versus anti-mainstream rebellion. Intent on seeing the ‘real’ Australia, Anna set out on a madcap hitchhiking adventure that’s the subject of her wildly entertaining new memoir, Datsun Angel. In this conversation, which has been lightly edited and condensed, Anna talks to Griffith Review Editor Carody Culver about gender politics, room jackings and an unforgettable journey north.

CARODY CULVER: Datsun Angel has two parts: the first details your experiences as a newly minted freshman at the University of Sydney in the mid-1980s, the second describes a trip you took during the summer of 1987, when you and your uni mate Peisley hit the road and hitched all the way to Darwin and back. What drew you to revisit this time in your life?