Orbit Mode: The Deeply Unhinged Australian Compulsion to Lap a Car Park Seventeen Times Before Admitting Defeat

There is a man in a Hilux. He has been circling the Bunnings car park since approximately the previous financial year. His indicator has been on for so long it's become ambient noise. He is not lost. He is not confused. He is hunting. And he will not — cannot — stop until he finds the one perfect, isolated, untouched parking spot that justifies the entire expedition.

This is not a rare sighting. This is every Australian, every weekend, everywhere with a car park.

The Spot That Doesn't Exist

Here's the thing about the ideal Australian parking spot: it doesn't exist. It is a philosophical concept. A mythological space where your car sits alone, unbothered, with no door-ding risk, no reverse-in anxiety, no awkward eye contact with a stranger also reversing. Close enough to the entrance that you're not embarrassed, but far enough that you chose it, rather than settling for it.

The distinction matters enormously. Settling is for people who didn't try hard enough.

The average Bunnings car park on a Saturday morning is a slow-motion ballet of Subaru Foresters and dual-cab utes all performing the same ritual. Nobody accelerates. Nobody commits. Everyone is doing between four and nine kilometres per hour with the vague energy of someone who's forgotten why they came but absolutely refuses to leave.

The Mathematics of the False Economy

Let's do some numbers, because Australians love pretending they're being efficient when they are manifestly not.

A park near the entrance: thirty-second walk to the door.

A park at the back of the lot, isolated, pristine, untouched by neighbouring vehicles: two-minute walk.

Time spent circling to find that back-of-the-lot spot: eighteen to twenty-three minutes, depending on how many other people are also circling and whether someone's reversing a trailer near aisle four.

The maths does not work. It has never worked. It will never work. And yet here we all are, lapping like sharks who've forgotten what they were chasing.

The truly wild part? Nobody acknowledges this. You don't get back to your car after forty-five minutes of hardware browsing and think, crikey, I wasted half an hour finding a park. No. You think, good thing I found that spot. The spot that saved you nothing. The spot that cost you everything.

The Unspoken Shame of the Close Park

Parking close to the entrance carries a specific social weight in Australian car park culture that is almost impossible to explain to outsiders. It feels lazy. It feels like you gave up. Like you saw the first available option and just... took it, without honour, without the chase.

There's also the issue of witnesses. If you nab a close spot, other circling drivers see you take it. They were circling for that spot. You swooped. You are now a swooper, and swoopers are regarded in Australian car parks with the same energy as someone who cuts a queue at the servo — technically legal, morally bankrupt.

The close park also creates an obligation to be fast. You can't park two spots from the entrance and then spend forty minutes browsing the garden section. That's abuse of privilege. Everyone knows it. Nobody says it. But everyone knows.

Territorial Geometry and the Door-Ding Anxiety Complex

A significant portion of the circling compulsion comes down to door dings — those tiny, infuriating little dents inflicted by strangers who treat your passenger door like a bumper. Every Australian with a car they actually care about has a door-ding story. Usually it involves a shopping centre, a small child, and a parent who saw the whole thing and just kept walking.

The trauma is real. The avoidance behaviour is extreme.

This is why, when a legitimately isolated spot appears — say, three empty spaces between you and the nearest vehicle on either side — it's treated not as a parking space but as a sanctuary. A protected zone. You park there, you get out, you take a moment. You look at your car sitting there, alone and safe, and something in your chest unclenches.

Then you go in and spend two hundred and forty dollars on stuff you didn't come for, but that's a separate issue.

The Reverse-In Vs. Drive-In Schism

Layered on top of all of this is the ancient, unresolved Australian debate about whether you reverse into a spot or drive in nose-first. This argument has ended friendships. It has caused actual silence in vehicles that previously had functioning conversation.

Reverse-in people believe they are practical, forward-thinking, efficient. They'll tell you it's easier to exit. They will demonstrate this belief by spending four minutes reverse-parking into a space that a drive-in parker would have occupied in eleven seconds.

Drive-in people don't have a philosophy. They just parked.

At Bunnings specifically, the reverse-in contingent is enormous — probably because half the people there have trailers, and the other half just watched someone with a trailer do it and thought, yeah, that looks right actually.

The Moment of Defeat

Every circling session ends one of two ways. Either you find The Spot — the isolated, well-positioned, door-ding-proof holy grail — or you reach the breaking point. The breaking point is a specific emotional state where you've been lapping long enough that you're now competing with yourself. You've passed the same empty-ish spot four times, rejected it four times, and on the fifth pass you just... take it. Without ceremony. Without satisfaction.

You park. You sit in the car for a moment. You don't feel good about it.

This is the Australian parking experience in its purest form: a completely self-imposed ordeal that solves a problem that didn't exist, followed by mild existential disappointment at your own compromise.

It's Not About the Park

Here's the real thing, the thing nobody in the Hilux wants to admit while they're doing their fourteenth lap: it's not about finding a better park. It's about the illusion of control.

Bunnings is enormous and overwhelming and full of decisions and aisle numbers that make no sense. The car park, though? The car park is a puzzle you can solve. It has a right answer. You just have to find it.

So you keep circling. Not because you need a closer spot or a safer spot or a more convenient spot. But because out here, in the asphalt, with your indicator ticking and your speed set to ominous crawl, you are the one in charge.

Until someone swoops your spot. Then all bets are off.