After the drive-in

Rory Green for Cordite Poetry Review.
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What I remember best is all of the stars, and the robots glistening like they were made of stars, which I guess they technically were. When they clashed, sparks splashed out of their bodies, stretching across the enormous screen that met the sky, so that it seemed like the sparks were leaping up and getting stuck in the cloudless night.

It's 2007, I am 11 years old and I am at the Heddon Greta drive-in cinema for the first time, watching the live-action Transformers movie. My scout group leader organised this as a special excursion, hauling a minibus of pre-teen boys an hour north-west to what, for most of us, was our first outdoor cinema experience of any kind. Although it was supposed to be an informal event, we were still expected to wear our uniforms. I keep my scarf's woggle tight to the neck, trying to keep insulated from the winter. In retrospect it was a bizarre choice of excursion for late July, but the cold did nothing to lessen the rapture of my experience, sat in a fold-out camping chair with a fleece blanket watching Optimus Prime skate across a screen about 100 feet wide.

Once I'd had a taste of it, I began to beg my mum every school holidays to take my sister and I to that drive-in cinema out at Heddon Greta. To get our money's worth, we would stay for at least two, sometimes three movies in a row. We'd drive past remnant bush and farm acreage on the outskirts of Newcastle, getting to the grounds just as dusk was settling in. Mum would reverse into the spot so that we could open the boot of her Ford Falcon and lower the back seats, building a miniature fort stuffed with blankets and pillows and junk food. After getting settled, we'd tune the car radio to the exotic frequency the cinema fed the movie’s audio through, and the three of us would gawp up at the big screen while car headlights tapered off around us as the opening credits began.

I liked going to the movies as a child, but there was something different about the drive-in. Perhaps it was that, unlike cinemas, I'd first become aware of drive-ins through movies themselves: Danny Zuko trying it on with Sandy as The Blob plays before them; a tornado tearing away The Shining off of an outdoor screen in Twister. And of course, The Simpsons. The drive-in makes an appearance in at least a dozen different episodes of The Simpsons, and my obsession with the 6pm weeknight re-runs of the '00s meant I have seen pretty much all of them. If Hollywood and cinema were synonymous in my childhood, then the drive-in was its purest vehicle. And here it had landed, like a sparkling UFO, in an empty field by a small town a short drive from Newcastle.

It makes sense to me, then, that the Transformers movie would loom largest in my memory of that time — alien robots, from beyond the stars! I wasn't much into cars as a boy, but I loved blockbusters, especially where live-action met fantastic limits: scores of Ulruk-hai marching on the glistening stone city of Osgiliath, Spiderman sweeping high above the clustered New York traffic. Michael Bay, a director famed for explosive military action flicks, reached a new level of spectacle helming the adaptation of the beloved children's franchise where robots shapeshifted into cars, trucks, and later, increasingly niche vehicles and computer hardware.

The transition sequences between robot and vehicle in Transformers were a CGI marvel for the time, one that was recognised with an Oscar nomination in 2007 for Best Visual Effects. The digital models for these robots contained thousands of parts, incorporating 3D scans of actual car parts to create a visual connection to their counterpart vehicle forms. The result was hundreds of gears, panels, and interlocking parts in an orchestral flurry, each individual piece moving without visible logic but with felt purpose, like a swarm of steel gnats.

I still think about how energising that drive-in experience was to me. One of the defining blockbusters of my pre-teendom, fused with the exotic wonder of the drive-in experience, became a portal to the future – an adulthood beyond the everyday trials and mundanities of suburbia.

It seems silly, looking back, that I grew up thinking of drive-ins as a vision of a glossy global future when they realistically are more emblematic of a bygone era. Australia's first drive-in was a phenomenon when it opened in Melbourne's east in 1954, two decades after they emerged in the United States. Opening night reportedly stopped traffic with over 2000 cars trying to squeeze into a space designed for 600 cars — one paper described it as "one of Melbourne's greatest traffic jams". A report from Perth's Daily News on opening week makes a compelling pitch for the creature comforts of the new format: "How would you like to sit back in your car enjoying a cigarette and a glass of beer, and watching your favourite film star all at the same time?"

At their peak, there were over 330 drive-in cinemas across Australia – but as of writing, as few as 16 drive-ins remain in operation. The Heddon Greta drive-in of my youth has itself been in purgatory for over 10 years, the land rezoned in the early 2010s and then sold to developers in 2022 who have repeatedly put off commencing redevelopment. Last year a local reporter quipped that "the old drive-in has been closing down in six months for the past three years", but it is indisputable that the drive-in is getting by on borrowed time.

I moved to Sydney in 2015, going back to visit family in Newcastle a few times a year and always trying to sneak in a trip to the drive-in while I was in town. I loved visiting the drive-in's website — if the cinema was itself a relic of a past time, then its website (at least until an upgrade circa 2023) was a relic of a different world wide web. Button images in the top-level navigation, centre-aligned multicolour font styles, a starry GIF background: the site would have been right at home in a Geocities 'Best of' gallery. The only sign that the website was still active into the 2010s and 2020s were the images of movie posters, rotated onto the front-page to indicate the coming week's schedule, the evolution of poster design trends in stark contrast to the retro sensibilities of the rest of the site.

The remaining drive-ins in Australia eke by, perhaps largely by targeting the nostalgic section of the brain. I wonder if the same urges – for a time that seemed simpler – motivates the proliferation of calls for the 'personal web', where internet denizens build personal digital homesteads outside of the dominant social media platforms. Many blog posts and message threads refer to this as a 'return', a notion infused with a kind of nostalgia for being back in the Web 1.0 era.

Developer and web historian Jay Hoffman likens this 'old web' nostalgia to anemoia, an invented word from an online art project that describes "nostalgia for a time you've never known". Reading this term, I realised how my pull towards the web and to drive-ins were of a similar frequency. By the time I came to both of these places, their golden age had taken on plenty of rust. The internet I grew up in was past the heyday of Geocities and web forums, my formative years instead spent in the slow boil of social media platforms like Facebook and Tumblr, not to mention the arrival of the smartphone and app-ification of digital life. My understanding of what these web spaces were comes to me second-hand, felt through what remains of their archive and the custodians for whom they actually meant something.

This distance is maybe what makes me a little ambivalent towards web nostalgia. There is a much larger proportion of the world's population expressing themselves and connecting with others than on the internet of that time, even if the platforms they are on are ever-seeking new ways to sell them shit in the process. Is it with rose-coloured glasses we imagine people finding each other in the fields of an internet without walled gardens? When I recently told a friend in another state about my love of drive-ins, they said they hadn't heard of any in their state and couldn't imagine any left. A quick web search showed me one within the city limits, about a half hour drive from their place.

In the past year or so I've started returning to the cinema regularly, in some part thanks to joining the film-centric social media platform Letterboxd alongside my housemate and our friends. The gamified mechanics of seeing friends log the latest movies they've watched has spurred me to get out to local cinemas in my city, joining in on the buzz of new releases and throwback sessions of cult classics. As a digital community, I find Letterboxd brings a directed sociality as well as a channel towards physical connection that I've long loved, be it discussing gigs on music forums as a teenager or the grand outdoor adventures of that Pokémon Go summer in 2016. For me this contains the promise of connection that Web 1.0 recalls, of niche interest groups finding each other, but within the framework of today's amorphous web-app environment.

There is a particular reverence for physical cinema spaces in the reviews of Letterboxd. Often I will see the names of certain venues in the metadata tags for reviews – cinephiles paying tribute to the gathering places that sustain their hobby (and in some cases, a thriving social circle). I look for a 'drive-in' tag and find hundreds of entries from people around the world, including more than one logged from my beloved Heddon Greta Drive-In. It's nice to learn through the internet that there are many others who continue to enjoy the inimitable experience of the drive-in, and are doing their bit to keep the remaining venues alive.

Somewhat embarrassingly, I only learn while writing this essay that there is in fact a drive-in cinema here in Sydney, some 40min drive from where I live. Its modern website lacks the charm of Heddon Greta, but I have been looking weekly, cross-checking the film schedule with the weather forecast, angling for that perfect summer evening where I can go with my friends to see some ridiculous action blockbuster. In my daydreams of this anticipated outing, I look to the screen and I see and feel those sparks again, showering up from the film world and out to the sky.

References

CAMDEN'S "DRIVE-IN" THEATRE. (1933, August 31). Queensland Times (Ipswich, Qld. : 1909 - 1954), p. 3 (DAILY.). Retrieved January 18, 2026, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article118509130

'Curious jammed drive-in' (1954, February 20). The Argus (Melbourne, Vic. : 1848 - 1957), p. 6. Retrieved January 18, 2026, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article26592129

DRIVE-IN THEATRE IS (1954, February 18). Barrier Miner (Broken Hill, NSW : 1888 - 1954), p. 11. Retrieved January 18, 2026, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article49416937

Hoffman, Jay. "This is what you’re nostalgic for." History of the Web, https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/postscript/this-is-what-youre-nostalgic-for/. Accessed January 18, 2026.

McCarthy, Simon, and de Peak, Simone. "Eulogy for a silver screen: Heddon Greta drive-in, always closing down, never closed." Newcastle Herald, https://www.newcastleherald.com.au/story/8885071/heddon-greta-drive-in-love-for-the-last-of-the-drive-in-movie-theatres/. Accessed January 18, 2026.

"Transformers." Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2 Feb 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformers_(film).