I have never been to Goodnight, NSW, but I know where it is, because I often saw the turn-off sign when driving between Adelaide and either Sydney or Canberra.
For a reason that initially escaped me, I often found myself feeling randy in the vicinity of the Goodnight turn-off, and I could not understand why. Later I realised that when driving from Adelaide towards Oyen, I would see road signs referring to Lamaroo and Pinaroo, and my fecund mind would work on a ribald song that started something like:
I knew a girl from Lameroo
Who wanna . . . da kangaroo
But kangaroo no wanna do
So she go to Pinaroo
There she find a shearing crew
Who . . . her two by two
et cetera, et cetera.
By the time I had passed through Oyen, inventing lines for that song would become tedious, but then the road signs mentioned Tooleybuc, which screamed for a song starting “I knew a girl from Tooleybuc”. Inventing more lines that ended with whatever rhymed with duck would occupy my mind until I reached about where the Goodnight turn-off is (the Goodnight turn-on for me).
Goodnight is an English surname of Germanic origin that originally meant either good servant or God's servant. It morphed over hundreds of years into Goodknight then Goodnight.
