It broke my heart with longing, because I wanted dad with me in this place

Recently I stepped back in time to the world of a more languid pace, a kinder, gentler space. It was the world of the country town.

Sweet: a scene in Gulgong

Recently I stepped back in time to the world of a more languid pace, a kinder, gentler space. It was the world of the country town and all around me were whispers of my father; men of a slower stance with the bum hanging out of their trousers and slow chuckles and sun-spotted hands and even the occasional tip of the hat. It broke my heart with longing, because I wanted dad with me in this place. To immerse himself, to unfurl, to yak, because you don’t see old men like that in the Big Smoke and it’s all the poorer for it.

There was the chunky white bread of childhood sandwiches. The dogs in the back of utes; big working dogs, not those decorative city fluffballs. The sobering rebuke of the war memorial. The gracious wideness of the main street. The valiantly clinging-on local rag. The sparse newsagent that smelt of childhood. The faded flyer for an upcoming eisteddfod with its desperate plea for entries. The fish van pulled up by the deep-cut stone gutter one morning a week; do we dare, in this inland place?

The lifeblood of the town, its IGA. The petrol station from another era. The theatre with its faded Queen’s portrait, dinky wooden ticket booth, old Beale piano and ghosts. The Thai restaurant that used to be Indian that used to be Chinese. The pioneer museum full of dust and rust. The teenagers desperately, listlessly seeking something, anything. The cluster of churches on the prosperous hill, looking down, looking across, looking. The social dynamics of high school perpetuated long into adulthood; dynamics never ending. The flag raised at the post office at 8am on the dot every weekday morning because, well, these rituals are important. For a sense of permanence, a civic tidiness, a community’s energy.

Yet flickering in the corners of this world, the dark side. The claustrophobia of the deeply familiar, the stifling judgment in a town where everyone knows who you are, everyone has an opinion. I think back to the Kafkaesque circularity of Wake in Fright, the curtains twitching in a too-close community and the aura of boredom and listlessness and up-to-no-good-ness, the edge to the place. Those dreams of escape from a town only good for getting away from. And woe betide if you’re different, woe betide if you have the courage for that, you’d stand out too much. “The day was twenty-four hours long, but it seemed longer. There’s no hurry, for there’s nowhere to go…” Harper Lee wrote of her Maycomb in To Kill a Mockingbird.

Recently I’ve sampled the Elvis festival in Parkes and the ceramics festival that is Clay Gulgong, wondrous flares of brightness in the quotidian routine of a country town’s life. The cliché is that nothing ever happens in these places, day after day, week after week, but then there are these explosions of colour and crowds and vivid, varied life. The festival in a tiny town is a marvel of a thing, vining its way joyously through all the businesses on the main street and into the pubs and clubs at night, clustering on street corners and reviving dusty old halls and giving them sights never before witnessed in these parts. And all for a common cause, an honouring of art.

These celebrations of particularity are the result of enormous amounts of grit and organisational skill thanks to the dynamic drivers at these festivals’ helms, because it’s so easy for these gifts to a community to lapse. I’ve seen little writers’ festivals disappear and it’s a tragedy for the locality, let alone the outsiders who loved attending them. So hats off to the doers who inject an energy bomb of activity, attention and financial largesse into tired, post-plague communities. A world beyond Covid and mice is beckoning and life is to be seized. I’m aiming, most joyously, for the ABBA Festival in Trundle next.