By Geoff Strong
Enjoy the wide open spaces? Not when you work 100-plus hours.
DERRINALLUM is a little place on the edge of the Western District, on a crossroad that goes from not much to even less. Its wide main street - with its central plantation of elms, Gallipoli war memorial, World War II field gun and functional public toilets - looks like it was laid out for a greatness that never quite arrived.
The empty gaps between the main street's buildings point to a struggle and decline that has never quite left.
A window into this life came in a discussion I had with a guy who owns the town's takeaway and newsagency. We were talking while his wife was making a pretty good burger. After asking where I was from, the guy said he had not been to Melbourne for decades.
''Didn't like the rat race. Prefer the wide open spaces.''
This is the reaction you often get in country places when country people express their contempt for the city.
I asked him what enjoyment he gained from his life out in such spaces and he confessed, ''I never get to see them. I work here in the shop from four in the morning to seven at night. Seven days a week. I used to get out once a week to pick up the local papers at Camperdown, but it wasn't worth the cost of the petrol. Now I get someone who works there to deliver them.''
So much for those wide open spaces. Even though he had space, he had no time.
His comments made me think of the different dreams people have of their lives. I'm not a country person, so I don't really understand country people's dreams, but I know lots of city people who have country dreams, particularly as they approach retirement: the tree-change phenomenon for some and, before the wine glut, a vine-change for superannuated public servants, teachers, journalists and other dreamers who fantasised about financing their dream as vignerons. Some have made a go of it, many have not.
Friends have moved to or bought weekenders in places such as Castlemaine and Daylesford, towns that in some respects have shed some of their countryness and absorbed some city. I always feel that a true country town is where you get good burgers and bad coffee.
Coffee seems to be the dividing line, because doing it really well is extravagant. Bugger the taste when you can get a good caffeine hit with a teaspoon of instant.
Castlemaine and Daylesford serve good coffee, so too does Mansfield up near the north-east ski fields, where my family has had an association for years. It was initially attractive because of the snow and the nearby waters of Lake Eildon. Now, climate change has meant less snow most years and a lake that never seems to fill beyond 30 per cent. Arthritic change in me has meant an end to skiing, either snow or water.
Though Mansfield is a town that trades on its image of mountain tough men wearing broad hats and riding tall horses, it is not really all that rural. A former mayor confessed a few years ago that there were only a handful of farms in the shire that earned their entire income from traditional farming.
The rest either had one of the couple working off the property or were deriving income from tourism. Indeed, the whole place seems to gain a large slice of its income from tourism, with a festival of some kind nearly every month, whether it is to do with hot-air ballooning or food and wine.
When I was starting out in journalism, I lived in a shared house in Sydney and one of my flatmates was another cadet reporter on The Sydney Morning Herald called Paul Slessor. His father worked as an editor for the rival Daily Telegraph but was better known as the celebrated poet Kenneth Slessor. I just remember him as a grumpy old man who didn't want his son to move out of the family's Chatswood home and who grudgingly played billiards with us at the Journalists Club.
A recurring theme of Slessor's poetry was time; he studied the effect of time on humans and things they create, as in his most famous poem Five Bells.
An earlier poem, written in 1920, was called Country Towns, and when I saw the leafy sleepiness of Derrinallum, it came to mind. Slessor was mainly a Sydney poet who had little tolerance of Australia's bush romancing, and the poem is a touch cruel and disdainful, but it, too, deals with time.
It starts: ''Country towns, with your willows and squares,/And farmers bouncing on barrel mares …''
It ends: ''Find me a bench, and let me snore,/Till, charged with ale and unconcern,/I'll think it's noon at half-past four!''
The seeming lack of time in a place like the one he describes is seductive, but the message seems to be that time grabs you no matter how you try to delude yourself. Even running a takeaway in Derrinallum.
Geoff Strong is a senior writer.