The new freeway skirting Geelong (pop. 250,000) is an arc so perfect it is almost artificial, half-circling the city like a whining Electrolux floor polisher wielded by a 1950s frocked housewife on linoleum, pink roses rampant. New? The bypass has probably been there fifteen years, but I don’t come down this way much any more. In the early 1970s my family purchased a slightly down-at-heel ex-farmhouse in Birregurra, a small farming town in the western district. Geelong was the halfway point, and the road faltered through the city’s endless stoplights, over a railway bridge under which old diesels slept in glittering rail dust, past industries and factories and a cement works and the Ford engine plant and a greyhound track and the fourth-division soccer fields and a water park. Once past Geelong, the journey's second half had been easy, like a long gradual landing in a light aircraft on a gigantic flat green field. The house was a rambling - and possibly even slightly crumbling - t
The neighbours left a large bag of apples they had harvested in the wicker chair on our front porch one hot day in late summer. A text message said they’d be away for a few days, and we might also collect some cherry tomatoes from their garden before they became overripe. I opened their big gate and walked into a kind of eclectic sub-tropical Japanese-style garden in which flowering vines trailed over brick walls, freakishly tall sunflowers towered out of raised garden beds, and hundreds of cherry tomatoes sprawled; their vines winding through and around other plants rather than being lashed to their uprights like crucified lawyers. Amid this psychedelic jungle sat a red-beamed gazebo topped bizarrely but satisfyingly by a Danish maritime flag. The apple tree was somewhere behind all this eclecticism. The place seemed to have its own atmosphere, if not its own climate. The neighbours sit out here at night under coloured lights listening to Shankar and watching parti-coloured smoke on