A friend of a friend of mine
Article by Kate Tuart Photography by Alice Armitage
Kate wrote this piece for us. An ode to the love many of us have for the regional towns we call home. Or perhaps the regional town you might come to love.
I would like to share a little story. A story of a young 20-something year old who moved to a small rural town. In truth, having no real idea where it was on a map and yet they somehow found a community of their own.
This town is big enough to have the essentials, plus some. A couple of large supermarkets, boutique stores filled with tinker’s items and bougie fur coats – please excuse the fact that it’s tan season 9 months of the year. Enough coffee shops to sustain a caffeine addict, they even sell buddha bowls, can you believe it? A few art galleries to get your cultural fix, perhaps a paint and sip. An hour to the cinema, but is that really any different to the city?, and a 3-4hour drive to a big shopping centre. Depending how one looks at it, the perfect way to curb a shopping addiction or a good excuse to organise a monthly weekend escape to the closest ‘big city’.
This 20-something year old has always lived by the beat of the beach scene, the city scene, the city that never sleeps scene.
Yet they saw an open door, perhaps it wasn’t even a door, but a well maintained bitumen road that slowly turns to dust, then dirt. One that is certainly less travelled. A place and a path that you see on road trips between two ‘big’ places, but don’t quite have time to stop and explore because you’ve got an itinerary to keep and once you’ve seen one waterfall, one country town, one bushwalk, you’ve seen them all right?
But there’s a reason we love this sunburnt landscape, and why our 20-something year old found they did too.
They call it big sky country. Where you can walk from your parked car to your front door and see the entire expanse of the milky way above your head. Not an ounce of intruding light to be found from a cheeky skyrise or 24 hour fuel station.
They call it the great open plains. Where you can look out your open window on the highway, warm wind through your hair, to see all the way to the horizon line. They say the average person can see 5km to the horizon before the earth begins to curve away from them, and your eyes see it all pinched into what must be an optical illusion.
They call it a 5minute commute. Literally. Five minutes, ten if you’re pushing it. It’s swapping a bikini tan for a sock tan, an overpriced sauna for an open air natural hot spring at the back of a local farmers paddock that only the locals know the road to, and a bushwalk covered in tourists for just you and that other couple you met in the carpark that offered to lend you their sunscreen. It’s swapping the experience of glancing around a train carriage and meeting the eyes of one person for a shy tired smile, to running into half your friends at the grocery store during the 5pm clock-off shop and managing to get invited to two house parties and a BBQ.
And they might not stay forever, no, surely just for a year, or perhaps two to get that resume building experience. Perhaps they won’t plan their life’s full itinerary just yet. Surely there’s one more path, one more back road to explore.
The town, in fact, was Moree. A small town patiently waiting for those looking for a bush change. But I will leave the name of the 20-something year old for you to decide. Was it James, Sophie, Sonya, this friend of a friend of mine? In truth, it could be any regional town, and it could be any Tom, Dick or Harry. Perhaps it could be you.
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