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Pubs, post offices and other staples of small-town Australia may not have the cinematic appeal of a rural landscape but they’re precious, writes Grace Brennan.
WORDS GRACE BRENNAN PHOTOGRAPHY CLANCY PAINE
Go on, google ‘rural Australia’. It’s glorious. The campaigns almost write themselves. But among the images of paddocks and endless horizons, there is something they are missing: town.
With all its quirks and authenticity, it’s a rude interruption to the sweeping plains and intrusion on the idyll. There are bins and broken windows and mundane things like dentists and newsagents. There are things that aren’t pretty, like division and disadvantage. There are people just scraping by.
Perhaps this is why we don’t look. We don’t celebrate it in the same way we do a parched landscape. I wonder if people know its beauty, though: the intersection that is a small town?
In our town, the roads are wide and convex. You get the joy of the rise and fall as you cross them. Footpaths are wide too. Wide enough for after-school handball games and mobility scooters. Space isn’t at a premium like it is in the city.
There is a distinctive familiarity to a small town. A feeling that you know people like Paul — who rides past you on their bike occasionally — simply because you frequent the same main street. You go to the same chemist; stroll the same supermarket aisles; and pass the same post office every day.
There is magic buried in the ordinary. Inspiration found in a coloured piece of tin, a blossoming tree or warm light through a window.
There is a rhythm to things that, once learnt, anchors you to this place. Certain people sit in the same chair, at the same café on the same day each week. The café owner scribbles ‘Millie’ on a coffee cup instead of ‘oat milk’ because the barista knows each customer by name.
You tend to know who’ll look up and smile as you pass them on the zebra crossing, and those who prefer not to acknowledge you. You know when Mass is on, based on which cars are parked under the shady limb of a tree. And you know who will be in town only after heavy rainfall or if they need a prescription filled.
It’s the big in the small. It’s the people in the place. And the unifying nature of physical isolation.
Town is home for some and a destination for others. Hundreds of kilometres may be travelled to convene here. Cars are parked on a 45 degree angle, rear to kerb. People move about solving their problems. Mail is posted, parts for machinery collected, skin checked, cars registered, bananas, milk and bread are bought.
These big, wide streets offer welcome encounters.
“Yeah, 48ml out that way.”
“That road is cut: best to go the long way.”
“$1800 an acre, they reckon.”
“She was only 73. Funeral next Friday at the Presbyterian.”
“Lambs over eight bucks a kilo. Good money!”
Young ones pass through on their way somewhere else and the unpredictable splutter of a souped-up ute with P-plates catches the attention of an elderly man approaching the crossing. ‘Townies’ watch this traffic come and go.
It’s quiet on a Sunday.
Towns have history. Communities and streetscapes that were once bigger, busier and ‘more important’.
The shopfronts are like an exhibition of time forgotten. Timber doors, floor-to-ceiling windows and faded awnings providing welcome relief from the searing sun. They nod to past glory, repurposed for modern needs and modern dreams. If you look closely, you can see a hollowing in the stone of the doorstep. Imprints left by people who have known the beauty of this place through generations.
I wish we saw it more often, life in a small town. In those lucrative advertising campaigns about the outback designed to evoke national pride or global awe. Not the rivers and the trees but the chimneys and the roundabouts. The rusted corrugated iron roofs of pubs and post offices. The power lines etched across pink sunsets, connecting this place to the world outside and making it liveable. The characters that call ‘town’ home and the complexity of life in a place with limited opportunity. It’s important. And it’s beautiful.
Grace Brennan founded the Buy From The Bush campaign. She lives near Warren in western NSW with her family.
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