Ed River Valley.

The cabin was in a caravan park located just outside town, on the edge of the Edward River, an anabranch of the Murray River. You wouldn't miss the caravan park. It was on the main highway a few hundred metres before it curved across the bridge into town.

We had left the big smoke - which was literally the big smoke - early on an intensely hot Wednesday, but it wasn't that bad. Melbourne having 'the worst air quality in the world' was hyperbole.

The smoke seemed to disperse as we moved north on the Hume Highway, turning off past Seymour via Shepparton; but that night there was still a brilliant red moon, the red of the desert, not the coppery glow you would expect of a smoky atmosphere.

The cabin was perched on the edge of a valley which ran alongside the caravan park, a dry watercourse which must have been some other sub-branch of the river. The land is flat all around here so the water wanders where it will. If it is there. The day wore on. I found refuge from the heat next to the pool with a book, while the children submarined and broke the surface endlessly. The book made time stand still.

That year everyone in the family seemed to guess the Grammy award judges' nominations. My sister bought the Beatles' Sgt Peppers, a bright red carnival of an album with strange music hall songs with a kick. One day I turned on the radio and heard a song that went for seven minutes and had a link that sounded like the theme from a detective series and lyrics that were sad but elusive. A few days later my father brought home Macarthur Park. No-one knew what Richard Harris was singing about. I guessed it was some personal tragedy. Not everything has to be 'I really think you're groovy/let's go out to a movie' or 'you're my pride and joy et cetera'. Macarthur Park changed everything. The Beatles lengthened Hey Jude because of Macarthur Park.

Late afternoon, still hot, and clouds were gathering. Above the splash and thwack of children throwing each other and themselves into water, I heard the distant rumbling of other monsters: thunder. Dinner? There was a hotel just down the road from the caravan park. I had already figured out that we could walk down to the caravan park's main entrance and then follow the road a few hundred metres. Or we could go as the crow flies: directly across from our cabin (number 10), over the dry watercourse, and into the hotel property from behind. That would save a few hundred metres but be a much more interesting route.

We were halfway across the watercourse when the sky opened up. How appropriate: getting wet in the middle of a river. We ran. We got to the porch of the hotel soaked, but that would evaporate in seconds in the oppressive heat.

The hotel, a cream-painted long, low affair lurking behind a shady verandah with a few blown-over sandwich-board signs here and there and a blinking LED 'open' sign in the window of the front bar, sat back from the highway behind a large dustbowl of a carpark. If you were coming by road you could simply drive in and roll to a stop anywhere in the dust. Three or four utes and a truck had done just that and stood at different angles according to their point of entry; or possibly their intended exit. The whole place obviously had no pretensions to any kind of decor or culinary fad; it was just a country pub.

From inside, where we were now, the whole thing looked like the view from the interior of the roadside café in the scene from Duel, in which Dennis Weaver tries to find refuge only to discover that his unseen pursuer could have been one of the characters sitting at the bar. He kept looking outside across the same dustbowl carpark towards the highway wondering where his adversary was.

There was only one customer at this bar and the bistro, called the Red Room, was empty. The man behind the bar came and propped open the door directly from the bistro to the exterior. 'Bit of air,' he smiled. The rain had stopped and a kind of post-rain vapour came in and tried to cool us. I read the menu. The room was roughly red decored; ceiling and bits of wall and chair panels, and possibly the carpet, and unlit fat red candles 1970s style on the tables, of which there were about ten for four or six. We sat at one of the tables for six at the front with a view of both the bar and the exterior. Trucks snarled by. The highway steamed. Drinks first. Then food. Order and pay at the bar, said the sign. I paid at the bar and, twenty minutes later, the chef came out from a rear door in the Red Room and checked a detail of one of the orders and went back in again, and another ten minutes later out he came with the meals. $10 blackboard special, steak with chips and salad. Children’s special roast. 'Thai' beef salad. $15 blackboard special kebab. Bowl of wedges with chilli sauce and sour cream. The steak was medium rare porterhouse, as good as it gets. Steak can only be so good. Over $40 and you're paying for the decor. The chips were crisp and the 'Thai' salad was huge slices meat that was pink on the inside and slightly charred on the outside and done in some kind of fragrant marinade that tasted hot and cooling at the same time, and the whole thing sat on a forest of green and red. It would have fed six diners at an inner city 'Thai' place. The kebab was two barbells of juicy lamb on a bed of edible vegetation.

Something changed in the room, which was already mostly red. Outside, the lowering sun was leaching orange, which bounced off the sky and shot through the windows, and everyone's face took on a deeper glow. I thought they were just enjoying their meals. The placed looked like a tangerine dream spaceship ride from a 1950s sci-fi movie, or was that the wine talking?

Later, from out of the kitchen emerged some plates bearing steamships of chocolate and date pudding sailing valiantly through oceans of melting ice cream. We left the table and threw darts in the bar while an interstate cricket game burbled on the TV behind the dance floor. Yes, a dance floor in the bar. Old parquetry that had seen better years, scratched and worn from several generations of drunk patrons.

We fixed up the bill and went back to the cabin via the watercourse. It was dry again.

*

Edward River Hotel
6 Davidson St, Deniliquin, New South Wales 2710
Kitchen Hand rating: 5 stars. This kind of place does not exist south of the imaginary line separating the outback and the rest of Australia.