Sunday afternoon exit.

An hour to Dromana from the sharp end of the peninsula, on what is usually a fifteen minute drive. Late Sunday. The sun behind us. This will jam up even tighter once everyone tries to muscle onto the freeway back to the city. Sure enough, I rounded the curve away from the beach road and there they were, almost stationary on the overpass, just their roofs showing. I spurned the turn-in and kept ahead, passing under the city bound ant-trail of cars. I flicked a quick left and right hook at the Mornington turn-off, and in a few minutes we were on a dead straight roller coaster through farm land where, at the peaks, as you pass under linear stands of old windbreak pines dating to the nineteenth century, you can glimpse Westernport’s oily flat wetness in the distance ahead before it drops out of sight. Then north again, through Hastings, and onto the other freeway and home in an hour. 

There had been whispers of permanent - mainly of the ‘retired’ type - residents spying, or appointing themselves lockdown sheriffs, or otherwise similarly busying themselves. Indeed, they had been encouraged by government to do so. As far back as March some, revisiting their primary school art classes or their anti-Vietnam protest days, had made big banners reading Visitors Go Home. Baby boomer art lives on.