The chicken and gravy roll.

It was like the old British music hall comedy act in which players run in and out of random doors frightening each other. After a long drive, we had walked into a cafe in a small town just south of the border, where paranoia is running fast, like the Murray. A customer entered another door and people in the queue visibly cringed, as if it was a stick-up. A voice behind the counter shrilled ‘That’s the wrong door! Go around the corner and sanitise and mask!’ This was once an old rural hub where stoic farmers’ wives would park in the main street and discuss crutching. Now the farmers have gone and the tree-change arrivistes have filled the town with street art and city touchiness. A family of five wouldn’t fit on the stand-here isolation dots while waiting for the grizzled dolts in the queue to receive, like some entitled communion, their insufferable soy and almond lattes and gluten-free muffins, so we left.

The roadhouse set behind a gravel park was not quite out of town, and empty. Hungry by now, times five. It had been a long morning drive through northern Victoria’s austere flatlands, following silent B-roads through towns barely hanging on: Prairie, Kotta, Mitiamo. I parked and we went in. Behind the glass counter on which steam condensation danced like fire, the food was just made and ready packed in waxed brown-paper bags, titles scrawled in black marker. We sat at the big table. The boys ate Texas burgers the size of a small dinner plate - Texas meaning beef, bacon and fried onions - and Alex ate a devilled chicken hamburger, 'devil' referring to some kind of zingy sauce lurking amongst the sea of lettuce. She couldn't finish it. It was too big. Their mother ate a chicken BLT, a massive contradiction in terms (the sandwich not the contradiction), with a chocolate-drenched cappucino to wash it down. I ate what appeared to be the house special: a hot chicken and gravy roll which turned out to be what must have been at least half a bird drowned in gravy, tender and hot and falling out of the bread roll you had to hold with two hands. The bill: $38.

*

BP Roadhouse, Northern Highway, Rochester. Food: Hot and satisfying. Ambience: Truckstop basic. Value: $38? Unbeatable. Rating: Five stars.