Gold in the flatlands.

The road led north out of town on a vast hard plain pointing straight towards Australia's dead heart. We had emerged onto this flat superhighwayish landscape out of a series of curving roads through gulch, valley, pass, fissure; the land fractures that yielded 1850s Bendigo gold, whose evidence still lines that city's main streets. I drove the B-roads via Heathcote and Axedale to avoid linear Bendigo's endless stoplights and because I prefer B-roads anyway.

The houses along the northbound highway grew fewer, then the big industrial yards and warehouses muscled in, like in every other outer-suburban industrial wasteland in the world. A steel fabricator's warehouse, a wool-buyers' yard, a refrigeration works. Open fields, and then a lonely church, its sign recommending: Let Jesus Carry the Burden 1 Peter 5-7, in three different typefaces. A larger sign on the next property, a farm machinery sale yard, proclaimed: Kubota: This Is the Life, which was almost as spiritual. Behind the sign, neat lines of tractors sat in frozen poses, front-end loaders raised in the air as if in silent supplication.  

One or two more isolated private houses, closed in on themselves, palm tree canopies visible over tall fences like giraffes seen from outside a zoo. Then Cowboy World Western Warehouse, a brick building painted yellow all over like an abandoned western film set. A red For Sale sticker spoiled the yellow effect. People are not buying Wrangler jeans this year.

I drove on. Out of the distance, sailing closer like a mirage, another sign materialised: Gold Nugget Caravan Park and Resort. I slowed the car and turned left into a long driveway lined with rioting geraniums. At the end of the driveway, behind a boom gate, was an office building behind a gravel forecourt. Further back were rows of neat cabins, a children's playground, a mini-golf course, and a square of lawn in the middle of which lazed a rotary clothesline. Resort-style palm trees shaded long chairs by a pool, where you could lounge and believe you were not holidaying on a plain of basalt that had once spewed from volcanoes, far from any sea. 

The boom gate rose, and I pulled in beside cabin seventeen. 

*

Nightfall. I drove out of the Gold Nugget Caravan Park and Resort and turned north. A few miles of dark flat emptiness, then the black arrow of a highway glistening in the headlights leaned gently right to about north-north-east. Some random buildings slowly formed themselves into a small town where the highway doubled as its main street. Amidst a few darkened shops stood a ghostly white frontage on the right: the Huntly Hotel, an aspirantly appropriate name for such a modest building in a quiet town. I angle-parked directly in front, and we - two adults and three children (I had booked as such) - entered. A kind of reception area opened two ways; to a covered outdoor area on the left and a massive area the size of a barn to the right. The front had been an optical illusion. The place was enormous. Or maybe I just didn't notice in the dark. 

Sometime later plates were brought out. Glasses had already been refilled. More patrons arrived. Some early diners left. Deep-fried fish and crustacean pieces wearing batter danced off a plate and hovered crunchily in the air. A thick-edged pizza circled ominously. A chargrilled steak pink in the middle was a topographic escarpment on a village green. A 'loaded' beef burger unloaded itself. Beer battered flathead tails wagged. The place was amiably mobile if not over busy. It was an oasis but it might have been a mirage. I wasn't sure. The wreckage of a Caesar salad, the first in history to defeat me, lay broken like an unfinished harvest; crisp bacon on crisp lettuce fallen in parmigiana Reggiano-flecked tart dressing dew, pieces of chicken, pieces of April, a morning in May, a night in July, but who knows what month or year it was. I probably imagined the whole thing.

*

I punched the code and the boom gate, a luminescent shaft in the darkness, rose silently. Cabin seventeen was in total darkness. Next morning brought eye-squinting light, a low winter sun slanting across the flat miles, and the road home was a striated dreamscape.

*

Gold Nugget Caravan Park. Northern Highway, Epsom. Five stars. Figuratively if not literally an oasis. Clean cabins in pleasant grounds maintained by friendly hosts.

Huntly Hotel. Five stars. Worth the drive from Melbourne let alone Bendigo. Huge serves of quality fare in pleasant old-style pub surroundings.