Twentieth century modern.

Under a hot heavy sky that sang low like a faraway siren I held the six-cylinder engine at just under two thousand revs. It would be a three-hour drive on a sultry Saturday morning with five occupants on board and a playlist of classical music and progressive rock. But the three hours would not be continuous. I like to break it up. We left just after nine.

The road to Sydney was the usual snarl through the foothills of the Great Divide, those little mounds of earth that want to be mountains; the ones you look at and think 'I want to run up that hill and roll down again' as you ride past in your remembered childhood. I drove past one of them and left it circling like a slow dancer in the rear vision mirror, and turned off at the second Seymour exit. Then I pointed the car straight north and rolled into Shepparton an hour later. 

We parked off the main street and walked around and looked for a place for a late breakfast or an early lunch. The older teenager pointed to a church converted into a cafe. Let's go in there, he said. I can't eat in a church, I joked, wondering whether I really was 100% joking. I still find it difficult to accept the concept of repurposed churches. We went in anyway. Wait here, said a sign. Come here, said a waitress at the same time, pointing to a table for six.

There was a painted portrait on the wall. Is that Guy Grossi, I asked the waitress when she took our orders. Surely he doesn't work here as well. She laughed and said one of the owners had once employed him. (I'd known Grossi - not personally - since he worked/owned/managed/ran several cafes and restaurants around the Melbourne CBD starting with that small Italian cafe upstairs off Little Bourke Street in 1976 when at that time you could get a bowl of minestrone for about $1.50 and coffee was forty cents.) After a collective four coffees, a milkshake, two giant sandwiches in rolled up flat bread containing egg and bacon and sundry other ingredients and drenched in some kind of cheesy mayonnaise-based sauce, a serve of eggs benedict, and a giant scone with jam and cream, we left. It was just after midday.

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Friar's Cafe, Fryers (sic) Street, Shepparton. (The cafe's name might have been a triple pun on the street name, the building's origin, and what the chef does. But who knows? I didn't ask.)

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The major highway curls right - northeast - just past Shepparton, on its heavily-trafficked journey towards the Murray river. But we detoured directly to the right, through Numurkah, from where a B-road, a flat black strip of farmland-lined solitude, leads straight north.

Silence is golden. The car is no Rolls-Royce, but one of the quietest in its class. The cylinders ticked gently, like an old watch, and the new Michelins barely whispered. So that, in the car, the lowest notes of the Rachmaninoff piece were a distant eruption of massed human voice, a subterranean dream, a transcendental passage. Hot fields full of nothing passed. Then something by Eric Korngold, a kind of cinematic explosion of voice and orchestra. When you're driving, especially across a flat unending heatwave-illusory landscape, music like this seems to colour the passing scenery with painted gold leaf. The Korngold piece finished and we jumped a few decades to Dark Side of the Moon, as natural a segue as you're likely to hear. Classical or progressive? I can't decide. Labels are just labels. 

Clare Torry's tortured, aching vocals in The Great Gig in the Sky seemed to rain down from the few clouds, and the searing acid licks of Any Colour You Like faded as the car came to rest, perpendicular to the major highway again, facing the Strathmerton bakery on the other side. We arrived in Tocumwal mid-afternoon.