The new freeway skirting Geelong (pop. 250,000) is an arc so perfect it is almost artificial, half-circling the city like a whining Electrolux floor polisher wielded by a 1950s frocked housewife on linoleum, pink roses rampant. New? The bypass has probably been there fifteen years, but I don’t come down this way much any more. In the early 1970s my family purchased a slightly down-at-heel ex-farmhouse in Birregurra, a small farming town in the western district. Geelong was the halfway point, and the road faltered through the city’s endless stoplights, over a railway bridge under which old diesels slept in glittering rail dust, past industries and factories and a cement works and the Ford engine plant and a greyhound track and the fourth-division soccer fields and a water park. Once past Geelong, the journey's second half had been easy, like a long gradual landing in a light aircraft on a gigantic flat green field. The house was a rambling - and possibly even slightly crumbling - t
Recipes and ruminations from a small house in a big city.