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 - timber homestead in a street parallel to the main, but three back and high on a hill. It faced north, and the front verandah gave on a couple of acres of frustrated orchard, oversaw vastness beyond that. On summer mornings you could hear the rumble and shriek of the Warrnambool train amplified by the volcanic plain across which it rattled.
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Late in 1974, one of those train-whistle mornings: I am standing on the veranda watching the sun rise and from the kitchen, the kettle answers the whistle, its mimicry like a lyrebird's. The school year is over and I am shrouded in a post-examination limbo of unknowingness, or at least a purgatory of having-not-studied-enough guilt. My sister and her husband are the temporary custodians of the old farmhouse while waiting for their new home to be finished in Corio near the Geelong Ford factory, where he is a fitter and turner on the engine line. Eventually, they will move into their freshly-baked 1970s chocolate brick house with purple bench tops, upholstery, curtains and carpets. Their marriage will last almost two decades, by this family’s standards a long and happy one.
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Six years later, evening. I have thrown open the Birregurra house for a weekend party for fellow media students. The house is overflowing, tents dot the lawn, a fire blazes. Someone has set up a sound system, and neighbours are far away enough not to hear what it is playing. Inside, the kitchen table is a Jackson Pollock of food spillages, ashtrays overflowing with monochrome dead cigarettes, and empty or not-empty Ben Ean bottles. Later, the night smoulders and dies. The tired host, having surrendered all the rooms to guests, spends the night in his star-silvered car, and is joined by his friend Kay.
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In that hot tight square of time, a neat quarter of a year, the affair had ignited under the autumnal trees of Bowen Lane, the walkways and instant-coffee-cafes of the brutalist grey RMIT fort, and a Cardigan Street terrace; and it had flamed under those western district stars over Birregurra, and it burned out on a landline one pre-winter grey 1980 day in the dangerous trenches of suburban Melbourne where green monsters ply their trade.
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Late 2023. A Saturday, late morning, overcast. We had driven around that giant flat roller coaster ride circumnavigating Geelong, silver under cloud, and now the road was arrow-straight to the western district. My passengers were my eldest teenager and his friend who had just finished school like I had those decades ago. They were heading a little further than Birregurra: to Lorne, the surf beach, half an hour further south. Off the highway we swung towards Deans Marsh, leaving Birregurra's lonely hill diminishing in the rear vision mirror. Then we entered the Otway forest where the road twists and turns, and emerged from the canopy so unexpectedly that the sudden beach beyond looks like a painted theatrical backdrop, except the sea is foaming and curling.
We unpacked the car in the driveway of a 1950s fibro beach shack and carried in enough food to feed six elephants.
Then I left them to their week of post-exam exquisite agony, and drove home.
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There are two ways back to the city. Instead of returning via Birregurra I took the Great Ocean Road, which snakes around hairpin bends on the edge of nothing, ocean angry far below; and which offers the best views in the country if you happen not to be driving. In order not to go over the edge, I stared at two white lines for thirty minutes, and then pulled in at the Anglesea bakery for some bread. While I was there I looked into the second hand shop next door and found, amongst the usual dross of terrible CDs, a rare and fine copy of ‘Moondance’. Van Morrison unused? Back in the car it slid into the player with a retro ‘ssssttt’ and we purred around more impossible bends, and Van Morrison’s 1970 voice sounded like ... now, today, yesterday, tomorrow, whatever.
Music has the uncanny power to take you back in time, altering the warp and weft of minute-by-tiresome-minute linear existence… almost as if you could relive something, or even change the course of …
Don't even think about it.
And it stoned me to my soul
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‘Moondance’, Van Morrison, 1970, Warner Bros. No. 65 in Rolling Stone’s best albums of all time, 2003.
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Stone me just like Jelly Roll/And it stoned me
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