Centre to the Dish

Both men are tied to this country in ways that are neither abstract nor accidental.

Through all of this, the land remained what it had always been.

But those numbers, as tidy as they are, don’t tell the whole story. They flatten out the texture of lived life here

The same rules apply. Don’t overstay. Don’t claim it. Respect the place and it will return the favour.

It’s bush logic at its finest. Entirely implausible. Perfectly coherent. The idea that machinery evolves the way people do.

Standing there, between humour and mourning, invention and inevitability, it becomes clear that Condobolin isn’t hosting these stories so much as holding them

The rust is honest about it. It doesn’t pretend permanence. It just shows the cost of exposure

You understand why they are there. You even admire many of them. Craft, humour, resilience welded into form. But appreciation does not erase accumulation.

The tragedy is not that the white man named the land, it is that in doing so, he stopped listening to what it was already called.

Still, they stand. Because someone decided they should. Because someone calculated the risk.

Darkness and distance, those twin enemies of childhood travel, hung heavy over these roads. “Are we there yet?” wasn’t impatience so much as hope. And still the road goes on

But the land remembers even when we do not. It presses back gently, persistently, reclaiming what it can in the margins.