Although the main road heads off to the northeast and a very big city, we're going to make a diversion through Bringachookalong, Kickastickalong, and up the Wy Development Road to the very small town of Wee Kepler.
Wee Kepler is one of those insanely small towns with a population of double digits on a busy day and which swells to more than a hundred thousand once a year, for the Wee Kepler sports day. Folks from all over the country converge on Wee Kepler for that one day in November when the Uppies and the Downies play in their annual Tommyball match.
In the morning is feté part of the day when at Wee Kepler Racecourse, there is a tat fair, the Wee Kepler Quarter Mile Cat Race, the Saucepan Head Jousting Tournament, an Oratory Competition, a Folk Meleé, as well as Axe Darts.
The Wee Kepler Tommyball Cup is the premier trophy that people come to see being played for and even though this is an amateur event, scouts from professional clubs have been known to pluck players from here and put them on the world stage.
The rules of Tommyball are so arcane and cryptic that the umpires need to hold a law degree just to be able to properly adjudicate the game. The game is traditionally played on a rhombus shaped field but the Wee Kepler Racecourse makes use of both the racetrack and the infield.
As with all Tommyball matches, there are fifteen players on a team; which includes two motorbike riders but unlike the professional game, the teams are allowed to allocate their weaponry credits across all fifteen players instead of just six. This had the unexpected result one year of the Uppies building an armored tank type thing out of their two motorbikes; which promptly fell over and remained on its back after firing a single shell. The Uppies lost 908-3 that year, which was unfortunate.
However since we have come on a Friday and in April instead of November, none of this is here. The only things which inhabit the town are the locals whose population is barely in double digits and of course the memories of Novembers past.
At this time of year, the place is so quiet that the only sounds that can be heard are the far off warbling of magpies and the gentle rustle of the wind in the trees.
There is a faint smell of decades of racing cat poop, and the long expired smells of grease and two stroke additive. There are faded adverts for things like Patriot brand cigarettes and Golden Fleece petrol and Homestead chicken and a bunch of other things that have faded slowly from people's memories and now exist only as faded detritus.
Over in the next town of MacDonald which is on the MacDonald River and named after some dude called MacDonald who presumably said "Wahay, A River! I'm going to name it after me because there's no way that the local people who already live here have discovered this before and have already given it a name", is a building that totally used to be a Pizza Hut. There are still a few 'used to be a Pizza Huts' around but they pale in comparison to the splendour of a 'used to be an IHOP' which are veritable cathedrals to pancakes.
"Ahhhhhh aahhhh aaah ah ahhhhhaaaah, Pancakes."
"This is a real estate agent now. Please get out of the premises."
"Okaaaaahhhhhhhaaaaaaay, Pancakes"
Small towns are full of memories of things that are not currently going on. For the people who make the annual pilgrimage out there, the whole journey has some kind of almost mythical feel about it. There is a sense of purpose when you have to go somewhere to do a special thing. For the people who live in small towns though, their sense of going somewhere for a special thing must by definition be in some other place that isn't there. The only place that I can think of where literally everyone shows up for a special thing in a town, is the town of Betoota in Queensland where the usual population of place is zero. That also explains the reason behind the name of the satirical online newspaper called the Betoota Advocate. The reportage of that newspaper is as imaginary as this road trip.
We can't actually stay in Wee Kepler because it is so small that it doesn't have a hotel. Admittedly I could just imagine up a hotel but that's a wee bit silly, isn't it?
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