A second journey along the highway with a camera started to reveal some things for me. On/off ramps and the islands of land caught in the middle where particularly interesting. These are sometimes used as gateway monuments to towns and sometimes contain fragment of history like a few remaining exotic plantings from an old farmhouse or a convict stone wall. Maybe they function as a drainage or retention area. Mostly they are 'empty'.
Castlemaine has a 'ye olde worlde' thing going on, roots music, 'natural' products, antiques etc. This is continued in the festival aesthetic with pennyfarthings, town cryers, historic buildings as festival hubs. There is a strange sentimentality for the old and decaying but also a timelessness that urbanites especially enjoy.
The different spatial and temporal scales of a country town work in much the same way as a large urban park. The town offers most of the amenities of the city but without as structured social, spatial and temporal hierarchies. In that way the town itself acts as a liminal space for city dwellers and there is much potential in layering and reframing country towns to include a metropolitan population and programme.
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