Stawell

It all leads up to this, this race obviously, and again, we didn't have the technology to do this at the time.

So like we did at Stawell, w- would you give me the honor of sitting and-

[laughs] Mm

... and talking me through one of the most famous moments in the history of Australia?

[laughs]

Well, no, I'm not expecting you to run under 400 at Stawell-

I know

... on 48 Flat.

Yes

... might've stopped at, what's next? Might've been Stawell or Ararat.

There's a good bakery there, so we got a pasty and a coffee.

Oh, nice.

So I saw that Ballarat was obviously a town which has a range of support in terms of health services and education, and, and that if I was ever to have a family, that this was the place where I could certainly work.

It also provided opportunities to go further west to, say, the Grampians or Stawell, Ararat, Horsham, all of those kind of areas, to work as in some kind of outreach capacity.

I've always been attracted to the quiet of being out in the country on a bushwalk or hiking, kayaking, which I do, you know, with my wife and family.

There's the lack of a commute in stressy traffic for an hour in a city every day, and then there's the ability at the same time to be able to travel down to the big city for a cultural or sporting event if we want to, which increasingly we don't do.

Yes.

with Liam and Leah, who live in Stawell.

Oh, nice.

We've always planned to get back together and have a meal together, which we will do, but we think of them often, particularly when the cats are playing Collingwood.

How long has it been? There was a dull, sick interval as he grappled, again, perhaps, with how much to say, how much would be enough to stop the questions.

Since November, we met at a gallery in Stawell.

She was, she's an artist, I helped her get in with the residency committee.

It wasn't supposed to, he searched for a word, ends up with, it just happened.

Um, and in fact, there's one here in Australia.

Um, it's at a place called Stawell, uh, in, uh, Victoria.

It's down a gold mine, I think.

Uh, you bury these things deep in the earth so that you're, you're minimizing y- terrestrial effects.

Mm.

But that's not been replicated anywhere else.

I think that was one of the reasons why the Stawell facility, uh, was initiated down in Victoria, um, in order to, to, to check whether this is real, the, this story that's coming from Italy.

Um, unfortunately, I can't read any more in my article [chuckles] 'cause it's got all these zigzags across the, across the field of view, which are interested in-- interesting in their own right.