23. Let Me Be Mine - Spoon

Photo Credit: By I, Mattinbgn, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2347301

A few years ago we bought the practice of an adviser in Bendigo. He was a great operator and he embodies the best characteristics of financial advisers – dedicated to his clients, sceptical about the nonsense, generous and incredibly community minded.

His clients were spread all over regional Victoria, from Echuca in the north to East Gippsland to the Mornington and Bellarine Peninsula’s, and out over the border to Mount Gambier in South Australia.

He’d spent years helping people all over the state, under the now-defunct foundation of the financial advice business in Australia – the aggregated model.

This model – where services are provided across a broad portfolio of clients regardless of how much they’re paying you - was based on the idea of ‘it’ll all come out in the wash’.

Meaning that the aggregated revenue of the practice would cover the cost of providing advice to the entire client base. In effect – higher fee (or commission) clients would subsidise the delivery of advice to those contributing less to the revenue of the practice.

It’s an admirable approach, and one that’s allowed thousands of Australians access to advice that they otherwise couldn’t afford.

But there are serious issues inherent in the model, issues beyond a post about music. Suffice to say it’s no longer a viable option – for better or worse.

  * * *

One surprising feature of his practice, however, was a preponderance of clients in the mid-sized central Victorian town of Maryborough.

It turns out he’d lived there for quite a long time, raising his family and building his practice there.

What this meant for us was me spending a lot of time up there in the months after we took over, getting around with him to meet as many of his clients as possible.

I’d expected some resistance to the idea of someone from Melbourne coming up to take over, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Everybody was lovely – I haven’t eaten as many biscuits as I have visiting his clients – and really open to what we had to say.

It’s a solid town, with a pretty impressive train station (VLine to Ballarat, then into Southern Cross) and gorgeous houses, though everyone tells me it’s seen better days.

It was, strangely, central to the Victorian printing industry for years, until nearly all of the factories closed down. I say strangely because it’s two hours from Melbourne and an hour from Bendigo and Ballarat – on today’s roads. I’ve no idea how they ended up a printing powerhouse.

Cliché as it is, their attitude towards money is different than in Melbourne. The great Australian conversation on house prices isn’t quite as serious in a town where the median house price is $240,000 (with a median rent of $260 a week – a tidy yield of 5.6% a year).

So people aren’t quite as nervous around interest rates or bank policies or private schools or credit cards and car loans.

Which isn’t to say there are no worries.

Unemployment is a real issue, and everyone tells me meth is a pretty big problem. I haven’t seen it – I’m only there during the day – but then maybe I’m not looking hard enough.

The hipsters haven’t found it as yet either, and it might just be too big a town for them to turn it into another Daylesford or Castlemaine.

You also have what to me is the biggest drawback to living in a country town – everybody know’s everybody’s business. Strangely for somebody posting and sharing online, I appreciate my privacy too much to be entirely at ease with that level of community.

For one thing, I dread the ‘bump-into’ above just about everything, 

I had to get my tyres changed, so I thought I’d go to a local tyre shop in Maryborough. It was great – good service, quick work and a fantastic price.

What made me laugh was that when I got to an appointment later that day, they asked me how I went getting my tyre’s changed. I almost fell off my chair.

I think somebody they knew and that knew me had seen me waiting at the shop, and they’d spoken to somebody else and the information had beaten me to my client’s house.

There was nothing menacing about it, it’s just so different to the anonymity we have – and enjoy – in Melbourne. 

   * * *

One of my favourite things about my runs to Maryborough – besides the biscuits and finding crumbs in my shirt on the long drive home, with an embarrassed smile and lick of the thumb to get them all – is the drive.

It sits between Bendigo and Ballarat, so it’s off the main highways.

You can go to Ballarat and turn right, but the best way is to take the Western Freeway out past Bacchus Marsh, through Myrniong and Ballan to the Wallace exit.

Head past the Wallace pub – well worth checking out.

Through Bungaree then back over the Western Highway and keep heading north.

There are three main towns between Bungaree and Maryborough.

Creswick – home to Creswick Wool, a regional Victoria success story you’re probably aware of. It’s a decent town, with four pubs and one pharmacy I think. A respectable ratio no matter the size of the town.

Then there’s Clunes, an extraordinary looking town. Huge, broad thoroughfare, fringed by old buildings with large verandahs and enormous gutters that scream of floods you’d never expect.

And everything’s a hundred years old. It looks like a movie set (apparently parts of Mad Max were filmed here?) and I’m thoroughly disappointed every time I don’t see tumbleweed rolling along the deserted road.

It also boasts, charmingly, of an attraction I’ve yet to check out – the Clunes Bottle Museum.

Apparently it holds the largest collection of bottles in the southern hemisphere. I haven’t seen it for a few reasons, but mainly because I’m worried it’ll either be better than, or worse than, the picture I have in my mind.

The town is gorgeous, and it holds a ‘Booktown’ festival each year, which is just a dusty feather in its cap, if you ask me.

The third town is Talbot.

Similarly beautiful – honestly, the streetscape is out of a period film – but every time I go there it’s deserted.

Not derelict, mind you, it’s simply as if everyone just up and left before I got there, leaving cups of tea steaming in the cool air, jackets hanging over chairs and doors still swinging closed.

I never know if there’s a villainous rancher about to descend on the town – or if word of my imminent arrival has beaten me. It’s a little off-putting, to say the least.

I’m told it becomes a heaving mass of bodies on the third Sunday of every month when the farmer’s market is on, but I think my reaction – spinning around and asking “…really? Here?” has stopped people trying to convince me.

But it’s a lovely looking town, and if people would just stay around long enough for me to actually experience the town, I’m sure I’d like it.

   * * *

One of the many virtues of this drive is that I lose phone reception fairly early on, and only get it back as I pass through Creswick.

That’s 90 minutes, at least, of total disconnection each way. That’s something to luxuriate in.

I put music on, or line up a series of podcasts if my brain’s decided to hang around for the trip.

There’s nothing to be done to make up time – you’re already doing 110 most of the way.

The sheer, tyrannical distance between towns means that you just cruise along, listening to music, counting cows, pondering the flammable ugliness of the small, scrubby eucalypts along the way.

Brain off, cruise control on.

It’s pretty damned sweet. 

Early on, I’d get caught out by that loss of reception though – Spotify only works when you have data coming in.

So I’d hit the blackspot, the music would sputter to a stop, I’d look at my phone, see the ‘SOS’ in the reception image, curse – loudly – and try to find something on the radio.

And I can confidently say that the quality of radio programming is not one of the virtues of the trip.

It was a while before I remembered to download albums to my phone, and then for some reason I’d do only do one at a time. Which means I became very familiar with those albums, but also rapidly grew tired of them.

One of them was Spoons They Want My Soul album.

There’s one song in particular – Let Me Be Mine – that I really like on this album. There’s nothing terribly special about the song – it’s a gently grooving tune with a great rhythm and some rock-solid bass work (like many Spoon songs, come to think of it).

And it builds, the groove deepening, committing in the first two minutes. Then it bounces right into this, I don’t know what it’s called, a counter-riff? A musical response? Anyway, some sort of reply to the underlying groove.

And then, at the 3-minute mark, this second, third or maybe even fourth guitar starts responding at the end of the chorus.

It’s dancing around under there as the song comes to an end.

I love that bit, that tiny section of what’s a decent song. So much that I didn’t mind that it was one of the few tracks I could listen to in these blackspots.

   * * *

I was driving back early one night – I try to avoid the prime kangaroo collision hours of sunset and sunrise on these trips.

Everyone – I mean everyone – in the country has a story about hitting a kangaroo at sunrise or sunset. They get to you after a while, introducing a new layer of paranoia to night driving.

Anyway, this means that I’m driving home in the glorious dark of a regional night.

It’s the tail end of summer, so I have the windows down. Occasionally you can hear the insects over the wind flying past the car, but it’s quiet otherwise. Especially compared to a night in the city.

Overhead you can see the stars, all of them seemingly, shining bright in a clear sky.

It’s dark, proper dark, between the towns. The moon does what it can to light paddocks, but that silvery sheen isn’t quite the same as daylight.

The cruise control is set to 110km/h, the road is dead straight – this section is anyway – and the whole scene reminds me of the Simpsons where Homer farewells his mother.

There’s no interruption, nothing to break the quiet peace of driving a tonne and a half of steel through the country.

I think these periods are the most peaceful parts of my year.

Then you come to a rise, a rolling left turn over a creek, near a junction, and then it’s straight again. But uphill this time.

And there’s one of the bumps in this section that makes it feel like the car has hopped into the air, just for a moment. But long enough to bring your organs with it, before bouncing back down on the asphalt.

This little bump – the rollercoaster portion of the trip - caught me by surprise the first few times. It’s much more severe coming the other way, but you still gasp a little going uphill as your organs settle back down into their rightful places.

I remember this time in particular because Let Me Be Mine was bellowing out of my speakers, and I was car-dancing and tapping my hands on the door sill as the song climbed towards it’s groove crescendo. “Oooh-oooh-ooohing” along with Britt Daniel, and counter-bopping to that 3-minute riff as it rolls in.

And I’d forgotten all about the rollercoaster bump.

Then we hit, and it knocked the wind out of me for a few minutes.

That’s it.

Nothing serious, nothing drastic. Just a sudden reminder of that bump in the road.

And every time I hear this song now, I think of the peace of that dark stretch of road, under a starry sky, surrounded by moonlit paddocks.

Peace interrupted by a dancing idiot in a white car, getting surprised by a bump in the road.