Mark Roberts #25 Slide 24 Unknown creek crossing - Millthorpe, Blayney area.

I have only seen this creek crossing twice. It is not on a highway or a main road but I know it is somewhere around Millthorpe or Blayney. The first time I came across it I was in the car with my parents. We had probably been to visit someone and were heading back to the Mitchell Highway. Everything was dry, the paddocks were brown, trees were a dusty green and the sky an intense Australian blue. The narrow road turned a corner and there was suddenly a almost English image - willow trees along a creek bed, thick green shrubs almost growing across the road. There was a small building on the right hand side of the road covered in a rose bush or briar. The road curved to the left and dropped down into the greenness of the creek. After crossing the creek the road twisted back up through the green and back into Australia.

The image stayed with me as if a dream. An impossible image - a piece of Europe dropped into the Central West. Then years later, lost on the backroads between Orange and Bathurst, I came across it again. The same building, the same briar and the same greenness. Again it was sudden, unexpected, impossible to know exactly where I was. So now, again, the image has the quality of a dream.