Hot Weather and Marriage Disputes

Our ute doesn’t have air-conditioning and it was hot. But we’d just moved to Yass and I was itching to explore the region, so I hassled Justin into accompanying me on a Saturday outing to Harden, a farming community 62-kilometres north-west of Yass and 342-kilometres west of Sydney.

One very sweaty drive later, tempers were unsurprisingly on edge, so we thought it best to see the sights separately — I fossicked through the Harden-Murrumburah Historical Museum and a vintage shop, while Justin stayed in the car drinking iced coffee and listening to the cricket on the radio.

At first, lunch seemed to make the situation worse. I have the most inconvenient food intolerances, which seem to be unheard of in Harden eateries. In desperation, we headed to the local supermarket, where we agreed on a single gluten and dairy-free item … a barbecued chicken. Well, one skeleton and a box of wet wipes later and we’d discovered the solution to any marital dispute.

In a fresh and perky mood, we wandered past crumbling historic facades in Harden’s centre, before driving through the town’s back streets in search of residential icons. That’s where I found and snuck into this backyard of car wrecks and Suffolk-cross sheep. Fortunately for me, the makers of the gloriously plastic Pix Panorama — described in the owner’s manual as a “pice (sic) of precision machinery” — think it’s a waste of precious film to leave gaps between frames. The result is an extended montage of moving bodies, coloured with an old-world rust from cross-processing Fuji Sensia 100.

PS: you’ll be pleased to know we’re installing air-conditioning in the ute this summer.