Orange City

The start of another weekend and Batman’s gone off working a shift at the chopperdoc base in Orange, which means Ella and I have a whole weekend to fill.

I was really looking forward to seeing Orange because the Sydneysiders rave about it, describing it variously as beautiful, pretty or quaint, depending on what mood they’re in. And the guide books rave about the architecture and the way it’s laid out on a grand scale with European-style parks and wide boulevards.

Now don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice place and yes, it has a few old buildings, but if they’re raving about Orange, they’d just drop dead over something like the Cotswolds or Bath or even Chester because as far as I can tell, Orange has a couple of churches, a little town hall, a post office with regency-style columns and a theatre that looks like something you’d find at the end of Brighton pier. And after that it’s back to corrugated iron and concrete block, though admittedly the roads are wide and the cherry blossoms blooming either side give the place a British sort of feel that I haven’t noticed anywhere in Sydney.

There are a few other things that strike me about Orange. The first is the fact that almost all the residential buildings are detached houses on large plots and most of the ones around the city centre are in the classic federation-style like the ones in the first two pictures (federation-style refers to houses built around 1901, which is when the Australian states joined together to establish a larger federation and become all one country. The style varies slightly but they usually have high ornate ceilings and deep skirting boards and some sort of open fireplace). I haven’t seen a single apartment block, unlike in Sydney.

And if you drive a bit further out, you come across all of these little housing estates, a bit like the ones we build in Britain, though they somehow look twice as bad when you’re approaching them because the houses are almost all single storey and most of them have corrugated iron rooves which shine under the sunlight. The overall effect looks like a load of great big sheds stretching into the distance, though the individual houses themselves aren’t bad (bottom photo) depending on your attitude to vertical blinds and teenagers in green and gold shorts mowing the lawn using sit and ride mowers, like some sort of utopian vision.

Secondly, the women in Orange are an entirely different breed from the women in Sydney, so in the last three days I haven’t seen one Bugaboo pushchair, nor have I seen a single pair of designer sunglasses or anyone who looks as though they starve themselves thin 364 days of the year (in fact, quite the opposite as it appears you’re nobody in Orange until you’ve got a decent muffin top concealed under your skivvy, probably something to do with all the food and wine they produce out here).

And the only person clutching a take-out coffee has been me, which would make me very much the city mother if it weren’t for the muffin top helping me blend right in.

And then there’s the traffic, or lack of, and the fact you can actually find somewhere to park that’s not underground, and you don’t have to pay for it either. And you can also turn right at junctions, almost without exception. In retrospect, it’s no wonder the Sydneysiders have road rage is it?

Anyway, the most noticeable thing is that the people here in Orange actually talk to you; people passing on the street make a fuss of Ella, farmers tending their crops wave as we drive past and not only do they notice that we’re British, they’re interested in our Britishness and want to know exactly where we’re from and how we come to be in Orange of all places.

In Gloria Jean’s coffee house, for example, I dropped my purse while engaging in a conversation that the girl behind the counter actually started because she’d noticed I was British, and immediately a man appeared offering here, let me get that for you, which really took me aback.

“So if you’re living in Sydney, I’m guessing you have a frequent sipper card” said the waitress before taking my money, referring to the card you get stamped in Gloria Jean’s every time you buy a coffee (buy ten, get the eleventh one free). “I used to live there myself. The Sydneysiders are all frequent sippers”

“Yeah” I replied, leafing through my purse to find it, “they drink a lot of coffee in Sydney and I’ve kind of got the habit”

(And then she had a quick look at my card before she stamped it, just to check out which suburb I bought my coffee in. Once a Sydneysider, always a Sydneysider).

“Oh the Randwick branch” she observed, “that’s a nice suburb”.

“And not one I can really afford to live in” I said. “I haven’t got the right pushchair for Randwick”.

She smiled back and checked out my engagement ring, you know, like they do.

Until we came here, I hadn’t realised how unloved we feel in Sydney, because for the last eight months, I’ve had the distinct feeling that nobody there gives a toss about us, unlike the tourists, who always come away with the impression that the city’s people are so friendly (of course they’re friendly – you hang around Darling Harbour paying top dollar for average food and buy Ugg Boots for $289 at Circular Quay – they love you).

Our cause hasn’t been helped by the fact we’re only there for a year because once people realise you’re a temporary fixture, they can’t really be bothered to invest their time in making friends with you. Being in Orange reminds me that we’d have had a very different experience of Australia if we hadn’t lived in Sydney, something we’ve talked about quite a lot because there have been times we’ve wondered whether we did the wrong thing; perhaps we ought to have gone elsewhere, somewhere we could have afforded a house with a pool, somewhere we’d have made friends more easily, lived in a real street with real neighbours, not an apartment complex full of young professionals and other people just passing through.

The problem was, Sydney was the itch we came here to scratch; the place we couldn’t stop thinking about. So now we’ve scratched that itch, we’ve got another one and it’s called what if we’d lived somewhere else? The question is, how the bloody hell do we scratch that one?