An hour and a half on the freeway, and we were there. A small town with wide gravel roads, roundabouts instead of traffic lights and a city centre with a Myer that felt like it had been trapped in a time warp since 1995. It was quaint, it was quiet, with hidden laneways and old, stately buildings pushed up against clean, modern structures, all edges and glass. It was the chalk to Melbourne’s cheese. We could have been anywhere.