If you leave my Tiny Train House and turn away from civilization, rather than toward it, you'll find yourself following an overgrown, rusted train line, the sleepers rotted and filled with termites, an occasional piece of abandoned rail machinery dotted the lines.
Blink, and you'll miss where the traffic zone changes, signalling the end of TinyTrainTown- it's easy to fly right through here and barely even recognise it's a village.
You'll drive through a few more like that, too- other tiny train towns, little villages with one multipurpose general store that have continued to grin on, if not to thrive....
The train line has been deserted for the better part of fifty years. What was once a bustling area of chook farms and orchards, a wholesale feed company that made constant use of the train line nearby; is now a sleepy grouping of towns made up of a handful of streets, used mostly only by locals as a short cut to the nearby freeway.
So... you're driving along a bush road at one hundreds click an hour. The scenery is nothing but scrub, and it all looks the same... it's no wonder people get so lost in the Australian bushland.
And then, suddenly...
"What the f*ck is that!?"
What the f*ck, indeed.
As we can see, there is quite literally nothing on either side of this... oddity... except for road, scrub, more road, and more scrub.
And this.... thing... on the side of the road. (The rules of writing tell us that there is always a better word than "thing". But in this case... I' really not so sure.)
You can tell people who aren't familiar with this road if you happen to be driving behind them when they pass it. Their brake lights will suddenly flash red as the driver pumps down in shock. The more adventurous hit the brakes hard and swing in to check it out in detail.
Not that detail helps much... it is as it appears. A great bid chunk of concrete. On top of another chunk of concrete.
My mum assures me that it is, actually, a sculpture, and apparently it used to have a plaque on it dedicating it to 'human endurance'.
Human endurance, my butt. After much thinking and theorising over this (Bunny's best guess was that it was osme kind of alien spaceship, and thousands of people had driven past and said "What the f*ck is that!?" but no one ever actually stopped to check it out in detail. Plausible) the best I've got is... human laziness. And rampant cost effectiveness.
The sculpture/ alien craft/ thing sits in a very close proximity to where the Tiny Train Road intersects the local freeway, and a whole big chunk of earth has been cut out to allow it go through uninterrupted. Which means Tiny Train Road effectively became a bridge...
Held in place with massive concrete struts.
Say there's a strut- or two- leftover? Being cut or molded or whatever to a custom size means it's not useful for anything else. And hauling something so heavy back to the CBD or any major township would cost a small fortune.
What do you do with two tonne of concrete so it doesn't exactly look like industrial littering...?
You make it into a huge, f*ck off ugly sculpture. And sit back and laugh to yourself at the thought of thousand of people driving past it, almost causing rear end accidents, muttering to themselves...
"What the f*ck is that...?"