Closed for winter signs are rare these days. » “Tuscany is not real country any more. There is an explosion of people. The density of population in Italy is not thinkable in Australia. I read once that some very important things you cannot buy are silence, peace and time, of course. We came to Australia for a holiday for three months. We discovered this part of the country and, well, I would like to say we fell in love with it, but it was more rational because we were looking for a place with good services. Here you have Warrnambool for the services and Melbourne is not too far to go for business or pleasure.”
“I think he was very surprised when he arrived here. He’d never been to Australia before and, of course, he knew that Port Fairy was about three hours from Melbourne, but he was probably expecting a such bigger town. It was the end of April, cold and wet, there was no-one around. He was wondering where the people was (sic), who was the chocolate for!” Semi-retired electrical engineer and seachanger, Tim Mellor, who runs one of the nation’s few remaining kite shops in Port Fairy, says that 15 years ago many businesses would shut their doors come winter because there were so few tourists around. Not any more. Closed for winter signs are rare these days. 30 slow magazine
Photography by Rob Hickman and Tourism Victoria
Marco recalls bringing the globallylauded Italian chocolatier, Andrea Slitti, to Port Fairy to show him where they’d opened the first Slitti chocolate shop in Australia. They drove along the Hamilton Highway from Melbourne ‘through 350 kilometres of nothing,’ as Marco calls it.