Every time entrepreneur Frank Burke is on radio talking about resurrecting the Old Hume Highway the station plays Route 66, an anthem to North America’s famous highway.
But Mr Burke wants Australian music to promote the original route from Sydney to Port Phillip Bay in Victoria for fatigued drivers and tourists.
So he approached Geoff Mack who wrote “I’ve Been Everywhere”, a hit song released in 1962, to tweak the original with the chorus: “We are going everywhere on the Old Hume Highway.” The original singer, Lucky Starr, has re-recorded the classic track, managing to fit in the 86 towns along Australia’s most famous highway without missing a beat.
“We’re Going Everywhere” aims to raise awareness of communities bypassed by the new highway, such as Gunning, where Peta Luck and her daughter Laura Murphy bought the Old Hume Highway cafe in 2014.
The Luck family is descended from early European settlers in Gunning. Mrs Luck left the public service to re-connect with her community through the cafe, and says 50 per cent of trade comes from locals, the other 50 per cent are travellers from all over Australia.
“They turn off because they are sick of the service centres that just have McDonalds or KFC; they have heard we have great coffee in Gunning,” she said. “They get lamb burger with salad, lamb, Greek yoghurt, mint jelly and Spanish onion.”
Lots of grey nomads, car, motorbike and cycling clubs and commercial travellers wander in under pressed-metal ceilings looking for something other than pre-packaged fast food,.
“We do have a fair number of people who specify they want real Australian food. We employ 10 in this cafe, some are casuals who only get a couple of shifts a week, the little 14 and 15 year-olds. We get a lot of travellers who value that and want to be part of that,” Mrs Luck said.
A cafe since the Gunning bypass, the shop was a haberdashery and general store. The 1995 highway bypass emptied Gunning of much of its commerce, coinciding with a dark chapter for the village before a farmer’s wife, Melinda Medway, opened the Merino Cafe and later the Old Hume Cafe, resurrected the village’s famous lamb burger, and lured traffic off the new dual highway.
“After the trucks left, the town slowed down, the drought was terrible, we had [incurable sheep-wasting] Ovine Johne’s disease, some farmers were suicidal. On our property we buried 300 sheep,” Mrs Medway said.
A New Zealand company’s failed attempt to open a new service centre near the town was the last straw. “We thought we’d make the whole town a service centre to create employment,” Mrs Medway said.