Nelligen on a Sunday morning looks like a TV advert for a retirement village where everyone is ageless and smiling and playing tennis and there's no crime or illness or disease and everybody is permanently high on happiness.
As we walked the loop from Braidwood Street to Runnyford Road to Currawong Street to Clyde Boulevard to Maisies Lane, everything looked lovely and sunny in the fresh morning air, with early-risers tending their gardens, waving to neighbours, and patting their dogs.
Hemmed in by the river and the mountains, and surrounded by State Forests and National Parks, Nelligen will always be the size it is now. It has no need for a shopping mall, or a Burger King, or the golden arches of McDonald's. Yes, there is a Nelligen Progress Association but it does its best to keep progress at the Bay.
There are a couple of McMansions but they're on the Riverbend side where waterfront blocks (only one vacant one left!) have been selling for three-quarter of a million and a couple of owners felt compelled to spend another million on their own versions of a prostrate Trump Tower, but the rest of Nelligen still has that country-feel-and-look about it, with even new houses blending in nicely with the old.
It takes about two hours for day-trippers from Canberra to come down the mountain, and before the seemingly endless cavalcade of shiny four-wheel-drives arrives, the village still looks like something time forgot. For the last 171 years.
