Alexandra Bridge

You know how true-crime podcasts always open with *“it was a crime that shook the community”*? Well, in Alexandra Bridge, that crime was a 2019 TAB machine that ate someone’s $50 note and hasn’t coughed it up since.

It’s still the town’s unsolved cold case. We’re not over it.

Every Friday night at the pub—the one with the single beer tap that runs dry at alarming speed—someone brings it up. *“Remember when Trevor’s fifty went in and never came out?”* Mate, we remember. There’s a laminated notice on the machine now: “Out of Order (since ’19).” It might as well be a memorial plaque.

The town itself is a blink-and-you-miss-it stretch of gravel and corrugated iron where the only traffic jam is three utes outside the servo. The servo’s “Open” sign hasn’t glowed since 2009, but we still wave at it. The local Facebook group is 90% photos of washed-out roads and 10% arguments about whose dog is the best ranger. And when the Bridgefest committee spent the entire annual budget on a new esky, the dispute over whether to have a jumping castle or a sheep-shearing demo tore the town apart for two summers. The festival hasn’t been held since.

Your misfit? A vegan from Fremantle who moved here for a “tree change” and now survives on tinned chickpeas and the withering stares of the local butcher. They tried to start a farmers’ market. The only produce was three lemons and a bag of roadkill kangaroo.

But who’d love it here? The retired FIFO worker with a bullbar that’s never hit anything but serves as a warning to emus. The person who waves at every car, even the ones they just passed, and calls the river “our ocean.” Someone who checks the rain gauge obsessively, leaves the porch light on for neighbours six kays away, and still believes—against all evidence—that the TAB machine might one day give back that fifty.

Alexandra Bridge: where the biggest crime is a faulty machine, and we’re still talking about it.