That banging and crashing noise you might have heard at 6:30am on the outskirts of town was my trailer's tailgate snapping off and skidding after me, cartwheeling along the road looking for something to slice in half. (The screeching noise was me.) The tailgate finished up on the other side of the road. Lucky there was no traffic at that time. Its holiday season and if it had been, say, 10:00am there would have been cars going both ways.

A spectacular pothole, cunningly hidden in the shade, was the culprit. I trudged up the road to retrieve the tailgate and paused to admire the pothole. Magnificent. It was a good 20cm deep and as big as a family-sized pizza. Perhaps a signpost might have been appropriate: "Welcome to Bright, beware of low-flying vehicles."

The local economy thrives on tourism. There is an opportunity there….a day tour of the Alpine Shire potholes. The Eurobin Sinkhole....The Porepunkah Tube...The Wandiligong Whopper....plenty to work with there.

The one that broke my trailer was, fortunately, in the 60km zone. If I had hit that on the main road at the 100km speed limit I suspect the trailer and my car might have parted company. Up near our place there is such a monster. It’s a recurring pothole. It gets "fixed", and two rainy days later is has opened up again. I drove past last year and a local, in protest, had spray-painted "WTF??" with an arrow pointing to the pothole. As if you could miss it…

And that's the problem. People didn't miss it. One day I drove by and a family were being comforted by the side of the road by another group pf people. Their car had snapped its front axle in the pothole, and there was a long, long swerving skid mark on the road (which is still there) where the front tyre had dragged at right-angles. Must have been terrifying.

Nowadays its repaired again…sort of. The surface around it is bubbled and warped, not at all a flat surface, and the cavern it will become has started to open up again. You can tell the tourists vs the locals as they drive through. The locals swerve out onto the side of the road, kicking up gravel on the following vehicles, and across to the other side of the road, into incoming traffic. That's where I had my windscreen smashed by a flying stone 12 months ago.

But the tourists don't know to take evasive action, and they plow through causing their car to bounce quite high in the air.

I've been doing some road repairs myself. When we had our road graded, it was long overdue. It’s a gravel road, sand and small stones, with plenty of ups and downs. Without proper channeling of water the runoff process , when it rains heavily, over the years, had carved into the road and it was starting to degrade faster. It was a big job…the road company brought in 19 loads of the gravel (190 cubic metres!), and the grader and roller were here for a couple of days. It was expensive, but beautiful workmanship, and five years later we are only just starting to see some wear and tear.

But I have gravel, a shovel and a trailer. I can fix it. So I've been telling myself. My eye is not as good as it needs to be to align the levels correctly, but after I've had a go its better than it was. We've had some heavy rain since, and there was some new channeling, but I can see where the problem is and I should be able to top it up.

The pothole in Bright is in the shade because its in the long, majestic arcade of Avenue of Honour memorial trees planted after World War 1. So, they are almost 100 year old, and mostly elm trees. They are just starting to turn now, and as usual, it is astonishingly pretty. Bright runs an autumn festival celebrating the magnificence of those trees and trees like that in the area. So it will come as a surprise to hear that the council has approved a development along that stretch of some 180 (or 320, depending on who you listen to) dwellings. The developer is apparently lobbying to cut down the trees to make room for the roads needed to support so many homes.

I guess I'll be able t see the potholes if all that shade is removed.