We were in Beechworth for the 2016 Opera in the Alps, always a glittering night for 7000-10,000 people sitting under the stars listening to some of the best young and experienced vocal cords on the continent.

But there’s  something odd about a few folk in this otherwise beautiful, graceful, picturesque town of  2789 people at last count. While most local businesses were beaut, celebrating this influx of people and wallets, some were … unusual.

Mrs Whacked went in to the local supermarket – called Ritchie’s;  funny old game retailing – to get some basics as we had a little cabin booked for the weekend.

The teenage checkout girl, without any prodding, started venting her views on opera: “I don’t get it. I don’t like it. It’s just for yuppies etc etc.”

Mrs Whacked came out muttering darkly and so we ventured into the “antiques” and old stuff store across the road from the supermarket and sitting outside were two good old boys soaking in the rays and sucking up the nicotine, one passing loud comment about the place filling up with “ yuppies”.  There’s a theme here.

Mrs Whacked could contain it no longer and offered the pointed comment that our daughter was featuring on the program on the open air stage that evening. Without a hint of embarrassment, he said with warmth and sincerity: “Good luck love, sure she’ll go really well.”

About this stage, I felt the need for eggs and bacon and nuclear-strength coffee, so we pulled up at the nearest cosmopolitan-looking café and were told breakfast finished 11 minutes ago.

“What, do eggs go rotten at a preset time here? Does bacon last only until 11am when it mysteriously turns into prosciutto?”   I took out a second mortgage for a pie instead.

The same thing happened at the nearby nationally known brewery/restaurant. We were told no pizzas were available until 6pm.  At the next table, off-duty brewery staff were munching on … pizzas. We took out a third mortgage for kabana, crackers and cheese blocks.

The weirdness continued on Saturday night as the majestically treed 9th fairway on the golf course became, for a little while, one of Australia’s cultural focal points.

Mrs Whacked had her little bottles of soda water confiscated as we were not allowed to take glass into the sprawling picnicking and seated areas.

Someone feared they could slash people, or be thrown. (Absurdly, you could BUY glass bottles of beer and wine on the fairway.) At the OPERA? What sort of opera goer fuels up and glasses his mates or lobs bottles on stage?

 Pity anyone who tried that with Teddy Tahu-Rhodes, the NZ-born giant baritone who performed that night. Or even soprano Greta Bradman, come to that.

Dangerous sort, 70-year-old yuppie opera mob.  Too dangerous to be allowed to run about with glass, or have bacon after 11am or pizzas before 6pm.

While the superb concert was going on beneath a million stars … the local supermarket was being totally destroyed by fire about one kilometre away.

Personally, I suspected opera heavyweight Teddy the Torch, especially when I looked it up and found out “Tahu” is Maori for “to set on fire”. I swear I did not make that up.

But that was not – allegedly – the case. A local teenage girl has been charged with arson.  I cast no aspersions. That’s not the Yuppie code.                          – Wayne Gregson