And the pub? The Border Inn’s art deco facade is the pride of Apsley.

Locals barrel in from farms for a meal and a beer, their pockets lined with cheer from a healthy wool clip and soaring prices of fat lambs.

Travellers are drawn by the stark beauty of the surrounding redgum and wetlands country.

Caravans and RVs park alongside the inn, their peripatetic occupants merrily using the facilities and the hotel’s bar and dining room.

There are times when we all might wish ourselves far from the hustle of cities or, given recent events, what pass these days for the nation’s centres of power.

Apsley’s people are hoping those growing sentiments might deliver them a new era in the resurrection of their town.

The community is offering the Border Inn for sale.

It says something about the huge disparity between the big cities and tiny bush towns to mention the price: $99,000 for the leasehold.

But how has a community come to own a pub?

In 2014, the doors of the Border Inn had been shut for several years. This was intolerable for a village that boasted the oldest continuing horse-racing club in Victoria.

The Apsley Cup has been run annually since 1855 — a full decade before even the Melbourne Cup got under way — when the local pastoralists brought in their station horses and got up a purse worthy of the gold rush.

The finishing post for the early races was at the front door of the first Border Inn, which burned down and was replaced by the current building in 1885.

Even after the Apsley race meeting moved 40 years ago to the Edenhope racecourse, 20 kilometres to the east, rollicking after-parties continued at the Border Inn.

Apsley and its pub had quite a history. Why, the Indigenous cricketers who toured England in 1868 — Australia’s first internationals — were workers on pastoral stations around Apsley and the west Wimmera.

One of the players, Murrumgunerrimin — known, in the patronising style of the time, as Jimmy Tarpot — was raised on Benayeo Station, just outside Apsley. There’s a memorial to him in the Apsley cemetery, though he pulled out of the England tour just before the boat sailed.

Marvellously, he made his name as an unbeatable runner ... backwards. He ran the 100 metres backwards and barefoot in 14 seconds at the MCG in 1866.

Every year even now, the Jimmy Tarpot Backwards Cup is run as part of the Apsley Cup race meeting.

The great star of the first Indigenous team, Unaarrimin, known as Johnny Mullagh — whose home village of Harrow, also in the western Wimmera, pays continuing homage to him — got a less than stellar welcome when he played at Apsley, however. He was refused entry to the Border Inn, eating his lunch on the doorstep in protest.

A longer, disappeared and aching history is worn by scars still visible on big old redgums across the landscape. The first people, including clans of the Wergaia, Jardwadjali, Wotjobaluk, Jaadwa and Jupagalk peoples, cut bark from trees for canoes, carrying food and for shelter before their land and lives were stolen.

Not far away are more trees bearing marks — those of the Chinese making the long, baffling trek from the South Australian port of Robe to the Victorian goldfields between 1857 and 1863.

But a past had no point without a future, and in 2014, local property owners gathered to reopen the Border Inn. In the bush, if you want something done, you need to do it yourself.

Thus, 12 couples from the district clubbed together and bought the pub, never expecting a monetary return.

In saving the Border Inn, those 12 couples saved Apsley. Suddenly, there was a venue for meetings of the cricket club, the golf club, for footy players and all the other community groups in search of a home. The beer garden became the spot for a parents’ group, complete with a cubby house.

A corner of the inn became a general store. You could have a beer and pick up milk, butter and breakfast cereal.

People who had left the area began returning, and those who might have moved away chose to stay. Tourists, discovering the village had an inn, stayed over. Motorcyclists, cyclists and car clubs turned Apsley into a prime destination.

New parents paid renewed attention to the primary school and decided their children should no longer be bussed away to neighbouring towns.

The school now has 30 children.

Most of those couples who saved the pub and the town are in their 70s now and figure their work is done. So they’ve put the Border Inn up for sale, hoping, say, an energetic couple with an eye to the future, far from the big city, might see what they had seen: the vision of a future in an old Australian landscape.

In times like these, we need visions like that.