By around 2pm, the streets surrounding the Dungog Showground were lined with cars. More were streaming in every hour to the Showground proper to find a park among the trees and the stock floats - horses unloaded and saddled - ready for the town's first rodeo in two years.
There was an unmistakable energy about the place - a kind of unspoken, but collectively understood urge to knock off two years of pandemic-accumulated dust and to pick up we're we had left off.
