There are three mountain bikes leaning against the terrace of the Corner Café — speciality brownies with beetroot, local grown — in the main street of Scottsdale, in north-east Tassie, rolling dairyland. At my table, Glenn Moore, a tall man with an expression permanently between bemusement and bewilderment, looks out across the country beyond the town.

“It seemed simple enough to me. It’s just a bike trail isn’t it?”

Moore is President of Rotary for this small town; a dairy farmer, as are many people around here, family going back generations, as do many families around here. Solid conservative type — he gave a shiver when I spoke of MONA — and he finds it confusing to be assailed as some sort of hipster greenie. His crime? Backing a cycle trail, the North East Cycle Trail, through the region, on the old disused rail line. The story of its twists and turns to completion is a fable of our times.

“We put the first one in ten years ago,” Moore says. “Going from here, north … it’s had steady use. But the real advantage is it made this place a cycling place. Now there’s the Blue Derby [a mountain bike adventure trail]. Twenty-five thousand people a year come through. Derby used to be a ghost town.”

So extending the trail seemed a no-brainer. “We had a feasibility study in 2014,” Moore says, mournfully. He’s the deadspit of Hunter S. Thompson, though I do not mention this to him. “And we were ready to go.”

It was then all hell broke loose.

***

“Yeah uh, look mate, we think rail has a bright future in the north-east.” The voice on the phone is Stuart Bryce, a vineyard owner along the line, halfway between Scottsdale and Lilydale. British, with the voice of a man who makes things happen, Bryce has been the face of North-East Heritage Rail, the group assembled to — you guessed it — oppose the new cycle trail. And to develop a heritage rail line instead.

“What are the objections to the new cycle path?” I asked.

“Well look this cuts through farms, so disturbances of livestock, there are issues of theft, this is a high crime area, and of course biosecurity.”

“Biosecurity?”

“People bring things in on their boots, they get off the trail to walk around …”

I nerved up. “I heard, in Hobart …”

“Yessss …”

“That people here said they didn’t want a cycle trail …”

“Yes …”

“Because it would bring in rapists …”

Pause. A sigh down the line.

“Look, uh, mate, that was one farmer …”

Most experts say that a heritage rail line is utterly unsustainable, even with an all-volunteer staff. Some suggest that the desired effect of the rail proposal is to spoil other plans, so nothing gets done.

Sad to say — speaking as a gunzel myself — that seems almost undeniable. To be train ready, the line would need 15,000 replacement sleepers, and eventually re-railing. The heritage scheme proposes two trains a week running not from Launceston, but merely between Lilydale and Scottsdale. If the heritage route was eventually tracked back to Launceston — or to the railhead outside of town (“People could be bussed there from the transit centre,” Bryce noted, cheerfully) — the whole trip would take seven hours both ways, given rail stock and track condition.

“Seven hours?” I said down the phone to Bryce. “It’s pretty country but it’s not exactly the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, attraction-wise.”

“Yeah, uh, mate, but people could stop for a Devonshire tea.”

***

The Scottsdale cycle path quickly became a story about the old world versus the new, hitting Tasmanian and then national papers, getting an ABC community forum broadcast. But it wasn’t like that at all, and there was a degree of misrecognition.

Once the heritage rail lobby got a campaign going, and commissioned a not-untendentious report on the viability of the heritage line from a schmick European consultancy (spoiler alert: it’s viable!), there was nothing else to be done but, well, over to Glenn:

“They commissioned another feasibility study. Effectively it was a study of the feasibility of the earlier feasibility study.” The coup de grace? Labor backed the heritage rail line in the recent election, to scarf up stray gunzel votes in here and Strahan.

By then, the heritage rail idea had gained real support. “I prefer rail,” said a shop owner when I vox-popped the main street. “Not everyone can cycle. Everyone can go on a train.” Everyone knows what she means. Thundering mountain bikes, lycra, are a cultural message about who’s in and who’s out. The people of Scottsdale preferred a ghost train, and all that came with it, to what the cycle trail might bring.

I got it. Poor old Glenn didn’t. I left him at the terrace of the corner café, staring out over his beautiful little town, and the gorgeous country behind.

A season in Utopia had become an episode of Utopia.

“It’s just a cycle trail,” he said again.

It is. But it is something else entirely, and the defining conflict of our society, in this age.