Somewhere behind a perfectly ordinary country verandah home in Yandoit, Victoria, there is an entire town. Not a cubby house. Not a shed with a sign on it. An actual town — a general store, a blacksmith, a Cobb & Co booking office, a courthouse, a jail, a saddlery, a grain store, a theatre, and a church with its own white picket fence — all built by hand over 23 years by an owner who, by all accounts, really likes Westerns. The town has a name. It’s called Cross Creek, after the setting of the 1956 film The Fastest Gun Alive, because if you’re going to commit to a bit, you commit properly.
And it is a serious commit. Corrugated iron roofs weathered to exactly the right shade of rust. Hand-lettered signage. A working forge at the blacksmith’s. A saloon kitted out with a full bar, a wall of whiskey, and mannequins standing in for the regulars — a barkeep in a bowler hat, a saloon girl in red and black lace, holding court by the piano. There’s a brothel. There’s a jail. There’s a church, steepled and crossed, that the agents suggested could become a wedding venue, which feels both completely reasonable and slightly besides the point.
Then you remember there’s also a house. A genuinely nice one — three bedrooms, two bathrooms, wraparound verandah, solar panels, a circular gravel drive, set on roughly 12.5 acres of central Victorian bush. Inside, marble benchtops and white cabinetry in the kitchen, exposed stone walls, original fireplaces, and a home theatre that’s gone almost as hard as the town out back: velvet recliners, a taxidermy lion, ship models, and movie posters lining the walls. It is, on its own, a completely sensible rural property. It just happens to come with its own frontier town attached.
The listing has since been pulled, which means somebody, somewhere, now owns a Wild West village and isn’t telling us about it. We have questions. Mainly: did you keep the mannequins? Because the mannequins are doing a lot of the work here, and Cross Creek without its barkeep is just a really well-built shed with a sign on it.
