Nothing but the Pub

  A yarn I wrote a coupla years back for a motorcycle magazine. Maybe some of the faces have changed but Barcaldine still has to be close to the very best place in Australia for a pub crawl! Before the fairies arrived at around 9.30, it’d been a pretty quiet Friday night at the Railway Hotel. The Sand Goannas were having their end of season bash out at the oval on the edge of town and so most of young blokes and their partners were out there celebrating a year of mixed fortunes. Which was fine by me: more time to chat with Pauline, the owner about running a pub in a town with the unique and special history of Barcaldine. Because if you’re interested in pubs or if you’re interested in Australian History or if you’re interested in the history of Australian pubs, Barcaldine is your Mecca, your Lourdes, your Sturgis, and the publicans with their contacts are your clergy! Its population of around 1500 would normally struggle to keep maybe a couple pubs afloat

“In mid-1997 we were living in a little cottage at my workshop and Mandy, my wife, came home one day and said, “Booroorban’s for sale” and I said, “good, leave it where it is.” And she said, “no, I’m jumping in the car and having a look at it, are you coming?” But I told her I’d seen it enough so she came up here and had a look at it.” It’s a quiet Sunday arvo as Roger, almost immobile with a bung hip relaxes out front of the Booroorban Pub and tells me how he and his wife ended up here, because it was the delicensed slumbering shell of the old Royal Mail Hotel at Booroorban that she’d come to see. Months earlier the Packers had sent a posse out into the bush. “They started out around Albury and cleaned out a whole lot of licences and they spread the word around that they were going to use the gaming and liquor licences for the Olympics. They weren’t at all interested in the buildings, just the licences.” Roger thought at the time it was strange business: “I was

(Editor's note: A mate mentioned the other day that he'd had a session with Fred Brophy at the Kilikivan Pub and my mind went back to a very memorable night with Fred at his (unfortunately now on the market) pub at Cracow a few years back. This is the yarn I did on Fred and his pub back in 2014) Look, I’ll get onto the pub in a sec, just want to yarn a bit about the publican himself for a moment because the Cracow might be an impressive two story classic Qld country watering hole, but Fred Brophy, who owns it casts a far larger shadow on the Australian Countryside. Fred runs the last touring boxing tent in Australia. He’s out-lasted that other icon, Jimmy Sharman and now might just be the only boxing tent showman in the world.   He’s the fourth generation of Brophy to bang the drum and shout, “Who’ll fight my boy?” and in 2011 was awarded the OAM. Not sure what it was for but if you told me it was for pugnacious larrikanism then I’d believe you. He’s been bo