The Royal Mail at Booroorban, on the Cobb between Hay and Deniliquin

“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 dubious about their story. The Olympics was really only a 3 month business window and they seemed to be over capitalising.” Turns out he was right and stocking Packer’s gestating casino at Barrangaroo in Sydney was the real motive.

Anyway Mandy drove the 73kms up from Deniliquin and had a look at the hibernating pub. The bricks alone seemed to be worth more than the price they were asking.

“I knew the history of the hotel and well, you need to live somewhere and being a builder I had our place in Denny ready for the market so we sold up there and bought this place as our home.

Then Mandy decided we might as well be doing something useful so she decided to put the licence back under it.”

All the locals, and that covers people within a 75km radius, supported the return of the pub but Coles sent a barrister to the hearing to object on the grounds that this small stand-alone pub would be detrimental to sales at their liquor outlet in Griffith 190 kms away.

They overcame that bit of bastardry and finally, after a three year struggle opened the doors as a pub on Christmas Eve 1999. “Or it might’ve been 2000, I’m not certain. It’s a while ago now!” admits Roger.

They now run it on their own, seven days a week, unable to afford staff and forced to take separate holidays. Several times a year Roger heads out for 3 or 4 days fishing and then holds the fort whilst Mandy heads out for time with the grandkids.

Which means there’s a fair chance when you turn up the bar’ll be deserted because they’ll be out the back doing other stuff between customers. This, it’d seem is part of a long tradition:

Back in 1954 one Peter Snodgrass, correspondent for The Land Newspaper rocked up here: “I called at the Royal Mail Hotel last week…. (and) the hotelkeeper, was nowhere to be found. That is not unusual, because this quiet little gentleman has many jobs to do.

But, Snoddy noticed a ‘hung-bell’ and got all nostalgic and explanatory:

“It was the bell-hanger who wired them "upstairs and downstairs and in my lady's chamber" in the most mysterious way, until they terminated in graceful handles that could be turned in every room or on the exterior walls by the back and front doors.

ONE turn of the handle would cause a maid to lift her eyes from the baking-board, the ironing board, or the range in the kitchen to the madly clanging bell above her head and, by its position in the row, she could tell where her presence was required.

Two turns of the handle was a sign of great urgency; and a clanging full of foreboding.”

Nowadays there’s a far simpler cow bell on the bar that just needs a quick shake to have either of the owners heading to the fridge for you!

I finish my 5 dollar stubby and tell Roger to not get up - he’s in serious pain with his hip. Instead I head inside, get one for each of us from the fridge and he says he’ll sort out my slate later from the notes I’ve left on the bar.

Access to the bar from the front is over a well trod and elegantly worn down wooden threshold which gives way to a small barroom dominated by a redtop pool table at one end and dining tables at the other. 

Behind the bar, beside a signed Richmond AFL jersey, is the carved wooden nameplate proclaiming this as “The Headless Horseman Bar” in recognition of one of the area’s legends:

Sometime in the 1850’s following the death of a drover named, “Doyle” at The Black Swamp, some 20kms south of Booroorban, others drovers began seeing his headless ghost riding through their camps.

Jack Bushby in his history of this area wrote, “(the headless ghost of Doyle) would ride through the camp like a phantom causing the cattle to rush and the dogs to shrink away. Terror would follow with cattle, dogs, drovers all in a wild stampede."

I head back out and ask about the footy jumper. It’s just under 150 kms almost due south to the Murray River and the state border but Roger reckons the Murrumbidgee, 50kms north is the real border.

“Everything changed when the rail service to from Sydney to Hay was cut back in the ‘80’s. Back then all the essentials, the papers and the beer came from Sydney but when the trains stopped it was easier to bring it in by road from Melbourne so the beer changed and the papers changed. If you say ‘footy’ south of the Murrumbidgee it means AFL and there’s the parking. South of the ‘Bidgee you angle park nose in but north of it you park rear in. It’s like being in Victoria here!”

A tractor with an 8 metre wide disc pulls up. It's Boof who’s been cutting a firebreak beside the road up from Pretty Pine. He hands Roger some money and heads inside for a softie.

He only cuts the break on the eastern side of the road because the winds that blow all summer come in from the west, dry and hard and most of the blazes are caused by idiots chucking cigarettes and there’s little need for a break on the upwind side.

Across the driveway near where Boof’s parked is a rock with a plaque. It marks a time capsule that was buried on the spot during the town’s centenary celebrations in 1985 and which was opened twenty five years later. A decent crowd turned up in 2010 to watch the unearthing.

Bare hands and crowbars couldn't move it so a tractor was called in and the rock upended. Then the blokes got together and started digging. And digging.

A couple of feet down: nothing.

Another foot or so: nothing.

They dug a bit more and still nothing so they decided to all have a break and head in to the bar for a cleanser.

After a round they headed back out and one of the diggers looked at the bottom of the obelisk and noticed some concrete which was strange. So he hit it with his shovel. It shattered and revealed a tube.

Yep, the time capsule had been sitting just beside them for the last two hours of digging. So they got over that annoyance and opened it. Turns out not much had happened in Booroorban in the last quarter of a century so they stuck a bit more stuff in it, sealed it, filled in the waste-of-time-hole and buried the bugger again.

Hopefully they told their kids just where it is under the rock!

A ute stops beside us and Roger announces it’s “Politician Pete” from a nearby merino stud. Peter’s a councillor and explains the forced amalgamations and the troubles of these small rural shires which need to join together but which are also fundamentally different.

We all solve the problems of the world and of the local area as trucks and caravans tear past on the Cobb Hwy. A couple toot but none stop. There’s free camping at the front of the pub for those not needing power:

“We always try to get a self contained caravan parked out the front early in the afternoon because others will see it and come in. There’s powered sites out the back that we charge a bit for.” Plus there’re four twin rooms in the hotel itself at forty bucks a head.

I need to get going, to get off the road before the hoppers get too numerous and as I gear up, I ask Roger if it was a good decision to come here and how long they’re planning on staying.

“Yeah,” he mulls, “it ties you down a bit but it’s a good life here. But it’ll be a lot better when I get this new hip.”  

I pick up my stuff from the bar and sort out my slate. Peter helps himself to another and brings one out for Roger. This is the 17^th pub I’ve been to this week. Some of them have been real beauties, - great country pubs,  but not one of them has been more authentic, more intimately part of its community than the Royal Mail at Booroorban.  By all means go there for its history because you’ll stick around for its present.