The Tooma Inn, at Tooma, NSW ('Coulda been our capital'!)

Nole recalls growing up in the Tooma Inn and for a short time around 1958 she and her brother ran the place. “Dad had the license but wasn't living here and in those days by law the licensee had to live on site. My brother and I were sharing a room down the end so we became the licensees. I was the cook. This was before they started the Snowy and we had the engineers who were working on the road staying here. I must’ve been able to cook because they ate it. I didn't have any complaints.”

Her grandfather’s sister, Auntie Rose, lived in a small room at the eastern side of the pub. “Her room had a small door into the post office next door. She ran the post office for years”

In 1949 even the far off Herald in Melbourne recognized her efforts. Under a heading, “SWITCH-GIRL 92 TODAY”, it wrote: “Miss Rosanna Maginnity, who is 92 today, has run the post office at Tooma in Tumburumba Shire since 1911 claims to be the oldest switch-girl In Australia…”

And these were obviously times of both expansion for this wild town and the introduction of some pretty fancy technology. The Melbourne Herald went on:

“A new switchboard has just been installed to cope with the nine subscribers and a trunk line. Miss Maginnity celebrated her birthday by going to church. Later the family will have a small party”.

But the pub’s not the only connection Nole has with this ‘coulda been capital’ town.

Forty five years before David Maginnity took over the Tooma Inn, this tiny town was in the news for another capital reason. Two local police, a sergeant and a trooper, were out on patrol in the hills to the north when they stumbled on bushranger Mad Dog Morgan.

A few weeks earlier Morgan had shot and killed the overseer at nearby Round Hill Station and he wasted no time in firing at this pair. His first volley felled the sergeant and the trooper, one Constable Churchley, turned and fled, leaving his boss to die alone on the mountain.

In its coverage of the affair the Gundagai Indpendent chose its words delicately: “Constable Churchley's part in the affray was anything but heroic”. He was later dismissed from the force, charged with cowardice.

 

Nole and Matt at the bar of the Tooma Inn.

The slain officer left a wife and four children.  He was David Maginnity, Nole’s great grand-father and it was one of his sons who went on to buy the Tooma Inn..

Nole knows these stories well and as she’s winding up, Jeff joins us.

There were 30 kids at Tooma Public school when Jeff was there in the late fifties but by the time he’d left town in 1979 to study interior design in Sydney, there were less than five and the school was in its final year.

But Jeff maintained his connections with the town:

Jeff shares his vision and enthusiasm

“In 2016 I came down for Easter for the gymkhana and everyone said, why don't you buy the store (next to the pub). A lady who’d converted it from the store to what it is today came from Thredbo in the late eighties but she struggled to make a go of it as a quality restaurant…It’d been closed for two years.  I asked Rob if he had a key to the building and he told me that he thought the far window wasn't locked and  we climbed in. We came through to the kitchen and the light was on, so we turned it off and had a look all over the place. It was very impressive.

On the way back to Sydney I processed all this and I rang the owner, I was asking questions about rates and water, all that sort of stuff. I was asking about the solar panels on the roof and she told me that she had to leave a light on all the time as a safety thing so I franticly rang Rob here and told him he had to break in and turn the light on before the solar all exploded!”

Long story short, Jeff and a partner from just outa town bought the place, extended the outside wall into where the old skillion post office had been to accommodate his new kitchen, and opened it as an exquisite boutique B&B. 

As we’ve been yarning, a steady flow of folks from around have dropped in, ordered tea and a drink and drifted off again.

It’s Wednesday night and as the pub’s closed on Mondays and Tuesdays this is the start of their visiting week. There’s no gambling, no pokies and the television hasn't been switched on. Everyone just gets a drink, orders a feed and opens up a yarn with whomever’s closest.

Towards the end of the night, as the ranks thin, Lindy emerges from the kitchen.

Rob and Lindy bought the pub in 2013 and ran it themselves for three years until the long hours seven days a week burnt them out. They put in managers whilst they had a break but the managers didn't work out and the pub was going backwards.

Publican, Rob in the afternoon glow at Tooma

“We knew for the good of the pub, and for the community, we had to come back and be hands on,” explains Rob, “but we knew it couldn't be like the first time around. We needed a balance between working and living.”

So in 2017 they returned to the pub, keeping it closed on the two quietest days of the week: Lindy reckons, “it’s working very well. We’ve learnt how to serve this wonderful community but not sacrifice ourselves.”

One hundred and ten years before they arrived back in Tooma, the town hosted a very different group. A group of parliamentarians motored out from Albury to inspect the place – evaluating it as a possible site for the new national capital. One of the members, Sir John Quick, member for Bendigo summed up the verdict: “I had heard a great deal of Tooma before, but I must repeat that it has exceeded my most sanguine expectations. I am quite convinced that it is the best site that I have had any information about for a Federal Capital, and I intend to strongly advocate it in the House and use all my influence to support it…… I am profoundly impressed with the magnificence of the scenery, with the richness and fertility of the soil, with the presence of abundant water for all purposes including water power. Some of the richest country in Australia is in the area – a richness that I had never previously dreamt of.”

Tooma, of course lost out in the final ballot to Canberra/Yass but, listening to Nole, Jeff, Rob and Lindy is damn hard to grasp that if just 4 MP’s had voted differently, this tiny pub in the middle of nowhere would’ve been slap on the main street of our national capital!

The Tooma Inn and the Guest House.