Pretty Pine Hotel .... with locals like Nipper, a host like Denise and a goat named, "Horse", you're pretty assured any visit will be memorable!

In the afternoon light in October, the pub at Pretty Pine looks misnamed – Gorgeous Jacaranda Hotel would be hugely more apposite. Just to the right of the main entrance a beautiful specimen is peacocking its purple display against the lowering sun.

In the carpark, beside the Cobb Hwy a pair of John Deere headers, their trays tucked in behind is parked together with the wide-load warning ute.

Inside three blokes are chatting to Denise - joint boss of the place with her partner, Twang - who’s behind the bar. They still have to walk the combines another 40kms over to Conargo before heading back in the ute and are hoping they’ll be back in time for tea.

They’re from Rowena and they’re another face of the drought that’s ripping into the country:

“We’ve all got our own farms carrying wheat, chickpeas and barley but we haven’t sown at home for two years.  We’ve come down to try to find some work down here to pay some of the bills.  We had a little bit over at Warracknabeal near Horsham but then there was a late frost and that put us out of business and then we did some for a bloke over at Carrathool. He’s actually from Narrabri and we knew him from there and he gave us a few days work. The same bloke has some land over at Conargo so we’re walking  the headers over to there. We started out at Warracknabeal and doing 30kms an hour it’s a pretty decent trip.”

Three decent blokes forced to leave their families and their properties to go searching for work where the grass is just that bit greener.

Denise is almost aghast that they’d think they might miss out on some chaff.

“Whenever you get back, I’ll make you dinner. Don't rush, you’ll get a feed!”  Relieved, they smile and head out for the last stretch to the town where, just weeks after the breweries cut off credit a few years back, the pub burnt down.

Denise reassuringly sees them out as you would guests from your home then hurries back to make sure there’s a stool at the end of the bar, just around its corner.

“Nipper’s just parking.”

Nipper lives across the road on the site of the old school but cardio issues mean he drives over. Later he confesses, “I could walk back because alcohol thins my blood like aspirin  and I’m good for the trip home but it’s getting over there when I’ve not had a drink that’s the problem.”

Yep, makes sense.

Anyway he sits down on his perch and gets his stubby without having to tell Jade, an Irish visitor who’s also working tonight what he wants.

Nipper gets rolling.

“I only ever have to tell them once, on the first day each of ‘em are here,” he explains with the laid back comfort of a man who’s right at home, “from then on they know that I don't drink anything else.”

Jade, who’s surname happens to be the same as mine, pulls me a beer from the taps on the back wall and I ask what’s in the cookie jar on the high shelf of the back wall.

They’re homemade brownies and Canadian Rebecca, the other backpacker currently working here, but who tonight is having a shift off and is on this side of the bar here chimes in:

“The last backpacker working here was also Canadian and she missed her grandmother’s brownies so she asked for the recipe and then made up a batch and they were popular so when she left I took over the brownie making role.”

Nipper’s not into the brownies and reckons they can’t be too crash hot: “If they were any good,” he announces with the logic of a barrister, ‘the jar’d be empty.”

I ask him about ‘his’ stool and he reckons he’s not protective or territorial about it, at least not like some blokes get. “I remember the Colosseum  in Heidelberg in Melbourne when it first opened and a guy walked out and said, ‘you’re in my chair’, and I said, “you have to be joking”, and all the people in the bar stopped talking and were looking at me, so I moved. That place was a blood house, but it never got any of my blood!”

Nipper was four years old when he started coming up from Melbourne to Pretty Pine with his dad who was a mad keen fisherman. Each time they’d spend time in the pub but it wasn't until he was 16 that he had his first drink.

On one of the walls is a laminated list of all the publicans and the first Nipper can remember is Phyllis Lotty who had the pub from 1965-67.  She was the woman who served him his first beer and as we go through the list of owners, Nipper has a story about each and can name their partners.

“Most of ‘em left because their marriages broke down. There was a lot jumping over the back fence by neighbours to visit the wife whilst the husband was busy or away in Hay or Denny.”

He laughs, “yes, a lot of that went on and every time they’d get caught and suddenly the pub’d be on the market again.”

After he left school, which was some time before the scheduled graduation, Nipper found a job in a paper mill in Melbourne working four days on, four days off and pretty much each time he’d pack the car and head to Pretty Pine.

“I had no licence and the car had no rego. We’d just lift the rego sticker off the family caravan and stick in on the windscreen and I did that for years, never got caught, never got stopped.”

When he was 15 he met Jill and fell in love. A year later a mate told him about temporary tattoos and thought it’d be an idea to get one.

“I was told they’d last three years and then just fade away. Did it myself. Just an ordinary sew up your pants needle and then you wrap cotton around the bottom of it and dip it into a bottle of Indian ink and jab jab jab.  Hurt more than you realize. A few of us did it and of course they didn't fade but truly when you’re that age, they made you feel 10% tougher.”

They got married in a traditional shot-gun wedding at Moonee Ponds one Friday night and on the Saturday he packed the car and had a solo honeymoon at Pretty Pine. The marriage ended on the Monday but the fruit of the union, Nipper’s daughter still visits regularly.

He may not’ve been busted for driving without but that’s not to say Nipper’s not had an issue or two with the local constabulary.

For many years he rode motorbikes. “Once I got pulled up leaving here when I was about 19 and I was on a Triumph Daytona 500 I think it was and my mate had an Austin 1100.  We were all  going to the Globe Hotel in Deniliquin so off we go and I’m flat chatting it and then slowing down to get some clear road and then flat chatting it again and one of the exhaust pipes started coming out of the cyclinder.  Anyway this car came up behind me and looked like they wanted a drag so I flat chatted it and the pipe blew off but I kept in front of the car for fair way until it overtook me. It was a Mini Cooper S and it was the copper from Denny.”

He got pulled over and pleaded his case. The cop was decent and told him he’d bury the bluey for a year and a half and if Nipper kept out of mischief for that long, he chuck it.

The goat-trimmed pine.

“Eighteen months later I was up here in a car and had a local sheila with me and this local bloke saw the sheila and came over to the car and asked her what she was doing in a car with a desperate like me. I said who’re you calling a desperate and turned out he was a detective at Denny, probably the boyfriend of the girl. Anyway when I got back to Melbourne the next week a letter arrived telling me to front court up at Denny for speeding 18 months prior.  So the D’s gone back to the station and dug up the ticket and decided to get even with me for having his girl in my car

Cost me 70 bucks and in that was a week’s pay in those days. Lot of money. The mongrel.”

As we order another round of drinks, the three blokes from Rowena come through the door, the headers safely parked over at Conargo. I order a feed and mention the jacaranda to Denise.

“We actually have a little Murray pine out front that I’m trying to grow but my goat named, “Horse” keeps eating it." I have a feeling that this night has just begun!

The story of the Pretty Pine Hotel will be continued down the track a bit!