Nothing but the Pub

It was the light that drew me to Middleton.   Actually it was the lack of it. It was that and a yarn on the mulga wire saying the pub there was a ‘gotta-see’. And because I was camping, I didn’t much care that it had no accommodation, apparently there was plenty across the road. So anyway I headed down west from Winton, with the ubiquitous gales bashing me at every turn and on every straight. (There ain’t too many turns!) The road from Winton to Middleton sees the country morph from harsh to brutal, from grey to red and back again. New hues come through but the toughness only ever increases. Hughenden is the end of the bush and start of the outback. This is the land of the laconic single finger driver’s wave from the hand uppermost on the steering wheel. If you’ve been out there you know what I mean..the index finger raised, part in a kind of “g’day”   and part a salute for being a fellow crazy out here in the Vast. In the heat of the day I see nothing movin

So anyway, I’m in a saloon in New York, not far from the East River but my thoughts have just zoomed back home to the Riverina and Deniliquin on the Edward. Maybe ten years ago I was down at Denny speaking with a great gentleman who’s sadly since passed away. Bill Mulham was the lifeblood of the local historical society and we spoke for a couple of hours about the history of the area. At the end he asked if I knew about the shear tree to the north of the town. Seems that in 1914 a young shearer signed up for the War to end all Wars and stuck his shears into a tree at Pretty Pine, saying he’d get ‘em when he got back. He never returned and the shears are still embedded in the tree, only by now they’re about 5 metres up. I was comfortable enough with Bill to tell him that one of the few things I remembered from high school science was that trees grow from the top, only grasses grow from the bottom and so the shears simply couldn't rise up as the tree grows. O

When Henry Lawson left Hungerford in 1893 after a stay of possibly just one but probably two nights to walk the 220 kms back east to Bourke, he turned his back not just on the town, but also on the bush. He never returned to the outback despite the trip giving him material that would fill his stories and his ‘sketches’ for several years. The day after arriving here after walking from Toorale Station with his mate Jim Gordon, Henry wrote to his Aunt Emma. He told her that she could have, “no idea of the horrors of the country out here. Men tramp and beg and live like dogs…The flies start at daylight and we fight them all day till dark – then mosquitoes start.” Describing himself as a, “ beaten man”, he vowed to, “ start back tomorrow …(and) never to face the bush again .” Lawson would later write that the town straddled the border with ‘ two houses and a humpy in New South Wales, and five houses in Queensland……both the pubs are in Queensland .” And he ad