The ex-Lankey's Creek Wine Palace. Don't you dare call it a 'shanty'!

Here’s a story about a pub.

Well, the remnants of what was once a pub.

Actually change that to the remnants of a Wine Shanty

In fact, best not to risk the ire of the probably pedantic ghost of its long time owner and give it the full regal moniker on which she insisted.

Mrs Alexander, who ran the place between Holbrook and Jingellic for near half a century would promptly admonish anyone who within her earshot demeaned her house by referring to it as a ‘shanty’. Rather, it was the “Lankey’s Creek Wine Palace” and she would be ever so  thankful if it were referred to as such!

She was a stickler for proper behaviour and courtesy was Barbara Isabelle Alexander, and she had no truck with any lack of respect or innuendo about her morals and class.

One summer afternoon at the end of December 1919, this woman, who’s husband was absent, allegedly at the War, and who lived with her sister, had a visit from an old friend who was invited to stay for a cuppa.

Things turned a bit heated when the visitor, Mrs Louise Hope made some allegations against Barbara involving her intentions with Charlie Hope and called Barbara and her sister, “liar(s) …..low women, (whose) mode of living proves it.”

Charlie Hope was Louise’s brother-in-law and the owner of the Wine Palace (and village post mistress) was nothing if not sensitive and so on the basis of a comment made in private, she sued her friend for slander in public.

And for good measure her sister, Laura Gifford filed as well. They each wanted £400 for damage to their reputations and the matter reached the District Court in Albury.

On the second day of the hearing one of the jurors decided he couldn't be bothered with the rubbish so he didn't turn up and the local cop told everyone he thought the plaintiffs both ‘bore a high reputation’ and that the defendant also ‘bore a good character.’ 

His Honor smiled, struck out the case and Mrs Alexander, no doubt feeling vindicated and in need of a drink, returned to Lankey’s Creek and her palace.

Meanwhile, I of course do go too far along the Holbrook road, see the railway carriages, swing around and then spot the less than palatial ruins up on my right. As I park Super Ten in the shade, there’s a couple of blokes in the distance approaching on a quad bike and behind them a few camels.

From over the fence I check out the falling-down fibro wreck that is the shell of the old watering hole and as I do the two on the quad check out my bike and then come over.

“So you’ve been to Grong Grong eh?”

They’ve been reading the stickers on the bike’s panniers and when I tell ‘em yeah and it’s a pretty decent pub, the same bloke lights up.

“My brother Doug made that place famous, he’s been written about in a book on pubs. It was all about how he played a hoax on the Sydney papers and bullshitted to them how Grong Grong was the home of Neenish tarts. Did they tell you that story when you were there?”

I walk back to Super Ten, open the top box and pull out a book.

“This one?”

“Yes, that’s the book me brother’s in!”

I point to the name of the author at the base of the cover.

“That’s me. I wrote it. I’m Colin. How’re ya goin?”

“Be buggered! It’s a small world!”

We all shake hands and have a laugh. Turns out the other bloke’s Peter and he owns the farm that the shanty ruins are on. He also owns the camels and would I like to meet one?

Now, no-one’s too sure just when the Lankey’s Creek wine saloon actually opened for the first time.

In April 1897 The Wagga Advertisier advised that the Licensing Court to be held in Germanton on the 30^th of that month was scheduled to hear an application for a colonial wine license by James Gifford of Lankey’s Creek.

Now that sounds to me like an application for a new license.

Problem is, the next month the same paper announced that at this hearing the Court granted a renewal of a colonial wine license to James Gifford of Lankey’s Creek. So that doesn't settle much.

Then a bit over twenty years later, in reporting the slander case brought by Mrs Alexander in 1919 which I’ve mentioned above, the Border Mail reported testimony that the ‘accommodation house and post office had been conducted by the family for 30 years’ putting its birth at 1889.

So let’s just say late 19^th century and from at least 1897 the place was in the name of Gifford, the maiden name of Mrs Barbara Alexander.

Back at Jingellic I’d asked Rex Beaver about it and he remembered his first drink there over a half century later in the early 1960’s:

Me and a mate, Chris Bowman who used to make butter at Walwa, we got a lift to Holbrook this is no bull and we couldn't get a lift back here to Jingellic. So anyway we had to walk from Holbrook to Lankey’s Creek and we walked past Lankeys to old Sunshine Miller’s place. Sunshine was a bloke I used to shear for and he said what’re you guys doing and we told him we’d walked from Holbrook and he bugger that, I’ll give you a lift but first I’ll take you up to the shanty for a drink. We’d never had a drink there, I was still probably only 22, 23.”

So the three of them headed up to Mrs Alexander’s and Rex wasn't too impressed.

“I was a beer drinker then, didn't like wine but they only sold wine and it was pretty ordinary wine, very ordinary but we drank it. I don't think we even had a choice. It was all just one wine but anyway we had one each and then Sunshine gave us a lift down to town.”

The bush really is a small place. I found a real goldmine when I was backgrounding this Palace. Just up the road in Holbrook, a bloke named John Meredith was born in 1920. Inspired and encouraged by both his parents he developed a real love for Australian bush songs, poetry and music. In the 1950’s he and a couple of mates formed a band which, after a couple of name changes became “The Bushwackers”.

They were successful. Released in 1956 their 78rpm disc of ‘The Drover’s Dream’ sold over 20,000 copies which back then was unheard of. (They can also be held responsible (accountable?) for introducing the lagerphone to Australian bush music!

But John Meredith’s love of the music wasn't limited to performance. Lugging cumbersome equipment all over the country, he recorded the music of, and conversations with, old timers with connections to the music for which he had unlimited passion.

His most priceless legacy is The Meredith Collection now held in the National Library of Australia –  Amongst its over 1,000 unique and culturally valuable items is an audio yarn he recorded in 1989 with Jack “Sunshine” Miller, the same bloke who gave Rex Beaver and his mate their first drink at Lankey’s Creek.

In the interview Sunshine shone some light on the old Wine Palace of Mrs Alexander going back to his memories of the very beginning. After Peter and his mate have gone and I’ve trod through the ruins, I sit on the old porch and switch on my phone and listen to my recording of John Meredith’s yarn with Sunshine Miller.

“The shanty’s always been in the Alexanders’ and the Giffords’ name. Up to the beginning of WW1 (it) was in Jim Gifford’s name because in those days a woman couldn't hold a licence and Jim lived over the gap and Mrs Alexander was his sister.”

But then Jim Gifford went to war, Barbara married Alexander, a skin buyer from Corryong and with the war forcing a change in ownership rules, she took over the license.

According to Sunshine Miller, and just perhaps shedding an insight into Mrs Hope’s allegations about Barbara Alexander’s ‘mode of living’, she and Alexander ‘parted pretty soon after … (getting married).”

Her husband seemingly vanished without too much of a trace. In 1918 there was mention in the papers that’ “there was …a round of cheers for Pte Alexander, who was home on leave (from the war)” at a function at the Lankey’s Creek Town Hall but whether this was a son, the husband or some other relative is impossible to know.

But in 1942 Marie Isabelle Alexander married Ronald Keith Mott in Holbrook. Whilst the groom was described as the second son of Mr and Mrs T Mott of Holbrook, the bride was described as the daughter of only Mrs B Alexander of Lankey’s Creek. There was no mention of her sire.

Later there was mention of a son who’d married a lass from Spring Vale but again no mention of his father. This is the same father who Mrs Alexander told the slander trial was serving in the war.  And yet the only photograph from this time showing the a farewell for young men headed to the front features three locals, possibly Mrs Alexander but no husband.

No sign of Mr Alexander!

But enough of the suppositions of bastardry and loose living and back to the refreshment house!

Irrespective of what type of wine you requested at the Palace back then it all came out of the same cask and it was ‘black port like treacle’.  At some stage the authorities ordered Mrs Alexander to cease syphoning the wine out of the casks by sucking on a tube and then pouring it into the glasses.

The brew was known as, “Block and Tackle” because, according to Sunshine, “if you had a drink of it and then walked around the block, you’d tackle the first bloke who crossed you.”

And he remembers her brown enamel mug with its inside as black as ink, “because the wine had taken all the enamel off it, so what would it’ve done to your stomach?”

Jack Miller also recalled the endless fights at the Palace and how, ‘just away from the house was what we called the chamber of horrors. That was where they put the drunks.”

In the interview, John Meredith, echoing Sydney Watson back at Tintaldra here responds that such rooms were often called ‘the deadhouse’ and Miller agrees – “that’s right, the deadhouse of the chamber of horrors. She just called it the extra accommodation.”

High class, and slightly more sober visitors would sleep in two other rooms where Sunshine reckons “they used to sleep up to eight in a double bed.” These were attached to the main building where the slab kitchen, “had a window made out of old kerosene cases and that’s where they used to serve the wine through, We used to call it the black hole of Calcutta.”

None of which seemed to trouble the clientele too much and even after the local tin mine closed, Mrs Alexander’s place remained a goldmine.  He reckons there were anything up to 100 men in the area, all of whom had nowhere else to go.

“They’d come in to the shanty to cash their cheques and they never used to get any change, they used to cut it out.”

The original Wine Palace burnt down in the epic Holbrook fires of January 1952, the Wagga Daily Advertiser reporting that, “…..Mrs. Alexander's wine saloon and the Post Office were ….  destroyed ….as well as the Lankey's Creek Hall and Presbyterian Church..”

But old Mrs Alexander was herself a real trooper and as soon as the embers had cooled, set up shop in what the press described as ‘an old tine shed right opposite the ruined post-office.”

It took a few months longer for the insurance to cover the £5370 of damage to the Palace (and the chamber of horrors) and for the place to be rebuilt.

It staggered on for another decade or so but then the doors were finally closed for the last time and today the building is slowly imploding.

As we walk down to meet his camels, Peter explains that he bought the place in 1990 inspired in equal measure by the memories of times in these parts with his dad and a love of this part of the country. And he speaks with perspective. He’s been all over Australia including travelling with camels in the Simpson and up through Boulia.

He used to harness them to a wagon and give rides along the Holbrook Road.

“But then the whole green slime started and they allowed the  B-Double trucks on the road to get the logs out so it became too dangerous,” and he had to keep them on his rolling farm.

“Green slime” is the local term for the pine plantations that infest so much of the scenery down here.

The camels approach us. There’s seven ladies plus a bull to look after them and Peter reckons so long as there’s only one male in the joint, it’ll all stay peaceful.

He and his mate have to shove off but I’m free to roam over the ruin as long as I want.

Before he leaves I ask him why the camels?

His mate knows what’s coming and laughs in anticipation. With logic that’s hard to fault, half-turning to go, Peter explains:

“Well since the place is closed you can’t get a drink and there’s that saying about a man not being a camel. So I figured that if I can’t get a drink I might as well get some fucking camels!”

Peter with one of his camels. "They can go for three days without a drink but why the hell would you want to?" he asked.