Walkabout Creek Hotel, McKinlay, Qld

 

Lot of stitch-ups in the pub game. Some bloke wants to get rid of his pub, finds some mark who thinks he can run one – “hell, it’s a pub for gods sake, can’t be too hard” - juggles the books a bit, mentions sotto voce the thousands in cash that he’s been sliding off the slate, and, hold my beer, he’s got a buyer. 

 Who pretty soon finds out he’s been stitched up. 

Often the new fella soldiers on, sometimes he just cuts his losses and disappears one night, and sometimes he, or she fights back. Torrens Creek’s Exchange hotel’s schooner glass of history carries just such an impurity where the stiffed buyer who got conned into purchasing it in 1938, took the vendor to the Supreme Court in Townsville and for 5 days fought his case. 

 The place is a tick over 150kms west of Charters Towers on the Flinders, and a bit less than 100kms east of Hughenden. (If anyone out there has anything good to say about Hughie, please let me know.)  

Anyway, Torrens Creek, with a population of never more than 200 and now hovering around just on a dozen, has always lived in the shadow of its (just slightly) bigger neighbour Prairie and when Henry Lovell was sussing out the Torrens Creek Exchange the year before WW2 broke out, the Prairie Pub was the yardstick he used for measuring its viability and attractiveness. 

Lowell’s statement of claim – which took 2 years to get to court, argued that the vendors had “represented … that from a business point of view Torrens Creek compared more than favorably with Prairie (and) that the takings of the hotel averaged £50 a week.” He soon discovered that “Torrens Creek did not compare more favorably with Prairie and was in fact much inferior (and) the takings of the hotel did not (come close to) £50 a week.” 

Classic stitch-up. 

Pretty much ever since, Torrens Creek, the town and the pub have been little siblings of Prairie but with the Prairie Hotel evolving to pink polo shirts with up-turned collars (think Double Bay and Toorak back in the 90s) and the Exchange under new ownership, plus a number of other things, it’s time to put that to rest. 

The pub’s now owned by Alexander but he goes by ‘Xander” and he and partner Lorna bought it back in 2015. And this time it wasn’t a stitch-up. If anything it was the reverse. 

 He was a diesel mechanic working up in Broome and looking for something different. One afternoon after a decent session in the Kununura Pub he and a mate figured riding postie bikes along the Gibb River Road and on to Townsville might be an idea. So the did. Didn’t get a single puncture, but shredded a few tyres. 

 Once on the Flinders Hwy they overnighted at the pub at Pentland, about 50kms east of here, and “old mate said it was for sale for $300,000.” Again he thought, ‘might be an idea’. (Very early I understand three things about Xander: every main character in every story is ‘old mate’; that he laughs a lot and that when he agrees with something you say or understands it, his ‘yeahs’ come in handfuls: ‘yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah.’ 

 He headed back to Torrens Creek to chew it over and when he pulled up at the pub, he:

“.. thought fuck this feels wayy better. It was the sort of pub that you pull up out front and you want to go inside and have a beer, this was inviting.” But he was warned of the stitch-up: “I told old mate here that I was looking at Pentland and he said to be careful because old mate there was saying it was averaging 1,000 a day and it’s smaller than this place and this place never gets a 1000 a day. So old mate at Pentland showed me figures and they all seemed a bit strange and he explained them to me but even then it didn’t seem like he was making enough money for two people.” 

 So Xander let it slide and when a bit over a year later another friend mentioned that Torrens Creek was also actively on the market he headed out for a squiz. The owner had forgotten him:

 “and I never announced myself, I just come in and ordered a beer and sat in the corner and this group of 4 people came in after me and he was sitting behind the bar with his handle of gold and this is like 11 in the morning and one of these four asked him if there was any chance of getting 4 steak burgers. And he just said to them, ‘No I’ve got no fucking bread rolls.” No ‘but I can offer you a steak sandwich or something else’. No, ‘sorry, can I get you a pasta or a pie?’ And these four looked at each other, looked at him, looked at each other and just shuffled out the door. And I’m thinking Jesus, 150 bucks just walked out the door and that’s not counting the people who they tell not to come here. I dunno what how much he’s doing but I’m going to be doing better.” 

 So Xander and his partner Lorna, knew that the poor mouth figures were very likely close to the mark and that in the hands of people who cared about service, who welcomed and accommodated, it could be a goer. So they bought it. And started infusing it with, er, hospitality. 

 Xander (it’s only later that the light-bulb in what passes for my brain switches on and I realize the irony of a publican dropping ‘ale’ from his name) is one of those hosts who enjoys sitting on the guests’ side of the bar, getting up as the need arises to pull drinks or take food orders. 

 If it’s not your first visit in the last few months, chances are you’ll be asked, “Same as usual?” With the sun long gone, after a stunning sunset and after my dinner of a very decent pair of chops and veges, the regular late tide of truckies begins to pull up in the rest area right out front across the highway, off-setting their cabins so the small diesel engines that’ll power the overnight air-con won’t disturb their mate. 

 Later they’ll be having a free shower and then a feed. The kitchen’s open from 7.00am when there’s also fuel for the desperate, until after 9.00pm when these fellas are finished. But first they head to their semi-regular pews at the bar for a jar and a jaw. Tales are exchanged of their day and of days prior. Craig and Rob are bringing a load of pre-fab offices and dongas from the gulf country and are looking forward to dropping them at Townsville and a couple of days off. 

Xander explains the Covid rules of not standing and drinking. “If you think we have any intention of standing when we can sit, you’ve got rocks. Sitting is our speciality.” They perch at each end of the bar, legally separated. 

 A later group - which I don’t photograph - share yarns of times long gone of being blackmailed to drive 20 hours straight by bosses who told ‘em to take it or leave it, and being driven to drinking by the loneliness and the comraderie of the road. The Blue Heeler at Kynuna became a landmark: “We had to make Toowoomba to Isa in two days, so we’d leave base at about 7 in the morning and just go non-stop except for fuel the 1,400 kms to the Blue Heeler and get there in about 16 hours. Isa was just 3 hours and we had to be there at 7 in the morning so we knew we could drink till 4 am and then jump back in the cabin.” The old days weren’t always the good old days. 

 They head off to freshen up and I take Super Ten around the back to a bit of undercover and park next to the Broome-to-Townsville Postie - looking clean and fresh for an old beast. Turns out a fella came by a few months before and he was looking for a postie, dropped $200 deposit on it and vanished. No name, no contacts nothing. Wasn’t until almost 4 months later that he fronted again, paid the balance and cleared out. Pretty relaxed out here. 

 Upstairs there’s a double, 5 singles and two twin single rooms. A single’ll cost you a pineapple, just 10 bucks more to share a twin. Out the back there’s a handful of dongas with one family room (double and 3 singles), three doubles and a single with easy disabled access. Donga rooms, all of which have ensuites are PRPN at $120. It’s also the only pub I can remember with its own swimming pool. 

 There’re 4 beers on tap plus a ginger beer- schooners coming in at just 6 bucks but it was other fluids that’d originally drawn me to this place… the pub was just proving to be a bonus. 

 Around 100kms direct north of the Torrens Creek Exchange Hotel are the White Mountains, a unique and beautiful National Park of extraordinary interest to anyone with a fascination in the riparian arteries of this country. In the middle of these mountains is a broad ridge less than a kilometre wide. 

When the rains come, some of the drops that fall at the north of this ledge will become part of the Flinders River and end up in the Gulf just west of Karumba. 

 Meanwhile, some of those falling just metres to the south east, will end up in the Burdekin River and Ross River system and eventually flow into the Coral Sea at Townsville. 

 Other drops that fall less than the length of an Olympic Pool to the west, will end up in the in South Australia in Lake Eyre. The Sliding Door fate of the rains depends clouds and the winds. 

 And this time I’m here to track the last lot of drops, from White Mountain down under the highway just east of the Torrens Creek pub and into the Thomson to Jundah where it joins with the Barcoo to form the Cooper and then winds down to Innaminka and Lake Eyre in South Australia – for mine the most tortured, storied, tragic, unpredictable heat-breaking river system in our country. 

 The only way to see this triple font is from the air and the only way to do that is with Fox Helicopters who run exclusive charters from the pub up to White Mountain and Porcupine Gorge. It’s a two hour trip including a half hour smoko in the Flinders River Gorge for up to three passengers. The tours with this family company formed in 2001 and run by David and his wife Patsy-Ann as an adjunct to their aerial mustering and ag service business are coming into their 3rd season and run from April 1st until the end of October in a Robertson 44. 

 Give it a splurge. You won’t do anything like it again. 

 And truly, that’s no stitch-up.