Nothing but the Pub

  Mulga Creek Hotel Byrock NSW To purchase my latest book on the Pubs of the Murray and Edward Rivers click on: nothingbutthepub.com                So anyway there’s no mine, no diggings, without their mullock piles and noodling for good pubs is no different – clichéd themed oh-so-cute and quaint joints with transient staff and oblivious management with zero-care factors about the organic entity of which they are briefly a part, are the inevitable slag piles of fossicking for the gems of the outback hotel landscape.             But for every slag pile, every mullock heap, unless it’s a blue duck, there’re gems – precious places like, well ….. like the Mulga Creek Hotel at Byrock. I’ve dropped in here three times and every time it’s been wet. Today’s no exception and there’re puddles out the front in the empty parking area.            Henry Lawson graced Byrock in 1892, on his way to Bourke, sent there by JF Archibald to ‘dry out’ from his chronic alcoholism and his only slightly less

  The Wellshot Hotel Ilfracombe Qld           In 1954 the boss of the Qld A.W.U. was interviewed about the roots of unionism in the Sunshine state:  “The Labor Movement in Queensland as we know it-…., was born in the pastoral … In 1886, at Wellshot station … industrial trouble arose at shearing time because shearers would not accept the … slave-like conditions of work proposed (and) went on strike, and the news of their action went like a bushfire throughout the outback (and) when no settlement was reached at Wellshot the men began to march on Blackall (where, with shearers from other gangs and stations) they decided to form the Shearers' Union.”            Eventually this Shearers’ Union grew into the backbone of the organization which became the ALP in Barcaldine in 1892. The place of Wellshot Station and Ilfracombe in our political and social history were cemented forever.            When the Station was created in 1872 it measured a neat million acres – a bit over 4,000 square

Searching for Larrikins The Courthouse Hotel at Jamieson on the Upper Goulburn River, Vic.           “I shambled after (them) …. because the only people who interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn …..'             Three months after I first read and was inspired by this quote, and the rest of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road”, I hitchhiked from Sydney to Perth and back in 11 days for a bet. I made it with a bit under 6 hours to spare.             It was 1964, vast stretches including all the Nullabor were unsealed.           And I was 13 years old.            In the almost exactly 47 years since (the trip was 11 days because that’s how long the June school holidays were then) I’ve been drawn to the crazies, to the manics and the maniacs, to the passionate and obsessed and to the class we now know and accept as ‘larrikins.’