Searching for Larrikins - the Courthouse Hotel at Jamieson, Victoria
Searching for Larrikins
The Courthouse Hotel at Jamieson on the Upper Goulburn River, Vic.
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.’
Give me a sniff of a larrikin, no matter if it’s a living breathing one in a bar or the memories and stories of one long gone, I’m up for the shamble.
And as I turn Super Ten left off the C511 just adjacent to the confluence of the Jamieson and Goulburn rivers and head up to the Courthouse Hotel, there’s the ghost of an exceptional larrikin in my crosshairs.
Jamieson’s main drag is Perkins St. Its eastern end leads back to the ‘Jammo’ River where the Perkins Brewery once was.
Hundred metres or so upstream, the deep section is still called the Brewery Hole and beyond that there’s the Perkins Bridge.
It’s late autumn and it’s all stunningly beautiful.
Now Paddy Perkins could fill two of these columns but let’s just say he founded the first brewery here and then headed north to Toowoomba where he founded the Downs Brewery and his company eventually merged with Castlemaine to form Castlemaine-Perkins.
Yep, XXXX, the most ‘Queenslander’ of all beers is the product of two Irish Victorians.
Anastacia, you can thank ‘em anytime you like.
With business sorted, Paddy turned to politics, got elected, then got re-elected and then did it again but he wasn’t above a bit of unorthodox campaigning. His brewery had barrels up to their armpits and it isn’t pork barrelling if it ain’t pork inside, eh?
His supporters backed up their drays and carts, piled them high with barrels of beer and headed out to the polling stations. Meanwhile others were loading sympathisers onto trains to the electorate whilst others were writing down the names of folks recently dead, recently departed, the never-existed or the living-in-other localities.
The rest was bloody simple: Send ‘em in to vote, bring them outside and hand them a beer, then another beer, and then a slip of paper with some other bloke’s name on it; send ‘em back in to vote again in the new name. The more you vote the more beers you get.
Sounds legit eh?
Well, Paddy got in but a petition was got up and he was tossed out. He went to ground for a few years but then his mates sorted stuff and landed him a life-membership of the Legislative Council.
Too larrikin for the electorate, but well within the tolerances of legislators. Don’t ya love it?
Back at Jamieson where it all started, I pull up out front of the Courthouse pub, I’m on the search for a worthy inheritor of Perkins’s larrikin spirit.
I don’t have to wait long.
Jason’s folks bought the pub in ’81 when he was 11 and on the Friday before Good Friday a couple of years later, “there was a whole load of guys in the bar and one of them looked up and said why are the lights on upstairs and we looked up and all the lining boards were lit up and on fire.”
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| Confluence of the Jamieson and Goulburn Rivers |
“There was this old guy called Bert Devery and he lived down near the caravan park and he was balling his eyes out and said he was going down with the ship, said he didn’t want to live without the pub and we had to drag him out. Right after we pulled out the pool table and got it across the road and a lot of the seats, and then when we couldn’t get any more out we all stood across the road drinking and watched the pub burn.”
The motel section was saved and the bar section was replaced as a single storey, made muchly from bricks saved from the original and cleaned by kids over the following Easter weekend.
Jason and his mates lived on their BMX’s and the cop back then didn’t have a car, “So we could get up to mischief around the place and then we’d spot him heading our way we’d just jump on the bikes and he’d be shouting at us in the distance.”
Scottish, Jason’s mate chimes in: “Then he bought himself a blue light that had a magnet that he stuck on the roof of his own car but if he ever left the car, the kids would sneak down and cut the wires and knock off the light.”
Took 3 or 4 lights until he realised it was a lost cause.
Then Jason and his mates graduated to engines. “During the holidays the cops would stay in the pub and they’d get us to show them where the tracks were and we were on 80’s and they were on 250’s and they could never keep up, they used to say they’d never seen riders like us.”
Jason reckons the era when he got to legal drinking age, was ‘crazy days’.
“We’d have a blue here and it was like you see in the western movies, people climbing on the rafters and throwing stuff down and people chucking chairs at each other. It was wild. They’d come in the next day and Dad’d say well you broke three chairs or maybe a window so you have to work it off doing dishes or behind the bar for so many days and it’d all be sweet.”
Back then the pub had a video rental library and: “Once a month we used to deliver videos up the road, go to Kevie and swap 30 or so rental videos and then to Gaffneys Creek which no longer exists and swap maybe 20 and Dad would say, you’ll notice as we slowly go up the hill how much crazier they get and how much younger the mothers get. You’d be in the pub at Gaffneys and in the bar there’d be a 14 year old with a swollen belly and you’d ask dad is she going to have a baby and he’d say yes and then up in the Woods Point pub there’d be a 12 year old.”
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| Kevington Hotel |
But Gaffney’s had its attractions. The pub’s long gone but Scottish fills me in:
“Was a tradition to ride your dirt bike up to Gaffneys and the main road went past the front door and this track went almost vertical from the pub back across the road straight down to the creek and then sheer up on the hill on the other side. There was a rule at the pub that anyone who got up the other side got a hundred bucks so you could go there and just sit out the front drinking beers all day and watch idiots trying to earn the hundred and crashing and falling and tumbling down the hill with their bikes on top of them.”
Scottish reckons he did it once on a 390 Husky not much before midnight with a few under his belt and their mate, Crash managed it “but they refused to pay because they didn’t see it so he went back and did it again.”
And ‘Kevie’ – the Kevington which sadly has also closed at least for now, had its attractions too.
“Every Aust Day weekend they’d get OMG hard core bikies and there’d be like up to 1200 there, and they all had Harleys but we’d rip up there on our unregistered bikes and do wheelies up and down the street outside and they’d all line the roadside and chuck cans at us.
But they were all good blokes and had their own sergeants at arms and bouncers keeping order and we’d pull up and they’d come over and say mind if I get a photo of myself pissing on your bike and what could you say. But they’d keep it off the seat…told you they were decent blokes.”
One of the highlights was the homemade boat race down the river from Kevington.
“Everyone would build rafts and people around town would store eggs in their shed roofs for weeks to make them rotten and they’d stand on the bridges and hurl these eggs at you as you paddled down. Was insane, but then Scotty, you’ve got to catch up with him, he runs the servo, he’s a mechanic anway one year he said I’m going to get these bastards back so he put a furphy pump on the front of his raft and connected it to a hose and when he got close to them he’d open up the power and spray them. Almost knocked a few of them over.”
Next morning I catch up with Scotty McKenzie who says it’s all true but it wasn’t a Furphy, it was some other brand, and reckons the next year was better.
“We got these bottles of hotdog dye, mixed it with water and filled the stuff into four or five fire extinguishers. We’re coming down the river and there’s this local bloke with a pure white dog and he chucks an egg or something at us so we open up with the fire extinguishers. Got the dog side on. Suddenly the one side’s white and the other’s bright pink. He’s swearing at us and we’re almost falling in from laughing. We won the race that year.”
Back in the bar I’m hearing the story of Nessy who lost an arm and had it replaced with a hook. He got arrested for assault and the when he was charged the cops confiscated his hook.
“But this is where it gets weird,” warns Jason, and I’m thinking yeah, not weird at all up until now, “but ‘Nessy with the Hook’ was a professional shooter and owned a pump action but couldn’t use it with one arm so he had to apply to the court to get his hook back.”
Nothing larrikin about that, eh?
And talking of hooks, I ask Mick, who’s sitting right across the table as I hoe into the best gnocci dinner I’ve had in memory, what the scar is on his forearm.
“Shark,” he replies, showing it fully to me. “Was swimming off Frankston Pier and had just jumped in when it just grabbed my arm. You can see the teeth marks there. So I don’t know why but I just punched it hard as I could, right on the snout and it let go and I scrambled up the ladder, blood pissing out all over the place.”
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| Jason shows how the sharkbite didn't happen |
He tells about strangers wrapping it tight in towels and the ambos coming and the race to hospital and the rehab on the muscles and the tendons.
When I ask Jason how much of that is true, Mike doesn’t give him time to respond.
“Absolutely none of it.”
Then adds: “Did it in a bar fight but the shark story is much better with the chicks.”
They share a story of one NY Eve when “Warwick Capper was here with his girlfriend and about quarter to midnight we all starting getting in line and Capper asked us what we were doing and we told him we were lining up to kiss his missus at midnight and he said, bugger that, just do it now, go for it.”
So they did. Especially a mate named, “Ian”.
There’s a mob of dirt bikers in town, staying down the road and they come in for a drink before they head out in the morning – 9 riders this year. They’ve been coming here for 15 years during which the chopper’s been called three times to lift out injured riders.
They’ll do about 700kms of dirt tracks in the next 4 days staying in bunk houses and the two backups carry all the equipment and drinks.
It can get bloody cold out there at this season and Geoff, who’s done every ride tells of one year at Harrietville when they ‘found this laundry with a massive industrial spin dryer so three of the boys jumped in and we turned it on. Was pretty fun but not all that effective.’
So now the backups have to get the fire raging before the riders arrive each arvo.
I’ve spent the ashes of the day with half a dozen strangers, had one of the best pub meals in ages, and have cramps in my cheeks from laughing at stories of escapades.
The larrikin spirit of Paddy Perkins is in good hands in Jamieson and as I head to my motel style room, I know this shamble’s been well worth it.
To get your copy of my latest book, "Drinking the Rivers Vol 1: The Pubs and People of the Murray and Edward Rivers just click on the link: nothingbutthepub.com
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