Nothing but the Pub

  It has to be Australia’s most driven-by-but-not-gone-in pub.        You know the one!        You’re heading south down the Hume Hwy and you cross the Murrumbidgee at Gundagai and you’re thankful for the new bridge so you can stay on 110 (or just a bit over) and then five or so minutes later there’s an old pub on the left and it looks interesting with the old Cobb & Co coach out the front but you’ve missed the turn and so you keep going and promise yourself that next time you’ll remember to slow down and take the turn which was just 300 metres back and go in and check it out?        Forgetting that there’s another exit just a few hundreds metres on.        You know that pub?        Well it’s the Tumblong Tavern and it’s well worth keeping that promise. Perched slap beside the main south road to Melbourne, the settlement here was originally called ‘A...

       For mine, there’s an irresistible attraction in tales involving shonk.         Shonk as we Australians use it, as in a bit ropey.       Shonky businessmen, shonky politicians, shonky repairmen, shonky retreads on a suss looking car bought from a shonky used-car salesman.        Shonk is the bloke who talks out the corner of his mouth, who slips you some folding from the back of his hand as he scans the room, who’d prefer to make a dishonest 50 cents than an honest dollar. It doesn’t have the stench of corruption, just a way less acrid wiff. And give me a sniff of shonk and I’m out of my seat.        And right now that trail’s led me to Wagga Wagga because it was a total shonk who first put this place on the world stage.       From 1866, when Thomas Castro, the town’s own local butcher first claimed to be a member of the British aristocracy, do...

                                “Oh, we started down from Roto when the sheds had all cut out.                             We’d whips and whips of Rhino as we meant to push about”         This first appeared in print in Paterson’s collection, “Old Bush Songs” in 1905 and it’s gotta be one of Anon’s best works. But not everyone who cut out from Roto Station headed across to the Murrumbidgee and thence to the smoke to drink until their money ran out.        In 1863 William Hill, a Roto stockman, only made it 50 miles south through Wiradjuri lands to a small township on the banks of the Lachlan. The traditional owners knew the area as ‘Melnunni’, meaning ‘red soil’, and to the whites it became known as ‘Redbank’.       ...

       With his German-born wife, Sophie, Thomas Holt arrived in Sydney on the Helvellyn in 1842 after being inspired by reading a German translation of Dunmore Lang’s writings on the new colony. He was the son of a wool merchant and he hit the ground running, soon becoming a wool-buyer, magistrate, financier and board member of companies from Railways to gold mining.        By the time he was 44 he’d made a big enough pile to retire from business with land interests which peaked at over 12 thousand square kms – just a bit bigger than the entire county of Yorkshire where he was born.        But retired indolence wasn’t his gig so in 1856 he successfully stood for election to the first Legislative Assembly and became colonial treasurer. In 1865 he was accused by a political rival of, er, of the expediency of voting early and voting often. The charges didn’t stick, Holt sued his accuser for malicious prosecution and a...