Muttaburra Rules. Special Tales from a Special Pub

 

I always thought rules come in three main categories: Legal rules, agreed rules and - in Oz and Kiwi since around 1910 - Rafferty’s Rules. But, ah, out in Western Queensland they invented a whole new category. 

Muttaburra Rules. 

I park Super Ten out front of the Muttaburra Pub where someone’s added an ‘S’ in front of its displayed name turning it into the SExchange Hotel and head in past a few old fellas on the small veranda and grab a black fish. 

 Behind me, high up on one wall of the bar – so high it can’t be used anymore - there’s what I grew up calling a ‘hookey’ board. A round board about 18 inches across with 12 or 13 hooks on it, each with a number from 1 to 13 underneath. Stand back like you do at darts and throw rubber ring seals from mum’s preserving jars at the hooks. 

 Below this board, pinned to the wall in a plastic sleeve there’s some doggerel verse written on a sheet of paper. I don’t see them when I first walk in but then, first cold frothie in hand, I do a lap of the room and, well the poem is obviously about something. 

Something major. 

 But hold that thought for just a bit whilst we do some background. 

 In 1932 the Rocky Morning Bulletin ran an interview with Eustace King who arrived up here in 1877 and who worked on the famed Bowen Downs Station. (Again, I’ll get back to that.) One of his yarns was from when Muttaburra’s horse race track was around the town’s (then) two hotels. 

 One year Mr King took “Paddy” - one of the Station’s better horses - to town for a meeting and, ridden by a local indigenous jockey, it came home first in the main event. 

 But, (to quote the paper): 

 “The "forties" in charge said the race was started in front of the post and ordered it to be run again. Again Paddy won. Then the committee declared all the field had run inside a post and a third race was ordered. Paddy's donkey-licked the others so badly that no excuse was forthcoming and so, after three runs, Paddy got the race. The expression. "Muttaburra rules," is easily understandable.” 

 About the same time the Townsville Bulletin described Muttaburra in the 1870’s as: 

 “ a keen racing centre …. Hurdle races and steeplechases (as well as flat races) were staged … (and) …“rare stories used to be told of the Muttaburra races, and the all-in term, 'Muttaburra Rules' originated therein.” 

 Yep, way before Rafferty’s, there were Muttaburra’s and they weren’t confined to just horse racing. The newspapers of the time applied them to the no-holds barred behaviour in parliament, to football games (when their home team lost), pub brawls and even street hoons – pretty much everywhere a middle finger was extended at accepted norms from a bare-knuckle fist. 

 Just a few years after Paddy won the same race three times, a bloke who’d had a stint in the town’s hospital in 1887, was busted in Muttaburra for selling the same horse two times. He’d already started making a name for himself as a breaker-in of horses and he was starting to get some of his poems published in the country papers. 

 Just a few years after Paddy had triumphed over Muttaburra Rules, a poem titled ‘Old Harlequin’ appeared in the ‘Queenslander’ newspaper. it was signed simply: “THE HORSEBREAKER” Muttaburra. 

 The poet’s nickname was no idle boast, but if there was one thing he broke better than horses, it was rules: rules of contract, rules of decency, rules of civilized behaviour. Back in 1881 he’d married Daisy O’Dwyer but then he’d welched on the five quid fee of the minister who hitched them and very soon after got charged with theft of some pigs and a saddle. 

 Daisy walked out on him, and soon bigamously married a bloke in Berry, just north of Nowra, NSW, named Jack Bates. Despite marrying again later, she remained as ‘Daisy Bates’ for the rest of what became her famous life 

 Meanwhile Muttaburra’s poet, ‘The Horsebreaker’ was quickly getting a name for himself on a few other fronts: Firstly there was his profligacy: a noted female journalist of the time, carefully omitting to deny she’d ever had a tryst, wrote: 

“… he MADE LOVE INDISCRIMINATELY to all the girls and the younger married women, insisting to me that that was the very best way to entertain them and keep them happy”

 Secondly there was his continuing almost pathological failure to pay his bills: One paper commented after his death: 

“ (he) brought the art of being a sponge on other men's generosity to a fine art, and for bilking hotelkeepers and tradespeople he was unsurpassed…. From North Queensland to South Australia there appears to be hardly a town that he did not bleed.” 

 In the end karma prevailed and this fella – an Englishman who’d lied about having an aristocratic bloodline - whose ‘worthless life … quite destitute of … moral principle’ had his ‘Muttaburra Rules Account’ settled in full. 

 By a firing squad in South Africa. 

 By then he’d shortened his preferred moniker to simply ‘Breaker’. And the surname he’d assumed was ‘Morant’. 

 And he wasn’t the only, or the last, to perish in the mire of Muttaburra Rules. 

 Remember that hookey board high up on the wall of the bar? The one with the poem in a plastic sleeve below it? Well, the wall it’s on is just thin ply separating the bar from the hallway to the accommodation rooms and if you go around the other side of it about a metre and a half up from the wooden floor, you’ll find a small hole. It’s a bullet hole. Something around a 33, they reckon, and it’s been there for almost 50 years. 

 Brian, a local who still drinks at the pub reckons he was there on a particular night in September 1973 and had been playing what he calls ‘quoits’ and darts with two shearers who were both as full as the last bus. But he’d had enough and headed home, leaving the other two to bat on. Smart move because not long after he left all hell broke loose. I’ll let Brian tell you: 

 "One of the shearers, went out back, got a gun and shot the other one through the ply wall... Then he chased another fella too who ran out the back of the pub and hid down near the stables. Anyway, the shearer couldn't find him so went back to the bar and shot the first fella again in the leg but he was already dead. Then he jumped in a car but ran out of fuel and the cops caught up with him down near Longreach. Another bloke was later found in the room 1 hiding under a bed clinging to the springs half frightened to death." 

 It was all over a disagreement about the rules of the game.” Don’t mess with Muttaburra Rules. 

 I settle on a stool in the corner and pretty soon Sue, a local whom I’ve arranged to meet, rocks up and shares some stories of the pub: 

 “My mother’s mother’s father was Timothy John McCarthy and he was known to everyone as ‘TJ’ and he had this pub built in 1899 and he ran it until 1911 when he transferred the lease but he kept the freehold. It was two storeys but it burnt down in 1933 and was rebuilt the way it is now in 1934. Old TJ continued living here until he died in 1954.” 

 Sue was born here in Muttaburra but moved away to Brisbane and then moved back again 38 years ago and the town and the pub were chugging along. But pub really started struggling with the drought from around 2017 but then in October 2019 it was suddenly closed – the publican just shut the doors one night and walked away. 

 Overnight the town at the centre of Queensland didn’t have its own community centre - the (S)Exchange Hotel. Sue was on holidays at the time, “and I got a call from Fiona who runs the shop next door and she told me what’d happened and said, ‘You wanna pub?’ And I said, ‘well we don’t want it to close so we’d better buy it’. With my great grandfather building it and the times I’ve spent in it, I feel a very strong connection to the place and just couldn’t imagine the town without it.” 

 So Sue and Fiona and their husbands were in, but they figured they’d need some help and Sue knew whom she had to call. A fella in Tasmania. A couple of years prior to this, Ken and Pam were disembarking their caravan rig from the ‘Spirit’ in Melbourne planning on a trip to WA, but their youngest daughter was about to have a baby, Ken’s mother wasn’t feeling flash and Perth seemed a long way away. So not too far from Station Pier they pulled over, had a mull and flicked through social media. 

 Meanwhile Muttaburra was a town in need. The whole place needed nailing back together, a coat or two of paint, plumbing sorted and a general makeover but tradies weren’t even thin on the parched drought soil. So they put out a call on Facebook, Blazeaid and some other sites. Down in Port Melbourne, Ken and Pam saw one of their posts, checked their maps for just where the hell Muttaburra might be, gave each other the nod, changed the GPS and headed north to see how they could help. 

 Speak of the Devil, Ken’s sidled up whilst Sue’s been chinning and chimes in: 

 “That first time we came up we nailed things down and cleaned things up and carted away rubbish and all that sort of stuff – Pam did a lot of painting – everyone just did what they could. And we got to know some of the people, not all that well, but we liked the town and the people so we came back the next year. See Muttaburra is how Australia used to be, things don’t get locked, people all talk with each other and support each other and the kids run around the town and everybody looks out for each other.” 

 So it was Ken whom Sue called after she’d spoken with Fiona about buying the pub and re-opening it. Ken again: 

“When Sue rang me I asked what sort of help she needed to save the pub and pretty soon Pam and I, Sue and her husband Mal and Fiona and her husband Winky had formed a company and bought the place. Sue and Fiona and their husbands all had fulltime jobs but they ran it for 14 months, 7 days on, 7 days off and they got the pub back on its feet and got it in a very good financial position and they took no wages and this allowed us to re-roof it, and do up the rooms, the bathrooms, the hallways and the flooring.” 

 In June 2021 they were strong enough financially and the pub was in good enough condition to put on a licensee. This coincided with the Council finishing development of the Muttaburrasaurus Museum across the road. Ken again: 

 “And (now) that last tiny stretch of the road down to Longreach is sealed, add the dinosaurs to the town’s folk museum and the old hospital and we’re all pretty confident about the long term health of the pub.” 

 The great grand-daughter of the bloke who built the place nods, "Yes, I think we've saved it." And their efforts - along with the road sealing - have probably saved this town and that’s a great thing, because when it comes to flyspeck outback villages with astonishing histories and a wonderful present, well ……. Muttaburra Rules.