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 i...

When Henry Lawson left Hungerford in 1893 after a stay of possibly just one but probably two nights to walk the 220 kms back east to Bourke, he turned his back not just on the town, but also on the bush. He never returned to the outback despite the trip giving him material that would fill his stories and his ‘sketches’ for several years. The day after arriving here after walking from Toorale Station with his mate Jim Gordon, Henry wrote to his Aunt Emma. He told her that she could have, “no idea of the horrors of the country out here. Men tramp and beg and live like dogs…The flies start at daylight and we fight them all day till dark – then mosquitoes start.” Describing himself as a, “ beaten man”, he vowed to, “ start back tomorrow …(and) never to face the bush again .” Lawson would later write that the town straddled the border with ‘ two houses and a humpy in New South Wales, and five houses in Queensland……both the pubs are in Queensland .” And he ad...