Nothing but the Pub

  There's no doubt that the signature burgers and steak sandwiches at the Nindigully Pub are of near mythical proportions, but maybe, just maybe the claim that this is the oldest continually licensed hotel in Queensland is a far more undiluted myth.  Whether or not the Nindigully Pub deserves this title doesn’t affect the quality of the current pub – I’ll leave that to another time. But their longevity claim's been getting argued on a FaceBook page I follow i and so I went for a dig, and this is what I know at the moment.  As ever I stand to be corrected, in fact I love being presented with new - primary not secondary source - evidence showing I’m wrong or in the dark about some details.   I totally accept that the hotel at Nindigully has been known as the Nindigully Hotel, The Traveller's Rest, The Sportsman's Arms , the Grand Hotel and (seemingly in error), the Queenslander (in 1922) and that all these names refer to a single hotel. Such name changes ar...

  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.        ...

It was the light that drew me to Middleton.   Actually it was the lack of it. It was that and a yarn on the mulga wire saying the pub there was a ‘gotta-see’. And because I was camping, I didn’t much care that it had no accommodation, apparently there was plenty across the road. So anyway I headed down west from Winton, with the ubiquitous gales bashing me at every turn and on every straight. (There ain’t too many turns!) The road from Winton to Middleton sees the country morph from harsh to brutal, from grey to red and back again. New hues come through but the toughness only ever increases. Hughenden is the end of the bush and start of the outback. This is the land of the laconic single finger driver’s wave from the hand uppermost on the steering wheel. If you’ve been out there you know what I mean..the index finger raised, part in a kind of “g’day”   and part a salute for being a fellow crazy out here in the Vast. In the heat of the day I see noth...

(Written a few years back but damn, it seems like yesterday I was laughing with the Tree of Knowledge in the morning!) Like a select few world leading centres of arts and learning, Augathella in Queensland has had more than one name change in its history. The Big Apple started out as New Amsterdam and then switched to New Orange before it became New York City. Walt Whitman wrote of NYNY: “ There is no place like it, no place with an atom of its glory, pride, and exultancy. It lays its hand upon a man’s bowels; he grows drunk with ecstasy; he grows young and full of glory, he feels that he can never die”. In 330 AD Byzantium was renamed Constantinople and stayed that way for 1600 years before becoming Istanbul, the only city to sit astride two continents. Fatih Sultan Mehmet said of this city, once the second largest in the world: "İstanbul is a magical seal which unites Europe and Asia since the ancient times. Without a doubt, Istanbul is certainly the...