Nothing but the Pub

  Lot of stitch-ups in the pub game. Some bloke wants to get rid of his pub, finds some mark who thinks he can run one – “hell, it’s a pub for gods sake, can’t be too hard” - juggles the books a bit, mentions sotto voce the thousands in cash that he’s been sliding off the slate, and, hold my beer, he’s got a buyer.   Who pretty soon finds out he’s been stitched up.  Often the new fella soldiers on, sometimes he just cuts his losses and disappears one night, and sometimes he, or she fights back. Torrens Creek’s Exchange hotel’s schooner glass of history carries just such an impurity where the stiffed buyer who got conned into purchasing it in 1938, took the vendor to the Supreme Court in Townsville and for 5 days fought his case.   The place is a tick over 150kms west of Charters Towers on the Flinders, and a bit less than 100kms east of Hughenden. (If anyone out there has anything good to say about Hughie, please let me know.)   Anyway, Tor...

  So Anyhow*, probably no-one in the history of Australia melded a public career around script-written one-liners more than Paul Hogan.   He was painting the Harbour Bridge when an appearance on an alleged talent show in 1971 led to him getting his own gig on Channel 7 and then 9.   Then a mate of mine, Paul McKay at Hertz Walpole Advertising had the idea to have him front a campaign for a new brand of Rothmans cigarettes being targeted at arch rivals Phillip Morris’s market leading brand, Malboro.   The catch phrase was simply “Anyhow, have a Winfield” and it caught on like a struck Redhead in Mitchell Grass. Within months Rothmans were selling a million sticks of Winnies Red a day (at around 40 cents each!) and the Malboro Man (whose on-screen actor died of lung cancer) was in the shade.  Hoges was on his way. One of the early Winfield TV adverts featured the Sydney Symphony Orchestra which springs into action when Hogan turns to the cond...

The Union Hotel, Blackall On my Facebook Page A coupla blocks back from Shamrock St, the name the Landsborough Highway assumes as it rolls through Blackall, and suitably a bit west of the Black Stump monument, is the Union Hotel on the corner of Coronation Drive and May St. Just as the pubs on the main drag scream ‘Tourist”, this old double storey beauty drawls, “fair dinkum” so I park the bike out front, stretch out the joints and walk into the coolness.  Sarina, who runs the place with her husband is keeping a couple of locals and one of their dogs well satisfied and after grabbing a schooner of lite, I strike up with a bloke about my age whom I’ve not laid eyes on before at the bend in the bar. His square jaw strong eyes and granite face are sandwiched between a faded but not too filthy workshirt and an off-kilter wide beam and he’s the owner of the decent sized dog that’s just finished checking me out and licking the dead bugs from my riding boots. We exchan...

Echuca, The Star Hotel It’s just on ten in the morning and at the Star Hotel and there’s an expansive bloke running around like a blue arsed, carrying on half a dozen conversations at once, advising staff on special arrangements, taking calls on his mobile and shaking hands with some early starters.  His name’s Paul Jarman and he’s got ten minutes to spare,   “if we’re lucky’. Paul was ‘born into hospitality’, probably, I’m guess about 50 odd years ago.   His father ran the pub down in Rochester but in his twenties Paul headed overseas, working in Paris and London before coming back to Echuca at the turn of the century to raise his kids. A self-described, ‘river man’, he’s done the full length of the Murray in a tinny. It took him just over three years off and on and he managed a drink, he guesses in “98% of the pubs”. The trip convinced him of his connection to the river and the pubs convinced him of his desire to own one. In 2009 along wi...