Back Of Beyond
The Age
Saturday June 8, 2002
Beer is the outback drink of choice. And no beer ever tastes as good as the first in the Yaraka Pub, in the foothills of the Yang Yang Ranges, south-west of Blackall, in western Queensland, where the Great Western Railway peters out and remoteness kicks in.
Yaraka is a forgotten town. Construction of the track, suspended in 1917 owing to a treasury shortfall, is still awaiting revival. The rails point resolutely but with fading hope towards Windorah, 145 kilometres to the south-west.
Save for this 84-year delay, Yaraka might be little more than a memory. Instead, it has become a railhead by default. Once a rip-roaring, sly grogger's town, it has evolved into the sort of idyllic hamlet Norman Rockwell would love to paint.
Over there, says one local, pointing to a gidji tree, is where the police leg-ironed criminals. A Yaraka venerable recalls throwing rocks at luckless prisoners in the 1930s, ducking when they tossed them back.
Yaraka's 25 inhabitants watch the train roll in every Friday with provisions from Rockhampton, rolling back out again with things they raise or shoot.
It's the end of the line - and that's OK. Locals see no reason to go further. The town has a pub, a school, a police station, a church, a store, a swimming pool and an IT centre. There's a sense of camaraderie. Everyone lends a hand.
Publican Les Thomas shows me around, jockeying his 4WD up an impossibly steep track
to the flat top of nearby Mount Slowcombe, where locals picnic or watch the sunset.
They don't see many outsiders. To backpackers, a night at the Yaraka Hotel would be akin to visiting Mars - unless, of course, they happen to be Londoner Maggie Stanley who arrived three years ago to save money and never left.
"It was so friendly, and everybody made me feel so welcome," she says, "I fell in love with (her stockman husband) Malcolm (Hanton) and now I wouldn't swap it for anything - no bitching and no backstabbing, just a genuine bond."
Beyond Yaraka, there are more communities of graziers, stockmen, 'roo shooters, raconteurs, poets, opal miners, artists and dreamers - a diminishing breed as properties amalgamate and young people drift to the cities.
School attendances are already borderline in many places. At Eulo, the community established a hostel so that primary school kids on properties could attend the local school during the week, rather than go to boarding school.
"Before the hostel began, we were in danger of losing our school for lack of numbers," says Chris Berghofer, proprietor of Eulo's general store, "Now, for the first time in the town's history, we've got two teachers."
As families quit the land, Chris sees tourism as the town's best bet. He's not exactly an art lover ("art's a lot of bullshit") or an environmentalist: "Like it or not, you've got to jump on the greenie bandwagon," he says.
He has converted Eulo's telephone exchange into an art gallery he calls The Bilby Burrow. Within he shows paintings by local artists and arts and crafts, including a slim tome entitled Always Wear Clean Knickers by Eulo poet Janine Haig.
The Bilby Burrow aligns itself with the Fur Ball at Easter, raising cash for a 25-square-kilometre fenced enclosure at Currawinya National Park, where it is hoped this endangered bandicoot will reach sufficient numbers to become an attraction.
Chris is equally concerned about dwindling human numbers: "Years ago, a station might support 40 or 50 staff, now they're lucky to support mum and dad and one child. Someone buys a neighbour's station and that means fewer people in town."
It's an ongoing problem. Winton chemist and charter pilot Peter Evert recalls seeing his town's population shrink disastrously when the drought of the 1960s drove graziers from the land and shopkeepers from the town.
With his late brother, Vince, Peter fostered tourism with an opal museum adjoining his pharmacy, revived Winton's open-air cinema and began mini-bus tours to nearby stations to give tourists a taste of life on the land. He helped found Winton's Outback Festival in 1972 and a few years later established a light charter plane service to fly tourists to historic towns formerly accessible only to 4WDs.
As communities fade, he says, there is a parallel impoverishment of social life as banks and other institutions close or downsize. "Once the bank manager was somebody in town," he says, "Now he probably doesn't want to go out."
Still, the outback continues to attract free spirits - few freer or more spirited than Toompine publican and shooter, Wayne Hockings, who took the time to show this city slicker that there is more than one way to skin a 'roo.
Earlier, in the bar, I noticed a sticker announcing that "The only true wilderness is between a Greenie's ears". Photographer Tony Gwynn-Jones, meanwhile, lamented that he had inadvertently run down a skippy.
"Only one," said Wayne, disgusted, "Mate! You just ain't been trying. I knock off 20 to 30 'roos a night, then I tan 'em and skin 'em and stitch 'em. "I shot a big red once. I sent five bullets straight through the head. He kept rearing up. He was dead. He just didn't want to admit it."
It was uplifting to hear Wayne discuss his work with such enthusiasm - and when he mentioned his recent invention, an hydraulic 'roo skinner, I just had to see it. All right. But first, explained Wayne, you have to bag your 'roo ?
I'd only intended him to show me the device, not demonstrate its grisly doings. But the Great Roo Hunter's blood was up and, within minutes, he was leading an impromptu safari into the mulga, felling a grey 'roo with a well-aimed shot.
While Wayne made incisions in the hide, an obliging opal miner removed a joey from the pouch, dispatching it against a tree. Next, Wayne activated the skinning device on the back of his truck, peeling the hide like skin from a grape.
To round off the demonstration, Wayne extracted strips of cartilage from the tail, fashioning some pieces into Aboriginal-style fishing lines, others into strips to secure axe and spear heads.
I tried to imagine a party of sensitive New Age Japanese package tourists absorbing Wayne's exposition of bush survival skills - and, frankly, I couldn't see it working.
In the event, I decided to skip afternoon drinks with Wayne and headed for Thargomindah, hurtling down a perfectly straight red dirt road abounding with kangaroos, emus, plain turkeys and one or two critters I couldn't identify.
Getting there was 90 per cent of the fun for, on a cursory glance, there was little by way of mental stimulation in Thargomindah aside from an old Fargo fire truck, the ruins of a disc plough and a historic house clearly marked as such.
On the outskirts, a wedgetailed eagle feasted on a dead 'roo. Storm clouds, red dirt and sunset lent the place an eerie feeling. No doubt it's a great town once you've stayed for a while - say 20 years - and become accepted by the inhabitants.
Time was running out. En route to Cunnamulla, the Eulo pub looked so clean and welcoming that it seemed only sensible to wash away the dust of the road and take lodgings for the night.
In the morning, Eulo farmers Ian and Nan Pike poured me a glass of their famous date wine and, fortified, I pushed on to Cunnamulla where the local population was still seething over Denis O'Rourke's controversial film about their town.
It didn't seem so bad to me. A boy wanted to know if we were new in town, then offered misleading directions. At the Spice O Life Cafe, the espresso machine was no longer in use because regulars wouldn't tolerate foreign stuff.
Down the highway, at the Gladstone Hotel in Wyandra, Tommy Nicholls, 75, reminisced about when the town had two pubs, two iceworks and two stores.
It's quieter now. The local historical society has dolled up the power house as a tourist attraction but the best thing is the white sandy beach on a bend of the Warrego, which is a fine place to fish for yellowbelly or read a book. So to Charleville where, according to local Christie Palmer, 27, there's always a rodeo or race meeting, a ball or a shearing competition: ``I have a much busier social life than during the five years I lived in Victoria," she says.
When in Charleville, you must stay at Corones. Everyone said so in the 1950s and many people say so now. I myself stayed there - and next time I feel like sleeping in a garage sale, I will go there again.
My room, it was pointed out to me, was the actual room in which Papa Corones once reposed. Presumably Papa C left a lot of his stuff behind because every horizontal surface came adorned with kitsch.
The plumbing also appeared to be residual from yesteryear, not to mention the artificial flowers tucked into nooks and crannies. Yesteryear's hairbrush added a creepy ambience. Ditto, yesteryear's evening gown hanging in the wardrobe.
Outside, the rear veranda had been almost entirely given over to bric-a-brac - some relevant to the hotel's history, most of it reminiscent of disposal depot for unwanted overspill from the local historical society.
It reminded me of another Corones-owned hotel, The Brick, in Quilpie, where ex-Brisbane barmaid Wendy Smith and former oil man Maurice Rogers are restoring this once-elegant country hotel in what can best be described as eclectic style.
Maurice, who enjoys a reputation for tall tales, has introduced several personal touches to the public bar, including a large upright tree trunk - in the fork of which drinkers are encouraged to ``ride 'em cowboy".
``My nickname is Basil from Fawlty Towers," he says cheerfully. ``That's what they call me. I got sick and tired of oil rigs. I had a plan for a resort out here but then Wendy asked me to marry her and I said: 'I'll give you a hotel'."
The fruit of their combined labours has been to create a blend of family guest house and Ettamogah Pub. Upstairs rooms, which include a slightly over-the-top honeymoon suite, have been equipped with modern bathrooms.
Quilpie is a classic outback town. There's a haberdashery, a video store, a dress shop. A notice in the window of the Outback Hair Studio alerts customers to ``head check for lice".
Across the street from The Brick Hotel, Marnie Collins runs L. R. McManus Pty Ltd, the shop established by her father in 1935. Marnie started work here when she was 15. Now 52, she's had to adapt to changing times.
``Neighbours buy out neighbours, people move for reasons of education, people order from catalogues whereas once they'd call in," she says. ``We know all our customers and what they need. For us, it means carrying a lot of stock." You can see what she means. The shelves bulge with everything from work shorts to curtain materials, zips to Drizabones. You could walk into L. R. McManus Pty Ltd without a stitch and emerge a picture of rural splendour.
Fortunately for outback stalwarts like Marnie, there are others who love the bush and want nothing more than to remain here. Charleville-born Kelly-Anne Toner, 26, teaches at St Finbarr's Catholic School in Quilpie, and says that, during her years studying in Toowoomba, her ``worst thought was to get a job in the city".
``West of Roma everything changes," she says. ``No one's in a hurry, yet everything gets done. Everyone looks out for one another. It's a great life."
This is the part that tourists, hurtling from one bush destination to the next, often overlook. To experience the outback is to find its natural pace, to fish by a waterhole in Cunnamulla or to watch a molten sunset from a rocky outcrop.
Stop me if I start to sound like a New Age travel brochure, but there is an indefinable sense of spiritual renewal that comes with prolonged immersion in the outback. People do change out here - often for the better.
Yaraka school teacher Sean Cole, 33, maintains that three-and-a-half years in one of the Queensland's most remote towns has reaffirmed his belief in humanity. Mainly, he says, because the outback is about people, not commodities.
``I'm out of a rural environment (Forest Hill, near Gatton, Queensland), but I wasn't used to isolation like this. Out here, people really do depend on one another. I used to think I had faith in the human element, but not like I do now."
As much as there is a drift to the cities, there is an opposite flow from metropolitan centres to the outback.
Charleville bait and tackle shop proprietor Judy Aiken grew up on her parents' property on the Paroo River but spent many years running a newsagency in the Brisbane CBD.
Rude Jude, as she is affectionately known, typifies the lack of pretension that makes outback people different from city dwellers. Where in the city would you find a bait and tackle shop selling sex toys as a sideline?
Jude's shelves offer pecker party hats, vibrators and lick-and-look cards, along with rods, sinkers, swivels and hooks - and, bridging these twin streams of commerce, an array of fishing lures shaped to resemble male procreative gear.
``Believe or not, these lures work really well," says Jude, whose words should have a sobering ring to males tempted to go skinny dipping in the Warrego.
``I was in Brisbane for seven years and I couldn't wait to get back here," she says. ``I came back in 1983 - and I'm staying."
© 2002 The Age
