He eventually began a station and saw a hotel built as the number of travellers on the stock route increased (anecdotally the original Dowling homestead became the hotel premises). Among the travellers known to have visit were the Costello and Durack families whose pastoral empire in the Queensland Channel country and later in Western Australia became the stuff of legends. Waroo Springs towards Hungerford was the depot they launched from.
Yantabulla Hotel and The ruins of the Lake Eliza Hotel were remembered in Melbourne’s ‘Weekly Times’ in 1945 in a submission by Alfred Burke;
The Shanty By The Lake
I’d come into N.S.W, from| the Cooper with a mob of store bullocks, and after some wrangling with the boss of the droving outfit, he paid me off outside Yantabulla. a little one-horse town, west of the Darling.
With the ink hardly dry on my big cheque I rolled my swag, caught and saddled my horse and, together with the horse-tailer, rode the mile or two from the camp into Yantabulla. We hitched our nags outside the town’s one pub, greeted three or four idlers on the verandah and invited them to have a drink. It took the publican a while to rake up enough money to cash my cheque and when he had done this I bought a bottle of rum for the horse-tailer to take back to the boys with the cattle, shouted another round of drinks and prepared to go on my way.
“Goin’ so soon ?” queried the publican in a slow drawl. “Have one on the house,” he invited He turned and took a bottle from the shelf and poured stiff drinks into the empty glasses lined up on the bar. Though some of the idlers had ordered beer in their former rounds, they didn’t object to the yellow spirits which the shanty-keeper poured into their glasses. Twining my fingers around; my empty glass, I said: “Not for me, thanks I’ll take something soft this time.” All hands turned curious glances towards me. The publican’s eyes were steely but his voice was low. “What, on the water wagon?” he enquired gently.
I was a bit nettled but said coolly: “No, not exactly. I’ve got some business to attend to in Bourke and I want to be there day after tomorrow.”
Bound For Sydney
A BUSHMAN does not usually cash a cheque for nearly a hundred pounds and, after a couple of drinks, go on his way; but it was nearly ten years since I’d seen the old Sydney town and now that I was within six hundred miles of it I was determined that no outback shanty was going to stop me from making the trip. For years I’d been droving and mustering, doing all kinds of bush work; wearing moleskins and elastic side boots, sleeping out in all kinds of weather; knocking down cheques of forty and fifty quid in little places like this Yantabulla and getting nothing out of it at all except hangovers and cold looks when the money was done. This time I was for the city!
Slowly and in silence we drank on the house. The atmosphere was tense as we placed our empty glasses on the counter. “Looks like rain,” commented the publican, coming from behind the jump and offering around his rubber tobacco pouch. “If you’d care to stay till it passes over I’ll have the blackboy put your horse in my paddock.” I glanced at the pub lican. He was a tall, lean fellow with a sandy moustache; more like a teamster than a shanty-keeper. A tough bird, he looked.
So “that’s it. I thought; he’s out to entice me to stay and get on the booze. “No thanks,-‘ I answered hastily. “Reckon I’ll be getting on.” One or two of the others urged me to stay and I eyed each one in turn as he spoke.
When I first saw these men on the pub verandah they appeared to be the usual types you met in this dry, outback section of the country but. recalling that drink the publican had pushed across, and the fact that my cheque was a substantial one, I began to see something sinister in their efforts to detain me. This Yantabulla publican. I told myself, wasn’t any different from other shanty-keepers. After all, it is on the cheques of fellows like myself that they exist. If I go on after spending only a few shilling of what they regard as theirs I could not expect only some show of disappointment on their part.
All the tales of crooked outback publicans crowded vividly into my now suspicious mind and, though I knew that few of these stories were founded on fact, I was aware of plenty of instances where good intentions became blasted in some lonely, God-forsaken shanty.
I walked out on to the verandah, now. more than ever, eager to be away from the pub and its steely-eyed proprietor. The publican followed me out.
Continued in Lake Eliza Hotel
