Blink and you'd be forgiven for missing Dulacca, if it wasn't for the lurid pink weatherboard pub that holds the community — and its regulars — together.
The Warrego Highway stretches almost half the way across the massive expanse of Queensland after splitting off the Ipswich Motorway, which began in Brisbane.
Along the route are dozens of towns of varying sizes. Some, like Dalby, Chinchilla and Miles, are buoyant regional centres. Others, like Brigalow and Drillham, are merely settlements where a few houses were built on the hope that more would follow.
Then there is Dulacca, a town that started slowly, tried to grow, then gave up. The landscape out here, 380 kilometres west of the capital, is dry, flat and desolate. Farm families make up about half the district's population of 131, while the rest reside just off the highway in several streets of quarter-acre blocks and some long-abandoned shops.
Dulacca does have one feature that's impossible to miss — a lurid pink, two-storeyed weatherboard pub. The eponymous hotel faces the highway where a seemingly endless convoy of trucks, road trains, campervans and caravans pass by.
Sometimes someone pulls over.
It's ten o'clock, Saturday morning, and the doors of the pub have only just opened when a customer enters and politely orders a cappuccino. As he gets up to leave, the publican asks where's he's off to. "Tasmania," he says, sitting down again.
That was enough to open the flood gates — on why he was here (to help his parents sell their house in a nearby town), where he's passing through on the drive back (aviation museums, small airports and scale model shops), his other hobby (photography, particularly macro images of his mum's daisies) and how being short has made it difficult to find a partner, and where a solution may be found ("I've heard the Ukraine has lots more available women than men").
Publican Natalie Scotney has mostly stayed silent, making the traveller another coffee, nodding and adding a few comforting words between his sighs and pauses.
"A lot of people come in here, lonely and looking for company," she says, "and an important part of this role is to be attentive and positive and relate to them as much as I can."
Most often it's the local farmers who get Natalie's sympathetic ear.
"A few years before COVID our farmers were terrified and on the edge of bankruptcy [because of a severe drought]. So they came in here for a drink, destitute and broken. I'll never forget some of their faces.
"But it wasn't the alcohol that made them happy or feel better — it was being able to let it out ... It's almost like doctor-patient confidentiality. I know far too much about some people, but that's nobody else's business," she says.
The importance of a country pub is not lost on the 32-year-old hotelier.
"There's moments when things are completely out of people's control and they need to know they have somewhere to go where they can vent with other farmers and know they're not alone, and that's why we sell coffee and soft drink and don't push the alcohol. It's a community venue and … that's one of the main reasons we bought this pub."
Anonymity and community
The pub's role as a community venue has been integral to the survival of a town, which has little rainfall and no natural water supply.
First surveyed in 1847, the area was known to the Indigenous people as Doolachah, which means wattle trees. A few sheep farms were established but little else until a railway station opened in 1879.
Two ramshackle pubs came and went before the current Dulacca Hotel was built in 1908. Since then there has intermittently been a bank, a post office, a bakery, a butcher shop, a garage, a general store, a cafe and an arts hall, but all ceased trading decades ago.
Aside from the pub, the only businesses still operating are a service station at the western edge of town, while the owners of the old bank building sometimes sell crafts and takeaway coffee through the front window.
And yet, this anonymity is what has attracted some newcomers.
Sharni Corkill, a once "wild teen" (her description) from Rockhampton via Chinchilla says, "I hate people but I love this town; there are no drug problems." Now a responsible 25-year-old mother and bar assistant at the Dulacca Hotel, she adds, "We're free out here. There's nothing out here, but there's so much."
Sarah Lomas has lived in some of the remotest parts of Australia — from Halls Creek in Western Australia's Kimberley, to the Oodnadatta Track in South Australia, to Helen Springs in the Northern Territory. With her husband Jim she manages a cattle property south of the township as well as working a few days at the pub. "This is the most civilisation I've seen in a long time. I don't need to be near people," she says.
For others, Dulacca has offered an escape from cities, or lives, or people, they were never suited to, while some have been drawn by the affordable housing on offer: here a three-bedroom Queenslander on a quarter-acre block costs little more than $100,000.
'We had to bring our own steaks'
For Natalie's husband Danny Scotney, Dulacca is home. His grandparents owned the pub from 1978 until 1983 and his mum and dad run a seed grading business. Natalie grew up on a farm in nearby Condamine and the two attended high school in Miles, a town 43 kilometres east of Dulacca, but a six-year age difference meant the school bus was the only place they crossed paths.
After abandoning a teaching course at university, Danny went to Hervey Bay where he became a chef, while Natalie studied marketing at university in Toowoomba and then moved to Brisbane for work.
Years later, when Danny had returned to Dulacca to work with his parents, he met Natalie at a country race meeting. A long-distance relationship blossomed but Natalie collected too many speeding fines in the 380-kilometre, Friday night dash to meet her new partner, so she returned to live in the outback.
A series of neglectful owners had allowed the pub's structure and service to deteriorate to the point where it was in turn neglected by all but the most loyal of locals.
"For six to seven years there was no tap beer," Danny says. "As younger blokes, we'd all try to support the local pub, but it was just hopeless."
Local farm hand and pub regular Jacob Wells is less kind. "This place was thrown into the shithole. We had to bring our own steaks if we wanted a meal. Kind of makes you wonder why we came here?"
In 2017, to no one's surprise, the Dulacca Hotel was put on the market and the joke amongst Danny's friends, that the former chef should one day buy the pub, was suddenly a realistic option.
"When it came up for auction I talked to Nat and she was a bit hesitant so we put a sort-of business plan together," he says.
Danny saw accommodation as the key to the pub's success. To entice some of that passing convoy to stop for a night, the new publicans purchased land adjoining the pub and laid foundations for campsites, a shower block and ten self-contained cabins. There are also seven rooms available on the pub's second floor.
So far, the plan seems to be working, helped by what Danny believes is COVID's silver lining. "As hard as it was for two years, it forced a lot of wealthy individuals to not go overseas … and now we're seeing bigger, flashier four-wheel drives towing caravans that are probably worth more than this pub."
Another part of the Scotneys' plan was to restore the pub's reputation, which required shutting the doors to customers for extensive renovations and extensions. They reopened six weeks later with great fanfare: a live band played and chefs put on a huge buffet for the 300 people who attended.
"It was madness. I had no idea what I was doing," admits Natalie, whose only preparation was a one-day licensee course in Toowoomba.
The Scotneys also wanted the pub to attract women and to do that they needed to employ a professional chef.
"If women are in here with their husbands and the kids are entertained," Natalie says, "then dad stays for another three or four beers and mum might have another wine. So we changed it from a blokes' pub to a family oriented venue, and the food was a massive part of that."
Yarns, bikes and snakes
But blokes are a country pub's best friends and blokes like Greg, Simmo, Damo, Mark and Grinner are dependable fixtures in Dulacca's front bar.
Greg — Greg Davies — has lived in Dulacca for five years but when asked where he's originally from, thinks for a few seconds and then says "Australia", which means he's lived in a lot of places.
Simmo — almost never known as John Simmons — has been here since 1981. He was a fettler for the railways then became a truckie. Mark — Mark Gallagher — works as farm hand and is proud his house has the town's last backyard dunny, the kind that had to be emptied each week by the council. He also has seven kids scattered across the state, becoming a father for the first time at just 14.
Grinner — local farmer Paul Ryan — has a Coopers stubby placed into his hand each time he enters. Grinner is also referred to as the mayor of Dulacca by virtue of his family's four-generation lineage in the district, and some strong opinions, especially on the wind farm development he believes is dividing the farming community. When he finds out I'm from Geelong he looks at me quizzically and says, "Geelong? That's not even in f***in' Australia!" According to Grinner, Australia starts north of Goondiwindi.
Greg and Simmo share a social conscience and a love of motorbikes and country pubs, and when COVID travel bans were lifted, the two decided they'd do their bit to help hotels that took a hit. So each Sunday they put their helmets on and ride to places like Chinchilla, Muckadilla, Wallumbilla and Condamine, for lunch and a few beers.
In the absence of a local newspaper the pub substitutes as the forum for community news, minus any fact checking.
Currently, the reclusive owner of five houses in town has them all up for auction and possible reasons for his fire sale vary. There's also conjecture about who's responsible for truck parts missing from someone's yard, and why the old railway station building is being relocated to land opposite the pub.
Then there's the yarn about two brown snakes that slithered into the front bar of the Federal Hotel in Wallumbilla last summer (for the record, the hotel owner said it was just one).
When locals have enjoyed themselves too much, the pub looks after them. "There's been many nights when I've taken the keys and dragged someone upstairs who's got a bit carried away and told them, 'No, you're not going anywhere. Here's a bed'," Natalie says.
Those beds are up a flight of stairs on the second floor but experience has taught Natalie things you don't learn during a one-day licensee course. "It's quite easy, really, because they lose their legs and get sloppy."
However, prevention being better than the cure, and laws mandating a responsible serving of alcohol, means Natalie will let the blokes know when they've had too much or if the local cop has set up a breathalyser out of town. "I'm the one who puts the foot down. I would not mentally survive if somebody killed themselves on the way home from this pub."
The Scotneys' resurrection of the Dulacca Hotel has not gone unnoticed.
Cattle farmer Ashley Austin says, "When Nat and Dan bought the pub, we thought, 'they're either mad or they're geniuses'.Turns out they're geniuses."
Marie — the owner of three dachshunds and the house next door — says, "I've seen some riffraff run this pub. These people are good, though."
John Madden, a prickly local and recovering alcoholic who occasionally ventures in for lemonade reckons, "Some pubs get put through the washer, the rinse and the dryer and come out with no character. Not here."
Credits
Words and photography: Ian Kenins
Production and editing: Leigh Tonkin
