Djargunya

Chapter 1

‘I’m staying here!’ Shirley stubbornly proclaimed. ‘No way I’m going up to that stupid place out in the middle of nowhere!’

‘If you’re staying, so am I!’ declared her twin brother. Their mother and father glanced at each other resignedly.

‘Look,’ said their mother softly, ‘you two might love the place. You’ve always loved discovering new things to do. You’ll probably fall in love with it the moment you arrive.’

‘Like not!’ muttered Shirley stubbornly. ‘It’s probably just got one street, no movie theatres, no other teenage kids and it’s probably hot as hell and full of crocodiles and Aborigines and stuff. We’re not going!’

By this time their long-suffering father had had enough.

‘Listen, you two – now you listen to me! I’m your father, and if I say you’re going, you’re going, and that’s that! This is an opportunity of a lifetime for me to finally get on my feet. And I can buy a few things for you kids too. Perhaps you should consider that. I’d appreciate a little cooperation in this, not a lot of whingeing and complaining.’

‘But Daaad…’

‘Not another word!’

The twins did not argue any longer. When their father got that look in his eye and that tone in his voice, they knew not to push him any further. So they resigned themselves dolefully to the odious fate that awaited them.

Their father was the brand new licensee of the only pub in a tiny little place called Djargunya, two hundred kilometres north west of Cooktown in tropical northern Queensland. The family were currently living in Roma, a reasonably large town in south western Queensland where Don and Jean both worked in one of the local pubs, Don as the manager, Jean as a barmaid and receptionist.

A month ago Don had been given an offer he couldn’t refuse: the opportunity to be the licensee of his very own pub. On the wages that he and Jean earned, there was no way in the world they were ever going to save up enough money for their own pub in southern Queensland. When the Royal Hotel in this far-flung place called Djargunya was offered to Don for a fraction of what it would cost him in Roma, or anywhere else in southern Queensland for that matter, he immediately accepted, after having had a quick look on the map where Djargunya was, and realizing that it was a long way north of Roma, somewhere up near Cape York Peninsular.

‘We’ve got our own pub at last!’ he announced proudly to his family the night after the deal was made. While the twins were devastated at the news, Jean was happy for Don but a little worried about what they’d find in this place with the strange name. It sounded like an Aboriginal name. Did that mean, she wondered, that it was an Aboriginal settlement? And if so, weren’t most Aboriginal settlements ‘dry’ these days? In other words the government, or in some cases their own community elders, had imposed a ban on alcohol in order to prevent the rampant drunkenness that often occurred in Aboriginal communities. If that was the case, what would be the point of owning a pub that wasn’t allowed to sell alcohol? Jean expressed her concerns to her husband who scoffed at her.

‘Don’t be silly, love,’ Don had replied. ‘North Queensland people love their grog. They’re amongst the biggest beer drinkers in the western world.’

They resigned from their bar jobs, packed the kids and their belongings up and headed north for the adventure of a lifetime.

John and Shirley, despite being twins, were two very different teenagers. Whilst John was tall and skinny, Shirley was short but athletic. Shirley was good at learning, John was not. John liked bikes and cars and all things mechanical, Shirley hated bikes and loved horses. John had a thin face with full lips and brown eyes, Shirley had a round face with thin lips and blue eyes. Most people didn’t even take them for brother and sister, let alone twins.

But they did have one thing in common: a great sense of adventure. Both of them loved getting away from their parents and hanging out with their mates where they could enjoy doing the things they knew were wrong, like having a smoke, a swig of contraband, a cuss, a skinny dip in the creek, even a bit of a snog with one of their teenage friends if conditions were favourable, and escape from the authoritative adult world for a little while. Their sense of adventure often got them into trouble at home and at school, but they always accepted their punishment bravely, then went and did the same thing again. They were in a word, incorrigible.

Their sense of adventure didn’t extend to packing up and leaving all their friends and heading for unchartered waters over a thousand kilometres north west of Roma. The prospect of going to this place called Djargunya filled them with a sense of dread and foreboding. Whilst any place that was new and undiscovered would normally be exciting for them, this was definitely not the case once they discovered on the atlas just how far away and remote and tiny this little place was – it was hardly even a dot on the map.

In the past, any ‘excitement’ for the twins had always come in the form of doing outrageous things with their friends, not wandering off alone into the wilderness with their fuddy-duddy oldies. They would never ever see their friends again, they told each other, as they remonstrated about the abysmal future that lay before them.

It wasn’t until the family arrived in Djargunya that Don realised the impetuousness of his decision. It was in fact an entirely black community. Some of the Aboriginal people lived in timber or fibro houses in the village, but most lived in humpies or huts scattered in an apparently disorganized arrangement along the river. The township itself comprised a handful of quaint timber dwellings that housed a ‘trading store’, a butcher’s shop, a service station and a schoolhouse, all run by Aborigines. And there was definitely no movie theatre. The Royal Hotel stood out like a beacon, being the only two-story building in the township. It’d been built in the early nineteen hundreds by a very optimistic entrepreneur who must have imagined Djargunya developing into a sizable commercial centre, a dream that had never eventuated.

The term ‘Royal Hotel’ was a great misnomer if ever there was one. It was a rather unusual looking building to say the least. It was constructed from weatherboard and was desperately in need of a good paint job – the old paint was bubbling and peeling off the timber and it was obvious that little fingers at ground level had assisted the process significantly.

The second floor boasted a balcony, which many years ago would have been an ideal place to sit and look out over the little community, but it was now in a serious state of disrepair and the balustrades along the front were crumbling and rotting and in danger of falling to the ground.

The roof of the pub was made of corrugated iron and it was very rusty. Painting the roof would be a major task Don reckoned, as getting up there alone would be a great challenge and then trying to work on the sloping roof in the north Queensland heat would be something akin to placing your bare bum on a hot stove…

The bottom floor of the Royal boasted a public bar and a ‘lounge’ – another misnomer. It was in reality an empty room with worn and tattered carpet on the floor, and a handful of uncomfortable chairs. Upstairs there were three rooms ‘to let’ as well as the living quarters for the Peters family. They all wondered if the rooms had ever been let. The twins were devastated. There was absolutely nothing for them in this hot, steamy, ugly little place that was full of full-blooded Aborigines. They couldn’t see one other white face in the entire place.

‘I hate this place,’ declared Shirley to her brother. I’m gonna kill myself.’

‘I’m gonna kill Dad!’ declared John.

‘Well before you two do away with yourselves or me,’ interrupted their father angrily, ‘There’s work to be done. I would appreciate a little bit of help.’

He put them to work cleaning up the pub. Although they didn’t convey their feelings to the twins, both Don and Jean were extremely disappointed with their new acquisition. The real estate agent had painted a glowing picture of a beautiful old rustic pub that oozed character and charm.

What they had found was a run-down, filthy dump that belonged on a rubbish tip. In addition to this, there were no other white people in the entire township. In Roma, Don and Jean had had very little to do with the few Aborigines who inhabited the town and they felt extremely uncomfortable in their presence. They’d heard a few of the locals talking in their own native tongue as they passed through the tiny little township and they wondered if in fact any of them even spoke English.

Inside the pub was filthy, with unwashed glasses, plates and various other drinking and eating utensils lying haphazardly around in the dirt and dust and cobwebs. Rats and mice scuttled here and there and cockroaches had taken up residence in every room. It appeared as if the previous licensee had just walked out of the place in a fit of pique and left it in a state of disorder and chaos.

The whole place was in need of painting, both inside and out, there were seemingly dozens of broken windows and light fittings and the outside was a veritable jungle of old bicycle and motor vehicle parts and broken down fences. After surveying the mess, Don wearily placed a ‘Closed’ sign on the door and launched himself and his hapless family into a major clean-up and renovation program.

Chapter 2

John and Shirley had never worked so hard in all their lives.

There was an endless list of jobs to be done and at first it seemed that they would never get through them all. The Clean-Up Squad comprised the three Aboriginal staff who came with the purchase as well as Don, Jean, John and Shirley: seven people, two of them kids, to complete this mammoth task of repairing broken windows, rotting banisters, leaking roofs, broken light fittings, clogged and broken toilets, and stripping flaking paint from the walls, then repainting the entire building.

In addition to this, there was the mammoth task of clearing away piles of old motorbikes and pushbikes and their parts, as well as tattered saddles, stirrups, bridles, and dozens of broken car parts. There were even a few complete cars lying forlornly in the beer garden under the veranda, covered in dirt and grime and strewn around in the mulga behind the pub.

None of the Peters family could understand how the pub had come to be so badly run-down. At lunchtime on the first day, Don put the question to the three Aboriginal staff who came with the purchase: Mary, Billy and Morty.

Mary was a jovial full-blooded Aboriginal lady in her mid forties with huge breasts and large hips, a quick wit and a wicked sense of humour. She always wore brightly coloured dresses and often went bare-footed. When required to wear something on her feet it was always a gaudy pair of rubber thongs. She was a bright, happy person and loved cooking, eating and talking. She told Don that she’d been employed about eight years ago as a cleaner but had graduated to barmaid just three years before the hotel closed down.

The Peters family learned from Mary that the Royal Hotel had been operating successfully for about forty years, servicing a very wide community of blacks and whites. For many years it had been the only pub for a radius of about a hundred square miles.

‘Them previous owners, they started to find trouble about five year ago when they started relaxin’ their rules. Up ‘til then there’d been real strict drinkin’ rules about how many drinks we was allowed to serve the drunks and stuff. Any fullas, black or white, who caused trouble was kicked out and banned for good. Then some more pubs opened up in places like Cooktown and Cairns and our numbers started to fall off. To stay in business the owners was forced to relax their rules. So they started lettin’ any man and his dog in, and sold ’em as much grog as their bellies could hold.’

‘Let me finish the story, Mary,’ said Morty with a sparkling white-toothed grin. Morty was a handsome half caste fellow of about fifty who’d been employed at the pub for almost as long as Mary, originally as a barman, but who’d soon taken on a variety of roles ranging from cellarman, to gardener, to cleaner and more recently, to bouncer.

‘Things got pretty rough,’ said Morty. ‘Just to give you some idea of how rough, the previous owners instigated a ‘vomit levy’ which everyone was forced to pay if they booked a room. The ‘vomit levy’ was a twenty percent surcharge to cover the cleanin’ up of vomit, blood and other bodily fluids from the rooms after the customers departed. It was also used to cover the cost of repairin’ broke furniture in the rooms and bars.’

‘You’ve got to be joking!’ Jean exclaimed. ‘I’ve worked in pubs all my life and I’ve never heard of anything so repulsive.’

‘Oh, he not jokin’,’ said Billy, a middle-aged full-blooded Aboriginal who had been employed as a general roustabout at the pub for five years. ‘It the only way to keep ahead of it all. As well as damage done to rooms, there was regular fights and brawls in the public bar that useta lead to chairs, tables, doors and windows bein’ wrecked. It was a real free-for-all, let me tell you. Almost every Frid’y or Sat’d’y night it useta to happen.’

‘That explains all the broken windows, doors, balustrades, and banisters and so forth,’ said Don. ‘You said you were employed as bouncer, Morty. Did you have to referee all the fights?’

‘Well I was the only official bouncer,’ said Morty. ‘But there weren’t much I could do without gettin’ myself killed. So I useta just let ‘em go at each other until they run out o’ puff or fell down drunk or unconscious, then I just drag the bodies out onto the front veranda, throw a bucket o’ water over ‘em to wash off the blood, dirt and sawdust and leave ‘em there. They’d us’lly be gone by morning.’

‘Did anyone ever get badly hurt?’ asked Shirley who’d been listening with morbid fascination.

‘Oh yeah, there was a few broke bones from time to time, mainly broke noses, but nothin’ too serious. Not serious enough to stop ‘em comin’ back for more the following week,’ Marty grinned.

‘Can you explain all the old broken-down car and bicycle parts under the pub and in the beer garden?’ asked Jean.

‘Oh yeah, I can explain that,’ said Mary, smiling broadly. ‘You see, when the pub was operatin’ full bore, most of our patrons come from many miles away. Very few of the locals useta to come to the pub. They kept their distance – that is ‘cept for the odd few black drunks, but there wasn’t many of them compared to the white ones. Anyway, the patrons used to turn up on horseback, in cars, and in some cases on motorbikes and even pushbikes. When they couldn’t afford to pay their bills the owner useta confiscate something: it might of been a saddle or a bridle or a pushbike or even part of a car or a motorbike, or if the bill was real big, an entire car or motorbike or a horse even.

‘They’d have to find their own way home from the pub, but there was always someone to give ‘em a lift. The theory was that when they got paid again or collected their dole money, they’d return to pay their bill and collect their confiscated belongin’s. Problem was, a lot of ‘em either never returned or never had enough money to pay off their debts, so they just steal or borrow someone else’s bike, horse or car, and return to the pub where the pattern’d just be repeated. The Royal Hotel just become a massive garbage dump.’

‘Well it’s not going to be any more!’ said Don with fierce determination. ‘The Royal Hotel is turning over a new leaf as from now. There will be strict rules on cleanliness, orderly behaviour and drinking habits and anyone who breaks the rules will be banned permanently from the premises.’

‘Then how are you gonna attract people to the pub, Dad? asked John. ‘Mary’s already said that there’s hardly any customers left.’

‘Through hard work, good will and word of mouth,’ said Don proudly. ‘I’ve advertised far and wide through radio and local newspapers that the Royal Hotel will be opening soon to a clean slate. People will be happy to drive hundreds of kilometres to a pub that offers good food, drinks at reasonable prices, clean, pleasant accommodation, good reliable service and a high standard of behaviour.

‘And something else I intend do as well,’ he said. ‘On Opening Day I’m going to provide free food and drinks to all patrons, which includes all the indigenous people who live in and around Djargunya. I want the Royal to become a regular meeting place for blacks and whites alike.’

‘It’s a great idea, boss,’ said Morty. ‘And it might work. But it gonna be a lot o’ work getting the old place up and runnin’ and operatin’ as you imagine it will. But we’re with you, brother. You can depend on me and Mary to give it our best shot.’

‘That’s what I like to hear, Morty,’ said Don warmly. ‘We’re all totally committed to making this place a success, aren’t we kids?’ He smiled at the twins, waiting for an answer. Neither John nor Shirley was prepared to give an answer. They both avoided their father’s gaze as they drew nervous patterns on the dirt with their feet.

Don had some experience with building and renovating. So he concentrated on repairing all the shattered windows and the broken and rotting sections of the building, and then painting them, with help from the Billy and Morty. Jean set about the task of cleaning up the insides of the hotel: cleaning and unclogging toilets, washing and scrubbing floors, walls, mirrors and windows, washing and drying glasses and bar equipment and cleaning up the drinking areas. She had Mary to help her as well as John and Shirley.

A couple of hours into the first day of cleaning, John noticed a couple of black kids wearing nothing but colourful tattered board shorts, standing about a thirty metres from the hotel, watching the clean-up operation. He decided to go and befriend them. Putting down his scrubbing brush he strode out through the front door and onto the veranda. When he looked up the two visitors had mysteriously disappeared. He wandered across the street to where they’d been standing. Not a sign of them. Shrugging dismissively he returned to his cleaning duties.

During the afternoon the two black kids were there again. This time John decided to be a little less obvious. He put down his pail and walked out the back door of the pub, then skirted around the back coming up behind where the two boys were standing. He was standing about ten metres from them. He was about to call out and introduce himself when they must’ve sensed his presence. They turned and saw him and went scampering off like a pair of startled rabbits.

That night at dinner he related his experience to his parents. ‘These Abos are very stand-offish at first, apparently,’ his father said. ‘They’ll take a while to get used to us I’d