Almanac Pubs: Mystery Pub – Blue Got a Flat
I’ve always been a dreadful passenger.
As a kid I was often carsick, and the rubber grounding straps Dad dangled from the back of the XY Falcon didn’t help. My skin went clammy, my face green, and my stomach leapt like a cornered cat.
Winding our way to Mystery Pub reminded me of this.
Claire was the Mystery Pub chaperone for the month of June. To preserve its integrity, I was on the front seat with a scarf wrapped around my noggin. Looking like a Merino mummy, I was sightless, and my gizzard was gurgly. It was a notorious pre-pub theme-park ride.
In the city, Mystery Pub works by car or foot. But in the Adelaide Hills, as John Denver sweetly sang, country roads take me home — and they rarely lie about which pub’s waiting at the end.
Here in these wide, antipodean spaces, we’re all prisoner to the hardhearted truth of geography.
After a lengthy and nauseous crossing from our Birdwood digs, our car came to a stop. Yanking off my scarf, I blinked. Claire proclaimed, ‘Here we are. In Palmer.’ Home of granite outcrops including Bear Rock. Home to one hundred citizens. I flung open my door and gulped at the fresh air like a stranded goldfish.
Palmer! Mystery Pub had delivered a most surprising surprise.
I get a Pale Ale and Claire asks for a house white. Mine Host flees through a door (startlingly quick for an ample fellow) before reappearing with a glass of vino. Sipping, her face makes a grim assessment. With superior powers of deduction, Claire asserts that it must be, ‘Banrock Station. From a cask.’
We go outside to the veranda and take in the vanishing orange light.
I’d be happy to have misjudged the fellas sitting at the veranda table, adrift in a mountainous sea of discarded bingo tickets. Each bloke — there’s about ten of ’em — has a black drink in front of him: stout, Bundy, Coke and something. They all wear black beanies, black coats, and, near as I can tell, black jeans.
Bingo tickets were once central to country pubs. Sold at the bar, punters would buy a handful, hoping to peel off a winner. Each batch held four prized reds, worth $50 each — a tidy sum and once enough to buy a busload of beer.
The sharp-eyed punters — usually nursing a West End — let others burn through the duds. Then, like card sharks, they’d pounce. Spend, say, $30, snag a couple of reds, walk off with a hundred. As my mate Dick used to say in the Wudinna Club, ‘A nice earn.’ Looking again at the unsightly swell of bingo tickets, Apocalypse Now comes to mind when Captain Willard says to Colonel Kurtz, ‘I don’t see any method at all, sir.’
The blokes about the table talk in staccato ways — and all at once. But there’s laughter and warmth in their in half sentences. I catch the single newsworthy snippet. It’s from the gruff chap in the corner. He reveals, ‘Blue got a flat around lunchtime.’
With this Claire and I head inside.
The fire crackles along while there’s a flow of customers to and from the bar, ordering their dinner. Some dine in, others opt for takeaway. 80s and 90s ‘old school jams’ play on the TV until the VHS tape runs out. Sitting by a window, we flick through a tourist magazine and make a few amused observations.
We watch folks come and go, just like fictional Queensland bouncer and former Eastern Suburbs Rooster Les Norton at the Bondi Icebergs.
A painstakingly dressed woman presents at the bar to apologise for she and her husband being no-shows last Saturday. The barkeep, like the best of them, a social worker and bush psychologist, offers, ‘Yeah, well, it got to 6.30 and I thought — that’s unlike Marg and Blue (unsure at time of writing if this is flat tyre Blue). Something must’ve cropped up.’
Marg replies. ‘The afternoon just got away from us. I’m so sorry.’ For atonement, she then buys a can of coke (to take away). Relationship repaired. Although an elementary exchange, it spoke of the rural values of mutual dependence and traditional courtesy. I remembered the country communities in which I’d happily lived.
Our week included visits to Lobethal, Mt Pleasant, Charleston. Palmer hadn’t been on the obvious itinerary — but then again, the best things often aren’t.
We return to the car. I throw my scarf on the back seat.
More from Mickey Randall can be read Here.
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About Mickey Randall
Now whip it into shape/ Shape it up, get straight/ Go forward, move ahead/ Try to detect it, it's not too late/ To whip it, whip it good
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In the late 70s/early 80s I used to play in a men’s softball competition on Friday nights at Walkerville Oval. The bloke that sold the bingo tickets on behalf of the Walkerville Sports and Social Club was the inverse of your West End fuelled blokes – he knew how much profit there was to be made out of each series and in the event that the current batch had exceeded that amount, would promptly throw the rest of them out and start a new series, leaving us no hopers without a chance of clawing back some of our losses. Can’t get much more un-Australian than that.
Protest your worship – surely Palmer is where the Adelaide Hills has given way to the Murray Flats? The evidence is plain in the knuckle dragging bingo players and Banrock Station that would not be seen dead in a gentrified Hills hostelry.
I gave up on bingo tickets after a sustained run of outs and graduated to Quadrellas and Trifectas. Why drink raspberry cordial when you can destroy yourself on the real stuff? We live and eventually learn.
Great read Mickey. What fun shinanigans! Love your work. X
I can’t deny never had heard of Palmer ( I have now googled it ) so educational as well – Mickey yes those bingo tickets bring back memories particularly-Payneham cc wise thank you
There are a few things at play here…:
1. Like Rulebook, I had never heard of Palmer – until now.
2. I just love an Apocalypse Now reference.
3. Re Coopers Pale Ale – the Apollo Bay Hotel has a Monday-Friday ‘happy hour’ from 4 til 6pm. All pints $10. Well, they recently changed it to “basic” pints (Carlton Draught, Furphy etc) only. I am happy to report that Coopers Pale survived the cull and is still $10 during happy hour. It’s a great country.
Thanks to everyone for reading and commenting. I admit Palmer is a place I’d not considered or visited for quite some time! But I’m happy to be surprised.
Swish- was that bloke ever subjected to an A Current Affair or Today Tonight investigation? Did Frank Pangelo bang on his door?
PB- -while we began in the Hills, yes, Palmer is more Murray Flats! Get your Banrock Station while you can as I think it’s about to go down the gurgler.
Someone- most kind!
Rulebook – I had almost entirely forgotten about bingo tickets! Have never had a sniff of them in the city.
Smokie- a story without an appropriate Apocalypse Now quotation should be terminated with extreme prejudice.
Agree with above comments but I still contemplate the obvious. Almanac censors alert.
If Marg and Blue turn up at 1830 and the “afternoon just got away from us”, you would have to say it must have been sensational sex. Just saying.
RDL
Good point RDL. Maybe Blue didn’t have a “flat” but something else that sounded similar.
Stand by for Marg and Blue: Uncut.
Maybe he had a date with Mrs Palmer and her 5 daughters? Too Blue?
I too haven’t heard of Palmer. A google map search sees a small town with it’s cricket (& footy?) ground seemingly right in the middle of and surrounded by a neat tree plantation.
Well remember pub bingo tickets when I was kid, don’t remember the old man having any luck with them!
A quick search shows a Palmer Cricket Club in the Torrens Valley Cricket Association. Like many small towns they seem to be struggling for numbers and the online scorebook on Play HQ has a game with two blokes called ‘Fill-In.’ One top scored with 23 out of a team total of 48 and also took two wickets. Well done, Fill. I hope they talked him into a few more games for PCC. Thanks, Luke.