A TAVERN IN THE TOWN

IN THIS AUSTRALIAN PUB, THE BEER AND THE COMPANY ARE FINE

Author: By Bud Collins

Date: SUNDAY, July 5, 1998

Page: M6

Section: Travel

Like Alice falling down the rabbit hole?

``Ah, yeah. Sort of. We call it never-never land, too.''

Prairies, deserts, canyons, mountains, stretching almost 2,000 miles. Hot, dry, spectacularly unpeopled, it reminds my friend Aurelio of New Mexico where she was whelped, forever engraved on her soul. It's still frontier country whose not-so-long-ago pioneering and settling heroes, like sheep-shearing titan Jackie Howe, were bigger than even Bunyanesque life.

``They had to be to survive,'' says Curr, who resembles the late Audie Murphy, polite and smooth-faced protagonist of numerous Western flicks. ``And you can still die out here if your car breaks down and you don't have enough water along.''

Water is, however, not the preferred liquid.

``Be kind of nice to have a beer,'' says Peter Nichols, who is showing us around this morning. ``You know, just to salute the temperature, which -- in the non-Centigrade calculations of you backward Yanks -- just arrived at 105.''

``But it's only dry heat,'' says Aurelio, bravely.

``But dry calls for wet,'' says Curr scientifically, amiably, and who are we interlopers to question an Aussie icon? Damien, one of the Antipodes's premier horsemen, is a rodeo and fancy riding star. ``Let's go to my place.''

This means a short ride (by auto) to Ilfracombe. With 159 humans it would seem to qualify as -- in American lingo anyway -- a one-horse town, although Damien employs many more for his equestrian shows.

``You know how you take the census around here?'' he says, grinning. ``Just pull the fire alarm. Everybody turns out to see the fire engine, and you count 'em.''

Publican and cattleman, Curr operates a 108-year-old saloon called the Wellshot Hotel, with corral, riding ring, and grandstand in the back yard as well as a ranching property in Winton. There, Dagworth Station, the beloved bush poet ``Banjo'' Patterson stopped long enough in 1895 to write what passes for the national anthem, ``Waltzing Matilda.''

In Aussie parlance, especially rurally, a ``hotel'' is a tavern required by law to maintain a few rooms (plumbing a remote rumor) for transients. Generally, you wouldn't want to inhabit one of those rooms, or pay more than $15. A motel is what you're looking for. There are, however, emergencies such as found me a few years ago at the indifferent mercy of the Jamberoo Hotel in the New South Wales hamlet of that name.

The clamor of the barroom directly below, where the jukebox loudly and incessantly traumatized dancers with Slim Dusty's mournful ``The Pub With No Beer!'' was equaled only by twanging hordes of mosquitoes entering the unscreened bedroom window that had been nailed open. Crowing roosters and lowing cows, their feed apparently spiked with No-Doz, maintained a nightlong vocal competition. A grudging dawn could not come soon enough.

``Hang onto your hats,'' advises Peter Nichols as we enter. Many didn't. Attached to the ceiling, crammed together, are all manner of headgear, from 10-gallon Stetsons and Panama straws to modest baseball caps. Each has been traded for a beverage by a desperate, presumably cash-short patron, fearful of uttering the saddest words at this end of Christendom: ``I'm so thirsty, mate, I'd drink water.''

Having forestalled that fate through barter, the patron, says Curr, usually orders Queensland's finest, XXXX Beer, known as 4X. Excellent choice. Far ahead of any American beer, as well-traveled Aussies never tire of confiding. To me, 4X always evokes a nice little guy named Otis 5X, who drove Muhammad Ali's ``Big Red,'' the bus Ali preferred to airplanes in his early championship days.

``I wanted to be just Otis X, you know, like Malcolm X,'' Otis said, ``but four other guys at our mosque beat me to it.''

Ordering a 4X, I intend to purchase it, wary of surrendering my wide-brimmed fishing hat and sacrificing the naked knob beneath to the Outback sun.

``No, no. I'm shouting,'' says Damien, the common expression for buying somebody a drink. Also the basis for the wonderful salute to a tightwad: ``Wouldn't shout if a shark bit 'im.''

OK. Thanks. I give him a verbal IOU, promising to send a Denver Broncos cap. That seems fitting for a mustang buster. But one who has studied the humane taming of horseflesh under extraordinary Californian, Monty Roberts, of the fascinating autobiography ``The Man Who Listens to Horses.''

Damien had detoured us to the Wellshot, where a fish-and-chip lunch served on burlap tablecloths goes with the 4X quite well. Now it's back to Blackall, beneath a sky so vast the overpowering clouds seem continents.

Far out, but not too far for the ubiquitous computer as we note at the recently established Internet Cafe. Log-on and lager-up appears to be the BillGatesian setup for lonesome woolly-minded types in this town where sheep have been very important residents. Not his idea of a refuge, says Peter, who would rather take his chances with the bites of a tarantula webbie than bytes of the World Wide Web.

``Only a matter of time, though, I suppose,'' he says with a shrug.

But time will never diminish the herculean 1892 feat of Blackall's ceaseless scissoring Jackie Howe, who had stronger, quicker hands than Michael Jordan in a sweatier, more physically demanding game. As proclaimed on the tablet beneath his statue -- Jackie embracing, defrocking a hefty ram -- he sheared 321 sheep in 7 hours 40 minutes: 1 1/2 sheep a minute. This was with manual clippers!

Not even Hollywood's Edward Scissorshands could have come close. It wasn't until 1950 that someone topped his record -- but with electric clippers. Little Bo Peep would have swooned at Jackie's feet. Little Joe Lithgow, a shearer at Avon Leigh Station, told us that, even with electricity, wrestling and baring 150 sheep is a good day's work.

Not far away is a lump of petrified wood marking the location of the Black Stump. Surveyors, in the 19th-century mapping of Queensland, used the thick tree stump (since burned out) as a base for measuring instruments called theodolites. Anything to the west -- beyond the Stump -- was considered Outback.

``Just step beyond the Stump,'' Peter suggests to Aurelio. ``How's it feel?''

``Like never-never land,'' she says, smiling. ``Like Alice through the beer glass.''