Woke up in the outback pre-dawn to a strange alien language of chattering. We couldn’t decide if it was crickets or birds. I went for a stroll on the rust-red desert sand. Saw a bustard, a flock of budgies and two big red kangaroos having a boxing match. But not a serious one.
We stopped to look around Australia’s smallest town, Betoota in the Diamantina shire of Queensland. The population of the town is zero. For many years the population was just one – Ziegmund (Simon) Remienko, the Betoota publican from 1959 to 1997. That’s right, Australia’s smallest town has one building – a pub- which also had a petrol bowser out front so you could kill two birds with one stone.
We looked around inside the deserted pub. The small bar area has a multitude of empty champagne bottles, lined up neatly on the shelves. The sink has some rather kitsch horse tiles above it and there are six old fashioned single sprung beds on the mozzie-netted verandah. So I guess if you’d had a few too many, back in the day, you could have slept it off before continuing on your journey. I’m very pleased to say there was no graffiti in this abandoned building. It is like a walk-through time capsule. The boys and I decided that we should chuck in our jobs, move in and bring the old pub back to life.
I’ve got a funny feeling we’re not the only ones who have had that thought.
