BEER SKITTLES GOVERNMENT’S BEST LAID PLANS

YOU won’t find the remote Central Australian township of Tennant Creek on Tennant Creek; while that’s where the government wanted it, its actually eleven kilometres away in the desert, and all because of a truck-load of beer.

After the extraordinary Overland Telegraph Line opened in 1872 to link Adelaide with Port Augusta, and then 3200km to Darwin through some of the harshest country on the planet, tales persisted of gold to be had for the taking from around the isolated Telegraph Repeater Station on the Tennant Creek.

A few hardy souls either brave enough or stupid enough to ignore government warnings about the harshness of Australia’s barren Inland confirmed the rumours with small finds, then in the early 1930s an Aboriginal stockman fronted up to a Repeater Station operator with a chunk of black ironstone.

“This what you white fellahs bin lookin’ for?” he asked. The operator was staggered to see the rock was flecked with gold – and quickly got a message away on the wire to Canberra, igniting the Rush of the ‘30s.

Everyone expected to see Tennant Creek blossom overnight into a thriving township, but every Repeater Station was actually protected by a Federal law that defined what could be built within an 11km radius.

This meant that when entrepreneurial Joe Kilgariff arrived at Tennant Creek in 1932 in his old buckboard Chevvy truck with plans to build the first gold rush pub and store, he found himself rebuffed by the telegraph operator. Unfazed, Joe retreated the required 11km south, and pegged out a site there for his hotel-cum-store.

Then he waited patiently in the 40-degree heat for his first load of beer and building materials to arrive from Alice Springs 500km away. When it turned up a fortnight later it proved the magnet Joe expected for the several hundred miners working around the Telegraph Station 11km “up the wire;” most downed tools and walked en masse to Joe’s to quench well-earned thirsts from kegs cooled with wet wheat bags.

Others arrived to open supply depots and stores, dining rooms and bordellos: Tennant Creek township was born, albeit eleven kilometres off in the desert from the Telegraph Station where the government intended.

The pub and its surrounding community of tin sheds, canvas humpies, tents and small businesses flourished, but the rest of Australia sank into the Great Depression.

In one 18-month period alone in 1935-36 miners at “The Creek” as it was known, chipped over 100,000-pounds worth of gold from the ground at a time when average wages were a mere 25-pounds a year. So delighted was the Federal Government with this windfall, that it thanked the hardy miners and their families with a series of slap-up dinners at Joe’s pub – showing its largesse with boiled saveloys, mashed potatoes and beer.

As tales soon spread Australia-wide of fortunes made and lost at The Creek, Melbourne’s Argus newspaper flew its best feature writer, J.D. Balfe 30-hours by air to report on the Tennant Creek phenomenon.

Balfe wired back vivid accounts of the rough and tumble life there, of disputes over claims settled in wild shoot-outs, of a butcher run out of town for selling feral goat as “finest merino sheep,” and of John Shaw who walked an amazing 1000km from Darwin to find a lode that made him a millionaire within days of arriving at The Creek…

And of rugged miners Balfe described as “sun-tanned, gigantically muscled men, whose skins seemed to have been penetrated by the pervasive red dust…” including the wealthy William Weaber who was in fact blind, and who told Balfe how his mate and business partner, Jack Noble guided him as to where to drive his pick.

“Jack’s actually blind, too,” Weaber told the astonished scribe. “But only in one eye.”

Tennant Creek’s hand-dug mines slowly petered out, but after the Second War mechanical mining uncovered deeper and even wealthier lodes, and copper as well.

Visitors today can explore Tennant Creek’s old mines, a mining museum, historic equipment, fossick on the old diggings… and walk the bizarre main street that was made wide enough to drive mobs of cattle through town as they followed the great Overland Telegraph Line.

For visitor information phone (08) 8962 3388 or go to www.tennantcreektourism.com.au