Tonight, now that she is 18, I got to buy my eldest child her first beer on Friday night at Conargo Pub.
It is a rite of passage that was discussed, well… since before she was born.
That sounds a bit redneck - discussing the alcoholic tendencies of a person before they are born.
But we did.
When we were discussing names for your yet to be born daughter, Pete loved the name Grace.
But it ended up being her second name because we genuinely had the conversation of: hmm, if we call her Grace and with our genetics she could be at Conargo in 18 years time with not a lot of it …
It was a joke.
But it also wasn’t.
Because the Conargo Pub is so intrinsically linked with our story and my family’s story, we knew it would feature in our kids’.
And again - I know how that sounds - it’s a pub. In this day and age, when the Australian culture of the love of a beer and the blending of children and alcohol much frowned upon, saying our kids would grow up knowing a pub.
But the Conargo Pub isn’t all about alcohol.
Sure at one point in the 90s it had the second most sold sticker in Australia behind the Oakley Thermonuclear stickers; and reportedly Bundaberg Rum sent a rep down to work out where the typo was in its figures because the village officially had a population of 50 but the Conargo Pub consumed the most amount of rum in their Victorian/Southern NSW distribution area thanks to the plethora of jackaroos and jillaroos on local sheep stations who consumed it and beer like water that it outranked towns and cities many thousands of times bigger.
And there is absolutely plenty of stories in both Pete and my post 18th birthdays that involve both the rum and the beer and the people of the 80s and 90s when it was at its height of fame.
But for me, Friday night beers at the pub was what we did socially as a family.
Kids were not allowed in the bar area, even to be served, and so my parents would buy us a can of soft drink and a packet of chips and send us out the back, lest we suffer the glare of the moustached publican, Geoff Bolden.
It was just something we and everyone around the village did - went to Conargo Pub for beers after work on a Friday. It was a social gathering within the community. To debrief the week.
There was a meat tray raffle every week to raise money for the community hall committee.
Raffle was drawn at 8.
Someone from the hall committee took it in turns to self the tickets - $2 a ticket, 3 for $5, 7 for $10 - from about 7pm.
Tickets won one of half a dozen meat trays, a box of veggies, or a frozen chook; and when the Conargo Store took on a fried chicken franchise, a box of cooked chook was brought over the intersection that is the town when the store closed at 7pm and added to the prize draw.
As kids at the primary school, we’d walk the Easter raffle prize of a big basket of eggs to the pub with a handful of raffle books and hand them over to Geoff, or his smiling bar lady, Di, and they’d sell tickets for the school… then before Easter, we’d be charged with walking back the pub to collect the egg basket, the ticket stubbs and the money.
Because we had all been kids growing up there every week, Geoff knew how old we were and there wasn’t a chance any of us were being served underage, but once we turned 18, didn’t all of us have our first legal drink from a 7oz glass crisply cold and clean from those beer taps Geoff religiously kept clean and fresh.
Having you first beer at the pub when you turned 18 was a rite of passage having grown up as a Conargo local.
Conargo Pub wasn’t just for drinking at. It was a meeting place. And a unique one.
It had no meals, no jukebox, no pool table. Entertainment was talking to each other and everyone there.
It just had cold drinks served promptly and the cost taken from the money you sat on the bar, or added to your tab, a back room of red gum furniture to sit at with a massive brick fireplace and walls adorned with pictures of broad ribbon-winning stud Merino sheep, movie-famous Kelpies, local identities lost, and an honour board of the Riverina Merino Field Days; lace curtained front doors so narrow the biggest of the boys jackarooing had to turn sideways to get through, a bottle neck as soon as you walked in the door with a fireplace within the first 6 steps that meant if people were sitting at the bar, it required close physical contact to get through the bar and out the back, and possibly the worst septic system ever because it was constantly blocking up.
And it always closed at midnight.
The story went as newcomers questioned why it didn’t stay open later like other pubs simply was: if you can’t drink enough grog between when you get there and midnight, you’re not trying hard enough …
When I was 18/19 a group of us would meet there on a Sunday afternoon for cleansing ales - having already had Friday night there and then playing sport on Saturdays. All sit at the bar together and talk and as the day wore on watch the 6pm news, then 60 minutes and the Sunday night movie all looking up at a 30inch tv above the drinks fridge. Like you would do at someone’s house, except it was at the pub. We wouldn’t talk during the movie, but wait until an ad break and then talk, get drinks, wander to the toilet, then reassume the position on a bar stool when it came back on. At 10.30 when the movie was over, we’d all go home, to return the following Friday night after work for end of week beers.
The sheer number of people who are characters in the stories of my growing up that have the pub as a backdrop that make me who I am. In good ways and bad. Some of them remain my closest friends to this day.
Pete had many many nights at Conargo Pub before I met him.
And it is where I met him.
Selling him a raffle ticket in that Friday night raffle.
He knew my name. And thanked me for the ticket using it.
I had not idea who he was.
My cousin, who he had asked about me to, made sure it was obvious across the bar that I was then asking about him following the exchange.
From then on, we spent many, many Friday nights at the Conargo Pub together.
When I got my job at The Land Newspaper in 2000, the pub cheered when I walked in, in congratulations, so beloved was the paper there and so excited were people that they knew someone who worked at it.
When I moved to Sydney to take up the job, I returned every other weekend to see Pete. If I left The Land’s office at North Richmond at 3.30 on a Friday afternoon, I could make it for last drinks at the pub.
There was no mobile phone service in Conargo until about 2004, Jerilderie was the last place with service on my 8hr trip home, so I’d ring the pub and let Pete and my friends know I was leaving Jerilderie. It’s a 55km distance between there and the pub, so if I hadn’t arrived within the hour, they knew to come looking for me.
When we got married in 2005 in Conargo and we let people know the venue was the Conargo Church, the reply was often: ha ha… Is that what you call the pub?
There is actually a Conargo Church. It’s about 200 yards from the pub. Many people who went to the church on that day in March 2005 also visited the pub. Some before the service. Most after.
When we lived back around the Conargo area some years later, our kids would come with us to the pub for Friday night drinks. We re-established the tradition that had been so beloved within our own lives.
Then the pub burned down in January 2014.
My Dad, as a member of the Conargo fire brigade and on the fire call list, happened to be the person closest to confirm the call that had come in that the pub was on fire that day. No one on the brigade call really believed it.
It’s about 1.5km between the pub and the fire shed. He confirmed the pub was on fire, hung up and headed to the shed to get the fire truck. And within that time frame, rang me to say: get onto the RFS website and see… the Conargo Pub is burning down.
The community was in a collective mourning for years until it was rebuilt. The hall committee, the beneficiary of the meat raffle funds, but also understanding the importance of a meeting place for the community, opened the hall and its bar on Friday nights as means to ensure the community had somewhere to gather.
In 2023, after its rebuild which allowed its famous face to remain, I finally got to have beers there again.
It’s the Conargo Pub, but different. It was never going to be the same as it once was - it couldn’t be. But it now does have the opportunity to create a whole new generation of memories for the teenagers today.
Sure, there won’t be Kellie the black Great Dane to mop up the chips from the floor and bark at people to let Geoff know someone was acting up; there won’t be a ring bound display folder of CDs owned by Deb the following bar owner with a questionable page of body hair for people to choose music from; no ‘Ronnie Specials’ of loosely measured drinks; no $1 middies of beer or wine and orange juice, probably a lot less black sambuca shots than were consumed in 1998 … but there will be new memories made.
And today has created another core memory involving the Conargo Pub for me, and the next generation.
Pete and I often talked about how cool it would be, considering how much fun we had both had - individually and together - at the Conargo Pub, to have a drink there with our kids when they came of age.
He isn’t here to do that.
I have a fair bit of heart hurt about that.
But the people who featured in so many of my memories there, were.
In fact, I also first met Parksy at the pub. She and my cousins who came today had all drunk for many nights there.
And so the four of us all clinked glasses with Isobel as she had her first drink at the Conargo Pub.
As we had been talked about since before she was born.
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