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A Job at the Nocundra Pub?We had heard that Bruce Maxwell from the Nocundra Pub was heading for the coast to spend some time with his wife so we reckoned there might be two jobs going up there. As we were already in Tibooburra it would only be a day’s drive to Nocundra and we would see if we could get work for a while. But not everything goes to plan out here.We had a bit of trouble leaving Tibooburra. For five consecutive mornings we called into the Two Storey Pub to “check our mail” and say goodbye. We somehow found a reason on the first four days to postpone leaving. Day 1, had to check out a musterer’s new Gyrocopter, Day 2, helped at a working bee on the town’s water supply, Day 3, met a bloke travelling in Burke and Wills’ footsteps with camels and I don’t really remember what held us up on the other day. Subsequently, when we landed in Nocundra, Bruce the owner, was gone and the pub was in the “care” of “Dangerous Dan” a windmill mechanic known throughout the district for mixing his drinking with his windmill work. We sat and had a couple of drinks with Dan. We paid for ours but Dan had a strange drinking system. He would get a glass and some ice, then take a small sample from each spirit bottle starting at the left hand end of the row and working across until he had a reasonable amount in his glass. When he finished that drink he would repeat the process starting where he had left off. We found out later that Bruce had marked the level of the contents of every bottle before he left. Dan thought, by taking a small bit from each, that the boss probably wouldn’t notice the drop in level! After spending an hour or so in the company of “Dangerous Dan” and a couple of ringers from nearby Nocatunga Station, we were surprised to see an elderly man walk wearily into the Nocundra Pub bar. He had been bogged on the road up from Tibooburra and was lucky enough to be towed out by a grader working on the road. He then got bogged again and had to wait until a couple of tourists came along to help him out. He was towing a large tri-axle trailer behind his F250 Ford and was worn out. It turned out that he had come up to recover a crashed aeroplane from one of Kidman’s Stations. I convinced him he would need a hand to dismantle the ‘plane and load it onto his special trailer so I was signed on as his offsider then and there. In the morning we set off with Bill the aircraft engineer following the mud map he had been given the night before, and us following him in our Kombi. We seemed to have travelled a lot further than the 20km from Nocundra to the station homestead the ringers had told us about. In fact we had covered 80km before Bill realised he was on the wrong road. We put our spare petrol in the Kombi and backtracked to eventually find the homestead where the ringers said it was. We waited there for over an hour before the manager came home for lunch. He told us the aeroplane was badly damaged when it took of from the station airstrip as the wind caught it and threw it into some “big trees”. He held his hand above his head to illustrate the height. When we looked around we noticed that any tree over 2 metres high was indeed a “big tree” in this forlorn area. The pilot however had an understandable attack of nerves and flew around in circles then off to an even more desolate airstrip 60 km away before he was game or desperate enough to land the plane. Off we went again, another mud map in hand. The aeroplane story continues.
The road to Nocundra
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