On Coming To Muswellbrook

In 1985 my parents decided to move away from our beautiful lake view home in Newcastle to a town I had barely even heard of called Merriwa. It was done for a good reason, my father who had a significant heart condition, had to move away from the coastal humidity to somewhere inland and more importantly a place with a drier climate.
Even though I knew this was coming it still was a bit of a shock as I thought they were going to move to either Cowra, Harden, Grenfell or Young (where my father's family was from). But on a whim they decided that Merriwa was the place to be. To make matters worse they did all this while I was away at University for the semester. I left home at Newcastle and returned to a new house I had never seen before ....... in Merriwa. 

The Lake View (Newcastle)

Now life is Merriwa is pretty sedate, I actually met an old guy there who had never been to Muswellbrook (a whole 72 kilometers away) because it was too big and threatening. To give you an idea of how quiet Merriwa was the local cemetery had emptied because the corpses thought it was too dull. An exciting pastime in Merriwa was to hang out at the local timber yard and watch the planks warp (letters of protest were written when it went out of business). One of the postcards you could purchase celebrating the town featured, in all its glory, the toilet block at the local caravan park (I wish I could say I was making this up). Needless to say I wasn't quite ready for Merriwa and Merriwa wasn't in any way ready for me.

Life became even more interesting when I discovered that there was no public transport to speak of to get to Merriwa. I was too poor to own a car so I had to get a train from Armidale to Muswellbrook. Then my parents picked me up at the train station and drove me the one hour to Merriwa. This all had to happen before I could even see their new abode. But before we could do that I had to deal with ..... Muswellbrook. 

Now on my first visit to Muswellbrook I was not at my jocular best. My train trip from Armidale saw me nursing the mother of all hangovers and I've never been one to suffer with dignity and grace. Country trains at the time were full of three types of people. Ones like me who couldn't afford cars (usually students), retirees who got free travel, and unemployed people (frequently single mothers with lots of kids) who got really cheap tickets. That usually made for what seemed like extremely long and throbbingly loud train journeys. There would be kids running up and down the carriages (mothers shouting abuse and encouragement in equal measure), oldies shouting at their deaf better halves over the din of the train, all the while students like me remained traumatised in our seats trying to deal with hangovers so torturous they could have enticed the Kennedy's to join the NRA. I think the train left at some ridiculously early hour like 8.30am for the four hour trip to Muswellbrook. I mean who expects a student to be out of bed at that hour, especially after a big night hitting the town (sorry I mean a big night hitting the books)? Not only did I have to be awake but I had to deal with a train full of LOUD obnoxious cheapskates whose principal lot in life was sucking up oxygen to which they were not really entitled.  

Anyway after the hell on wheels finally rolled into Muswellbrook (no doubt late as the trains always where back then) the quiet confines of my parents car seemed like some unobtainable Elysium field. As I sank happily into back seat of their car and its comparative silent bliss my father shattered my somnolent dream by excitedly telling me that we were off to the Club for lunch.

Now on the surface this didn't seem unreasonable. I could do lunch,  it would be quiet, I could probably get a drink (preferably alcoholic), I wouldn't have to pay and the food couldn't be as bad as what they served us up in the college dining room. I had visions of downing a couple of drinks, using the food to soak up last night's booze then beating a hasty retreat to the car, where I could legitimately fall into a satiated slumber with the winter sun beating in the back windows as we tooled quietly along the road to Merriwa. I could not have been more wrong.

Firstly lunch was awful, it consisted of frozen sausage, crumbed, then deep fried, accompanied by what could best be described as vegetable lumpy bits. This savoury collation was then topped with a generous serving of cold, coagulated gravy. Umm mmm ........ scrumdidlyupmtious !!!!!!!!

To make matters worse the bar didn't serve doubles, but, to really top it off there people everywhere, partaking in that most vicious of full contact sport ..... BINGO

I hadn't counted on the Bingo. Imagine a room full of loud angry women, who don't look like they've eaten for days, all staring intently at you as they listened for their numbers. Someone would call "BINGO!!" then all the others would start screaming obscenities (some of which I was so impressed with I started taking them down) all because they hadn't won a half a dozen eggs. Man I wouldn't want to have been those eggs. Anyway I can best describe the horror of that noise by comparing it with what had, up until that time, been the most frightening sound I'd ever heard in my life. I was once stood in the Great Hall of the Sydney Opera House and listened as 1,500 primary school children all tried to tune their woodwind recorders at the same time. After they had miserably failed at that task they then attempted to perform some jaunty number for the benefit of an audience filled with conscript parents. The sound those bingo players made was more frightening than that. And just to make sure that nobody missed it, they piped it through the PA system so the entire Club got to hear. Aural bliss. 

The Second Most Frightening Sound in The World

I don't remember much of the the trip to Merriwa, but I'm sure I had to see a counsellor. His name was Johnny Walker. 

So there you gave it, that was my introduction to Muswellbrook. I'm pleased to say I've made a full recovery and it's all been wine roses ever since.