The Golden Shanty

ABOUT ten years ago, not a day's tramp from Ballarat, set well back from

a dusty track that started nowhere in particular and had no destination

worth mentioning, stood the Shamrock Hotel. It was a low, rambling,

disjointed structure, and bore strong evidence of having been designed by

an amateur artist in a moment of vinous frenzy. It reached out in several

well-defined angles, and had a lean-to building stuck on here and there;

numerous outhouses were dropped down about it promiscuously; its walls

were propped up in places with logs, and its moss-covered shingle roof,

bowed down with the weight of years and a great accumulation of stones,

hoop-iron, jam-tins, broken glassware, and dried 'possum skins, bulged

threateningly, on the verge of utter collapse. The Shamrock was built of

sun-dried bricks, of an unhealthy, bilious tint. Its dirty, shattered

windows were plugged in places with old hats and discarded female

apparel, and draped with green blinds, many of which had broken their

moorings, and hung despondently by one corner. Groups of ungainly fowls

coursed the succulent grasshopper before the bar door; a moody,

distempered goat rubbed her ribs against a shattered trough roughly hewn

from the butt of a tree, and a matronly old sow of spare proportions

wallowed complacently in the dust of the road, surrounded by her

squealing brood.

A battered sign hung out over the door of the Shamrock, informing people

that Michael Doyle was licensed to sell fermented and spirituous liquors,

and that good accommodation could be afforded to both man and beast at

the lowest current rates. But that sign was most unreliable; the man who

applied to be accommodated with anything beyond ardent beverages--liquors

so fiery that they "bit all the way down"--evoked the astonishment of the

proprietor. Bed and board were quite out of the province of the Shamrock.

There was, in fact, only one couch professedly at the disposal of the

weary wayfarer, and this, according to the statement of the few persons

who had ever ventured to try it, seemed stuffed with old boots and

stubble; it was located immediately beneath a hen-roost, which was the

resting-place of a maternal fowl, addicted on occasion to nursing her

chickens upon the tired sleeper's chest. The "turnover" at the Shamrock

was not at all extensive, for, saving an occasional agricultural labourer

who came from "beyant"--which was the versatile host's way of designating

any part within a radius of five miles--to revel in an occasional

"spree," the trade was confined to the passing "cockatoo" farmer, who

invariably arrived on a bony, drooping prad, took a drink, and shuffled

away amid clouds of dust.

Dettagli