Very sad news. The owners of The Terminus have sold, and have bought the Yarra Glen Grand from a guy who was born in it, and whose family has been running it for 77 years. Judging by the photo of the Grand, the pair must have grown up, and done well out of The Terminus too. They should give the Healesville Hotel a run for its money. If you haven’t been to the Terminus’s restaurant, better go this month, as I heard that the new peoples were moving in this month. It is a splendid restaurant, and one of its dishes made it into John Lethlean’s top 10 dining moments in the Melbourne Magazine recently. Previous posts about The Terminus are here.

Check this out: it seems that the windows from the Grand have yellow glass in them:

I wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy new year, and warn you that this post has nothing to do with Abbotsford; it just explains the absence of blogging recently. I went to Broken Hill and Mildura from Boxing Day for a few days (and, on the way between the two, to Dareton, where I snapped the pictured marvel). How we thought we could fit in a 5 course dinner at Stefano’s the day after Christmas Day (and two days after my mother’s Christmas Eve dinner) is a mystery. But the food was superb while I could still fit it in.

In Broken Hill, I went to Bell’s Milk Bar, twice, and the second time was able to have an apricot fizz. That involved apricot syrup manufactured on the premises to a secret recipe from the 1950s, vanilla ice cream, soda water, and ice. It was good, in the Hemingway usage of that expression. I convinced the dreadlocked vixen formerly of Ballarat behind the counter to sell us some ice cream to have with the quandong pie we bought at the Silverton Tea Rooms. She said that after two years, she was still regarded by the locals as being “from away”.

Those tea rooms are definitely worth a visit too: the lady owner used to cook for shearers for a quarter of a century, and still serves up the same gear at reasonable prices. So too is the Silverton Hotel, even though the horse which used to wander through the front door for a beer every day passed away a few years ago.

But the highlight of the trip to Silver City was a show at the Art Gallery by Peter McGlinchey, “Tin Can”. His creations made from found objects made for one of the best exhibitions I have seen. I loved them.
Goannas ambled across the Silver City Highway, father emus strutted around with their flock of half-sized children, roos and wallabies were everywhere, some spinifex was spotted, I was reminded of the marvel of paddy melons — the cockroaches of the plant kingdom, which manage to grow amongst truly and insidiously green foliage on the dusty sides of outback roads where everything else is grey or at best olive — and I thought we came across a herd of 20 feral camels, but it turned out they were property of the Silverton camel safari across the road and down a bit.

I looked at the hire car contract we had and noticed to my astonishment that we were not restricted to sealed roads. Rather, we could go on “gravel roads” as well. So we took off down the less well frequented of two roads from Broken Hill more or less following the Darling River, which obligingly had a sign at the start of it which said “gravel road” — I couldn’t believe my luck given the large expanse of what appeared to be red dirt in front of me — and with some further luck, managed to navigate to Bindara Station through scarily unsignposted roads in a long stretch of country where my mobile was unexpectedly useless. I had found out about Bindara at the Broken Hill tourist information office only as a result of getting a map from a crowd which has only been going for a couple of years, Outback Beds. I recommend them. The station was once named Netley Station, a one million acre sheep station in the heydey of the paddle steamers with a staff of 200. Now, the homestead sits on 1,000 hectares of freehold, surrounded by 10,000 hectares of Crown lease, and is run by Bill and Barb Arnold.

On the way, we stopped off briefly at the historic woolshed in Kinchega National Park, a beautiful example of a kind of building I was only familiar with from Tom Roberts paintings such as “The Golden Fleece”, and just a wonderful place to walk through.

Bill and Barb have been at Bindara about 25 years. Not only are they delightful people and outstanding hosts, but they are switched on: they power their generator with bio-diesel Bill makes from spent fish and chips oil collected from Mildura, they dabble in the stock market (as well as supplying beef to the other stock market), pump water pursuant to their riparian rights from the Darling with a solar pump, and have a market garden of organic vegetables which they eat and supply to the most up-market restaurants in Broken Hill. I ate beautiful carrots deracinated not two minutes earlier, and went gaga over some tomatoes I fried up with liberal amounts of butter. Those tomatoes were the best I have eaten, plucked fresh from the vine, better even than the tomatoes I ate mid-year in Italy. Bill told me the secret was a litre of molasses mixed with a watering can full of water poured over the soil before or after planting (prevents the formation of nematodes). He and Barb poured scorn on the ridiculous collection of chemicals on offer in nurseries for the suburban gardener, especial mirth being reserved for a spray for lawns they saw recently. These are people with a good grip on lawn gardening: a perfect patch by the side of the homestead’s beautiful verandah, festooned with edible grape vines, is a marvellous achievement considering the scratchy dusty red and grey country beyond the garden fence.
The Arnold kids were schooled by School of the Air, and when I punctured my hand on a snag on the bottom the Darling River, I got to see inside the huge first aid kit supplied by the Royal Flying Doctor Service: containing hundreds of medications, scalpels, and no doubt, some opiates like morphine.

Bed, breakfast basket, lunch materials fresh from the vegetable garden, and dinner for two cost an astonishingly reasonable $95 a night. The bed was comfortable, everything was clean, and the accommodation was the old boundary rider’s accommodation. Sitting in the flywired verandah and looking out over the banks of the river a few metres away, a plethora of birds — outback parrots, dry country pigeons, bee eaters, apostlebirds, magpies and piwis, water birds including pelicans, swallows, willie wagtails, tree creepers — could be seen at any particular moment through a screen of outrageously beautiful river red gums. Some birdwatchers came to stay and counted over 170 species, but the Arnolds know there are more when the other seasons’ birds are taken into account.

A very reasonably priced family holiday could be had in the two double and two twin rooms with large attached kitchen. We twice dined with them on nosh cooked up by Barb, and for breakfast were treated to Barb’s home made jams, bread, stewed apricots, fresh fruit from the orchard, good tea, the aforementioned tomatoes, and cereals. You should go.

Henceforth, this is no longer a blog about Abbotsford as I choose to define Abbotsford. It is about that and country pubs, in particular those with old fashioned accommodation still operational (endangered species). There is a Flickr group on the subject (a future project of mine) but precious little else. If you know any other than Jeparit’s Hindmarsh Hotel, Dimboola’s Victoria Hotel, and Queenscliff’s Royal Hotel where you might enthuse about staying, let me know. (I bought Country Pubs of Victoria at Grub St Bookshop yesterday before heading over to the John Wren exhibition at the Racing Museum in Federation Square, of which much more anon.)

I went to Beechworth today and took the Canondale for a spin on the rail trail, discovering in the process the Commercial Hotel, just shy of 150 years old, and apparently in good hands. It is pictured, 3 times (the fourth is a gorgeous house in Beechworth). The pub’s proprietor fellow told me that I wouldn’t find too many hotels in Victoria in as original a condition as this one, and I believed him. It is a beautiful place — Ned Kelly used to drink there — and you can get a smallish simple clean rennovated double room containing a washbasin and a new bed — nothing else — for $65 a night (3 nights for the price of two) or bed, breakfast and 2 course dinner and champagne for $85 a couple, a bloody good deal.

I assume without quite knowing that Abbotsford was named after this place, Sir Walter Scott’s last home, Abbotsford House, in Scotland. Other Abbotsfords are to be found in Sydney, Dunedin, Johanasburg, British Columbia, and Wisconsin. That great hotel, the Rob Roy, may take its name from Scott’s novel of the same name. I just discovered the Rob Roy does accommodation from $25 a night with half-priced meals from the kitchen thrown in.

It is true that this post has nothing to do with Abbotsford, except that while I was sitting in Horsham’s Cafe Bagdad a suspected Canadian climber was extolling the virtues of our suburb to his mate, but I went for a drive to Jeparit via Nhill, Dimboola, Mt Arapiles and Horsham. Sadly, our energy flagged before we got to Antwerp or Rainbow. The idea was to get beyond the trappings of suburbia which in my book ends around Avoca and into the “real country” which I was sure was out there, back in the comforting world of plump bakery girls making up white bread salad sandwiches and willingly buttering your coffee scroll, with butter (tick), monuments to the Great War (tick), corellas (tick), proper gum trees (tick), quaint botanical gardens (tick), characterful country pubs with genial cockies propping up the bar (see below) serving up pots of Carlton Draught for $1.65 (nope, $3) and, most importantly in this crazy world of $100 a night motel rooms, charming simple clean upstairs accommodation for $35 a night (see below). The photos of many details of countrytownness are here.

It has to be said that though the front bar of the Union Hotel in Nhill provided the most wonderfully characterful couple of country folk, it has what I suspect may be one of Victoria’s most regressive dining rooms and its accommodation was dirty and spooky. A man who kind of belonged in the attic-like gloom of the upper level, the sole permanent resident of the hotel, loped around in the darkness disconcertingly. The breakfast was a tub of weetbix, milk, bread, and butter. Do not suppose I have left out the extras as too obvious to enumerate; there was no jam. I chatted with the previous owner who almost choked to hear they were charging $50 for accommodation; he used to charge $35 a night with a “proper breakfast” thrown in. But a more welcoming welcome from Peter the publican could not have been hoped for which went some small way to making up for the very obvious shortcomings of the place.

In the bar, there was a fallen woman, a ready made character in a novel, and a local crumple faced farmer archetype crowned by a beanie. The woman had had to live for too long in Adelaide, which she “loathed” (and she lingered like an actress on it, and paused for effect after enunciating the word carefully) on account of the town’s “filthy, ignorant” people, and manufactured a whole sequined drama of the surely-not-just-a-coincidence that I used to live in the Hawthorn street in which she went to primary school. How fondly she clung to the glory days when she was a saleswoman in a fashion boutique; how obliquely and with what ever-so-slightly-slurred melancholy she referred to certain health problems, sipping steadily on her beer at noon, and losing bets she’d gone halvies on with the publican on a gee-gee racing in the above-bar tee-vee.

The Royal in Horsham was a grand old country pub with a properly functioning accommodation ($50 a night for a double), but it was only after I got there that I understood the invasion of pokies had slipped past my radar. A black and white photo inside showed the hotel sporting a beautiful verandah. A pity that got rationalised.
I continue to cling to the dream, and reckon I have found two country pubs at which it will be realised, next trip: Dimboola’s perfect Victoria (above), and Jeparit’s much talked-up Hindmarsh Hotel, where the chef is “international award-winning”, and which is more or less a perfect country pub, though sadly this perfection to my eyes is probably the product of two Melbourners running it: Matt and Maryanne Kippin. I didn’t see the Hindmarsh’s $50 a double rooms, but I’m betting they’re just what I was looking for. Jeparit is truly a wonderful country town, the birthplace of Menzies, and home of some really classic front garden art. As at 2004, a constituent of this blog from Richmond was living there in a three bedroom Victorian house he snapped up for $30,000.

Here is a helpful tip. It has nothing to do with Abbotsford, so let me tell you this first. A Rough Guide author I met at a party told me that the Abbotsford Inn (now the City Edge Motel) in Langridge St, far too close to Hoddle St and our only non-pub accommodation as far as I know, was one of the worst hotels he had ever stayed in. He had just finished a guide on a South East Asian country. The internet, where he got onto the accommodation, suggests they charge $145 a night on weekends.

Ah the hazards of choosing hotels from afar. You go with the place that sounds brilliant in the 18 month old Lonely Planet only to find them resting heavily on their laurels, or to find that you are at a squat with a check-in desk also named the Original Old Yogi Inn which pays the rickshaw twice the commission of the original Original Old Yogi Inn: the Lonely Planet Effect. So you turn to the internet in search of that overlooked little gem.What the internet has been sadly lacking is a way to bypass the thousands of hotel booking sites all of which seem just as dodgy as each other, and take advice from a trustworthy international source. Tripadvisor is getting there and its readers send in photos of rooms they’ve stayed in which is handy, Expedia is comprehensive at least, and Lonely Planet’s Thorntree bulletin board is good, though it takes a bit of effort for the uninitiated. The Guardian’s website’s nascent “Been There” is already great (it got me to this wonderful place).

But now Lonely Planet’s website’s Worldguide has accommodation listings for selected tourist centres. Small and crumblingly colonial hotels are featured, some of which fly under the radar of the internet. I love it.

There are three books about hotels I plan to publish. The first, aimed at the Arabian Gulf market will be called Sheik Chic. The second will be a glossy coffee table book dedicated to charming tiny little family run hotels without televisions. The third would be the world’s worst hotels; what a joy that would be.

The photo is of one of 4 rooms at Cilik’s Beach Garden on Bali’s North Coast, stolen from I’ve Been to Bali Too.