Simple rations

Quilpie was probably the most remote of Queensland’s courthouses in the 1950s. It was as far from other centres and the coast as it could possibly be, with the local joke being that they had a choice of two beaches–Hervey Bay or the Gulf (Quilpie being about the same distance from both).

Quilpie’s clerk of the court was about to go on holidays and his reliever had arrived by train a couple of days before to do the ‘handover’. Train travel was the norm in those days and Quilpie was serviced by two trains a week. It was a golden opportunity for the two men to catch up on office gossip, transfers, promotions and the general by-play of shared experiences.

Later, on the afternoon of the reliever’s arrival, the clerk of the court received a telephone call through the recently installed exchange. It was an old lady on a remote station about 60 miles (100km) away who felt she was dying and needed to make a will. In those days the Magistrates Court did all varieties of ‘agency’ work, especially for the Public Curator, a forebear of the Public Trust Office.

The resident clerk of the court had an ex-military jeep as a personal vehicle, so he and his colleague locked up the office, packed up the jeep and drove off into the afternoon sun to the station to prepare the dying woman’s will. They arrived, took the instructions, typed them up on a pre-printed form and told the woman that all was in hand. The dying woman was nowhere near as close to death as she thought. The two men decided that rather than stay overnight at the station they would drive back to Quilpie.

As country hospitality demanded, the old woman loaded up the men with some provisions, including corned beef and a slab of fruit cake, before they set off into the now-moonlit night. About halfway home, the jeep broke down and the two men were forced to spend the night in the bush. As luck would have it, the car had broken down less than 100 metres from a bore kept in trim to water the stock, so they decided to fetch some water, share out the food and wait for the local policeman to find them (the two men had adopted the sound practice of telling the policeman where they were going and how long they intended to be away).

Having fetched the water and shared the rations, the two men set about eating their evening meal. Of course, the corned beef was very salty and the fruit cake was dry and hard. Even worse, however, was the bore water, which was almost unpalatable because of the sulphurous stench and flavour. Undaunted, the resident clerk of the court produced a full bottle of overproof (OP) rum from the back of the jeep to smother the taste of the water.

As the night wore on and their collective thirst, exacerbated by the dry fruit cake and the salty beef, became more and more extreme, the two men found themselves more frequently dipping into the OP-rum-and-bore-water concoction. By the time the local policeman arrived the next day they were both passed out in the jeep, dead drunk and incapable of driving regardless of the jeep’s mechanical condition. The beef had gone, the cake was a scatter of crumbs for the birds and the bottle was empty.