Birdsville Pub Brawl of ’74 could inspire script writers

AUSTRALIA never had a wild west in the Hollywood sense. Instead we mythologised our past via the bush folklore. The Great Birdsville Pub Brawl of ’74 – is one of those yarns.

Birdsville Hotel – the scene of the Great Birdsville Pub Brawl of ’74.

AUSTRALIA never had a wild west in the Hollywood sense – we never quite solidified into legend those colourful characters and events which allow the Americans to go on making movies about a shootout at the OK Corral.

Instead we mythologised our past via the “bush yarn’’ and, even if they have become unfashionable, there are still enough of them out beyond the Great Dividing Range to keep a team of script writers busy for a decade.

The following – The Great Birdsville Pub Brawl of ’74 – is one of those yarns.

In the 1970s a shearer from the Barcaldine district and a Stock Squad cop from Longreach were engaged in a long simmering feud, the origin of which no one was ever quite sure of.

Each man owned a ferocious dog, and when the prospect of a violent showdown between the two men arose both men backed down for fear of a mauling from his opponent’s dog.

That canine-inspired version of Mutually Assured Destruction, much like the situation between Russia and the US in the ’60s, ensured an uneasy period of détente prevailed.

But on the eve of the 1974 Birdsville Cup both men walked into the bar of the Birdsville Hotel minus their dogs.

The now chairman of the Diamantina Shire Council, Geoff Morton, who was in town that day as a young man in his 20s, witnessed what happened next.

Both men charged at each other in a rage and soon the town’s police contingent, reinforced by out-of-town conscripts for the Birdsville Cup, took the side of the police officer while the shearer’s mates and locals sided with the shearer.

While the core participants in the brawl numbered five or six, other hotel patrons felt obligated to engage until Morton estimates there were between 20 and 30 people fighting inside and outside the pub.

“There were people fighting each other and they didn’t even know what they were fighting about,’’ recalls Morton, whose family have owned historic Roseberth Station outside Birdsville for five generations.

Who “won’’ has never been settled, but it is noted that the Queensland Police Service airlifted the Stock Squad officer out of Birdsville the following day in what might be viewed as a strategic retreat.

A Brisbane dentist Pat Cook, who provided medical assistance to one police officer who was lying unconscious on the pub floor at the height of the brawl, later invoiced the QPS for “services rendered to Queensland Police Force on the floor of the Birdsville Hotel’’.

“He was paid in full,’’ Morton says. “No questions asked.’’

Punters outside the Birdsville Pub in recent times. Picture: Peter Wallis

Barcaldine Mayor Rob Chandler confirms Morton’s story saying the brawl has been the subject of discussion, comment and possibly embellishment across the west for more than 40 years.

A popular western Queenslander and former bookmaker now living in Clayfield, Brisbane, also witnessed the brawl, and never forgot the amount of blood that accumulated on the pub floor.

No arrests were made, no serious long-term injury was suffered by participants.

If any journalist witnessed the event, it doesn’t appear to have been considered newsworthy enough to report.

However, there is quite definitely an unpublished bush poem about the brawl, authored by a high profile western Queenslander.

Inside the Birdsville pub.

In the age of one-punch-can-kill, Morton recalls the story not to celebrate violence, but to illustrate, at so many levels, just how different a world Queensland is today.

The Birdsville Races are now famous for good-natured crowds who frequent the pub throughout race weekends, police routinely praising participants who seldom require arrest apart from occasional confinement for drunkenness (and, increasingly, drug use).

“It was a totally different world in 1974,’’ says Morton.

“If something like that happened today it would be a national scandal.’’

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