The Great River Run: Tilpa Hotel, the pub with six locals

Tilpa Hotel could well be the inspiration for cartoonist Ken Maynard’s Ettamogah Pub – it’s a ramshackle construction made of timber and corrugated iron that for the past 120 years, has sat perched on the bank of what was once the mighty Darling River.

• The Great River Run: Part 1, The Big Picture
• The Great River Run: Part 2, The Drought

Tilpa Hotel could well be the inspiration for cartoonist Ken Maynard’s Ettamogah Pub – it’s a ramshackle construction made of timber and corrugated iron that for the past 120 years, has sat perched on the bank of what was once the mighty Darling River.

But in Tilpa the Darling is now nothing more than a vast, waterless, dust-lined trench stretching to Bourke 200km to the north and Wilcannia 130km to the south.

German backpacker Miriam Quasdorf at the Tilpa Hotel.

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The most forlorn reminder of the river’s heyday is the long, steep concrete slipway from where you could once launch your tinnie in hope to catch a trophy cod – today the slipway’s end now hangs in dry, dusty air.

The pub’s manager Phil Mahoney cuts a lonely figure in a town that comprises of the hotel, a house and a disused school.

In fact the town’s population of five recently exploded with the arrival of a German backpacker revising the census to six.

Publican Phil Mahoney at the Tilpa Hotel. Picture: Toby Zerna

The publican and his wife have only been here for six months, Phil, a shearer from Boorowa in NSW taking on the job in hope the river would eventually rise again, but there’s no sign of that happening.

“If we only had a metre of water …” Phil tells me. “There was a time when you couldn’t get through the door of this place for all the fishermen and shearers. It was a great community – it’s really the last frontier.”

The dry river banks of the Darling River are exposed at Tilpa. Picture: Toby Zerna

Indeed, the pub’s walls and ceilings are covered in signatures and autographs from countless travellers who, for whatever reason, have stopped by the Tilpa Hotel to have a beer.

“Have a look at this name …” Phil tells me as he drags me across the room, hoping I might shed some light on some mystery. “I dunno if it’s him or not.”

There, scrawled in black texta – Ivan Milat.

“Geez Phil” I reply in surprise, not really knowing what to say. “I dunno either, mind you he did get around a bit.”

Phil’s keen to show us some of the pub’s peculiar history way out here in the never-never, pointing to the grinning head of a trophy Murray cod mounted on the wall. I wonder when the last time Tilpa’s seen a mighty fish like this.

The parched landscape surrounding the tiny town of Tilpa. Picture: Toby Zerna

“I’m still getting phone calls from freshwater fishermen from all over wanting to know how the river is” Phil sighs. “ … it breaks your heart telling them not to come out …”

He still has plans to build a bar along the pub’s back fence so when the river’s full once more you can throw in a line while having a beer.

Phil’s circumspect about what he thinks has caused the Darling to disappear, but he’s not backward in telling me what the locals think of the irrigation farmers back upstream.

“You’d be better off saying you’re a terrorist than an irrigator around here …”