Talk of the North: Normanton’s new bakery shows how much things have changed for the north

John Andersen has seen it all, but a flash new cafe at the home of the Purple Pub and the Brindle dog selling sweet treats and fancy breads? That’ll do him.

Cattle muster at Delta Downs Station, 40km from Normanton. Helicopter pilot Lockie Tremain-Hill helps muster cattle near Delta Downs homestead.

Normanton, global HQ of the brindle dog, home of the Purple Pub, ringers, fishos, deckies, fencing contractors, horse breakers and blokes in the pub it’s safer not making eye contact with after they’ve downed half-a-dozen VB schooners and a couple of stiff rumbos, isn’t actually the sort of town that breaks records when it comes to the consumption of wholemeal and wholegrain bread.

This is white bread country. No hippy stuff allowed. Let me tell’ya Louie, if its’ not sliced and white, it’s ain’t bread.

Normanton, 660km inland from the east coast, is doing the near-impossible and baking its own bread? It’s a great town, believe me, I love the place, but given its remoteness, bespoke bakers are not exactly queuing to move there. Ditto hipster baristas who wouldn’t know a pair of Wranglers from a greenhide rope. So when it comes to setting up a bakery cafe, things have to be done a little bit differently. Add a dash of ambition, a 44 gallon drum load of determination and before you know it, magic happens.

It might be rough and tumble but Normanton just can’t help going above and beyond. Bread used to come here from the Tablelands, but what with floods cutting of supplies for weeks on end, the local Indigenous-run FoodWorks decided to break the cycle and bake its own bread. Presto, we now have Lower Gulf Bakery Mantha (mantha means food in the local Kurtijar language). They tell me it’s bread so good even the fussy Victorian tourists are raving about it. It’s selling like hot ca … err, bread.

Waylan Pascoe stacking freshly baked bread at the Normanton bakery.

Adviser to the enterprise, Gene Geedrick, says the venture has created four new positions and more will come on-stream as the business expands into a coffee shop selling toasted sangers and all the usual cafe fare. Once upon a time in Normanton you’d be happy if you could get a slice or two of tinned corned beef on a Sao biscuit. Now it’s starting to look like eggs Benny on sourdough and a skinny flat white. Talk about culture wars. Cafe culture hits Normanton. What next? Aside from the once venerated Liberal Party pouring petrol over itself and flicking a lighter at last Saturday’s election, what’s happening to this country? Next thing you know they’ll be lining up for their macchiatos and double espressos at Kynuna and Urandangie. When that happens consider the great divide between the city and bush bridged … not by an understanding of these two different cultures, but by coffee and smashed avo on toast.

Gene Geedrick is taking it all in his stride. “It’s not unusual for us to be cut off by road for four to six weeks every year. When this happened we ran out of bread. Now we can hold up to six weeks dough here in our container. There’s no way we could store full loaves of bread for that length of time,” he told me this week.

Take note of this anyone with a hankering to pull up stumps and move to inland Australia where the emus run backwards to keep the dust out of their eyes and the populace is clamouring for fresh bread and decent coffee. First off, there are three types of bakeries.

One is the traditional baker who gets up and goes to work well before the sparrows start emitting methane, merrily baking away to serve his customers sauntering in soon after sunrise.

NQ Life: Cattle muster at Delta Downs Station, 40km from Normanton. Sidney Harold on Stranger musters cattle towards yards at Maggieville Station, part of Delta Downs.

It’s hard yakka and takes a lot of skill. We dips our lids to these old school bakers.

Number two is the hot bread variety which is fabulous when it’s fresh, but has a life span shorter than a Greens’ voter at a Trumpet of Patriot’s piss-up. After a day or two it’s s only good for the chooks.

Number three is frozen dough. Sounds like cheating, but it works like a charm. This is what the Normanton crew is using. The frozen dough comes up from Sydney in a refrigerated container that can hold four times in dough in what it could loaves of bread. If frozen dough had been around in JC’s time, the loaves and fishes gig at Bethsaida would have been a shoo-in. Feeding the hungry masses when you’ve got frozen dough? No problem, Amigo.

The bakery is popping out up to 50 loaves a day but this will rise (no pun intended) as tourism numbers grow during the cooler months. Migrating southern grey nomads escaping the southern winter are now pouring into Normanton and Karumba, placing extra demand for bread fresh from the oven. The bakery which was cranking out the loaves five days a week, is now pedal to the metal seven days.

Pastries fresh out of the oven at the Normanton bakery.

They are focused on delivering top-notch bread and coffee. In order to deliver on the coffee side of things they are bringing in a $20,000 machine that Gene assures me makes coffee as good as any barista in the land. He said that like the equipment used to bake the bread, the coffee machine is hi-tech, but he says this extra expenditure is necessary when producing a top quality product in a remote environment.

“It’s so hard to get highly skilled people out here. So we are investing in the best equipment to make sure our customers get the best product,” he said.

What’s not a surprise is that wholemeal and wholegrain loaves are not big sellers. As I said, white and sliced. This leads to the big question: Can this tough frontier town be convinced to embrace hippy bread? Gene Goodrick thinks it can, but it’s a process of education. My take on it is that he’ll know white bread is on the wane when the ringers from Delta Downs Station come in and ask for a loaf of wholemeal and a soy latte.

That will be the day he’ll know that things have turned around. It will be the day the cow jumps over the moon.

Ando says you need to do better in the gifts department for mum.

Hide the new mop and bucket

Mother’s Day tomorrow. Fellers, did you read the story in the Bully on Tuesday? Forty-eight per cent of Mums don’t like their Mother’s Day gifts. Cleaning and weight loss products led the charge of unwanted presents. Gee, who would’a thought? So, if you’ve gone and bought a new mop and bucket and have it hidden in the shed until tomorrow morning, the advice is leave it there … or better still fill it with water and mop out the house yourself. Slip out now while the going is good and buy some flowers and a bottle of champagne. Throw in some prawns and a box of chocolates. You’ll be King of the World.

Presenting her with weight products translates to you saying “babe, you’re starting to buck out of those jeans”. Danger. Danger. I can hear the air raid sirens blaring. No man has ever given weight loss products to his wife, girlfriend or whatever and lived long enough to tell if they were of any benefit. Danger lurks everywhere when it comes to blokes navigating weight and bum dimensions. And be warned. You can get the same sort of volcanic reaction from giving weight loss products as you can when she pulls on a new pair of jeans and asks, “does my bum look big in these” … Let’s pause it here and think before you answer. If you say “yep, like a hippo” instead of “nah, like a little peach” you are a dead man walking.

Giving her weight loss products and telling her that her rear end is like a hippo’s will see a sudden slide to minus-zero in how your marriage is faring. Will that be a problem for you? No, you will not have a care in the world because you, my friend, will be buried in the backyard six feet under the azaleas. Happy Mother’s Day for tomorrow mums. And yes, your bum looks great in those jeans.

Joke of the Week

An 80 year old bloke goes to the doctor for a check-up. He is in good shape and the doc asks what he does to stay so fit. The old timer said “I’m a biker. It keeps me in good shape. I get up early and ride up and down mountains, over sand dunes and along boggy trails. It keeps me alert and fit”.

The doc said “that’s all good, but there must be more to it. How old was you dad when he passed away”?

“The old biker said, “who says he’s dead. He comes riding with me every morning. This morning we did some real hard mountains”.

The doc says, “you mean to tell me he is still alive. How old is he?”

“He’s 99 and he’s got plenty of gas left in his tank,” the old biker said.’

The doc thinks for a few seconds and asks , “what about your dad’s dad? How old was he when he died”?

The old biker said, “who said grandad’s dead”?

The doc says, “you mean to tell me you’re 80 and your grandad is still alive”?

“Fit as a fiddle,” said the old biker.

The doc is getting annoyed and says, “and I suppose he goes motor bike riding with you too”?

The old biker answered, “he sure does. He’s 117 and hardly ever misses a morning ride, except he couldn’t go this morning because he went to the church to get married”.

The doctor is aghast. “Got married at his age. Good Lord, why would a 117 year old man want to get married?”

The old biker grinned and said, “who said he wanted to”?

Originally published as Talk of the North: Normanton’s new bakery shows how much things have changed for the north