This eclectic Central Highlands shop has plenty in store if you need a pit stop
A couple in Western Australia looking for a treechange managed to strike gold in a remote part of Tasmania, writes Charles Wooley
Opinion
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April 1, 2007, might not have been an auspicious date to purchase real estate in the Tasmanian bush. But that was when Shane Hedger, a driller working in the Kalgoorlie Super Pit, passed through Bronte Park in search of a treechange.
Despite Gunns Limited’s best efforts at woodchipping back then, there were still a lot of trees. But the change Shane was looking for was one of magnitude, and in that sense leaving the giant Kalgoorlie mine for tiny Bronte Park, in central Tasmania, was the biggest change imaginable.
The super pit is one of the richest gold mines in the world, producing about a million ounces of gold a year. It’s one of the biggest open cuts in the world. The small shanty village of Bronte Park could be swallowed without trace in that massive hole 3.7km long, 1.5 wide and 500m deep.
Shane’s wife, Wendy, was working as a driver-instructor in the same mine. She was teaching workers to drive some of the world’s biggest and noisiest trucks. For the WA couple Bronte was in every sense as far from Kalgoorlie as you could get: “Not just the peace and quiet, but we also loved the beauty of the surrounding lakes. And I really needed a big change – things down the mine had gone really badly.”
Shane told me how he had been working on the night shift with a good mate, a driller from Queenstown, who lost his life in a terrible accident. “His last word to me was that he was going upstairs to get some drill rods. But driving in the dark up to the surface he rammed his vehicle into a load of them. They were overhanging the back of a parked truck by a few metres and when he pranged into them, they came through the windscreen and just about removed his head.”
Shane’s mate survived for a short time in a coma. “He was brain-dead, but he had a young family, so the surgeons kept him alive until the wife and kids could say goodbye. Then they switched him off.
“After that I just couldn’t face mining. I had to get out.”
Everyone had been making good money in the super pit and everyone had big dreams for a different future. Shane’s workmate had been planning to move with his family to Tasmania.
“He was always talking about the place, and when he was killed I just said, ‘Why not?’’’ Shane said. “We were up for a change. Property was going gangbusters in Kalgoorlie but was still pretty cheap in Tassie. And then I heard of a country store for sale in a place called Bronte Park, smack in the middle of Tasmania.”
Getting on for 20 years later he’s still there. If you leave the Lyell Highway just after Bronte Lagoon on the way to Derwent Bridge, you will find Shane’s shop five minutes up a sealed section of the Marlborough Highway, in the direction of Miena and the Great Lake. But coming the other way from the Great Lake Hotel and travelling west for about half an hour on the unsealed Marlborough is a drive that can be testing even for locals. If you survive, Shane is good for coffee, chips and gravy and, if you want more danger, there’s his Bronte Special, a giant ham, cheese, onion and potato cake toastie. A note in the shop window claims it is recommended by “one out of 10 cardiac surgeons”.
Helpfully, it also draws attention to the heart defibrillator located on the site.
I’ve always been surprised at what you can buy at Shane’s store and what you can’t buy.
“Shane, where are the eggs?”
“Eggs, now Charlie, there’s something I can’t help you with.
“But a bloke came in yesterday and said, ‘I bet you wouldn’t have a coffee percolator,’ and I said, ‘How much do you wanna bet?’ And I sold him one.”
Fishing gear, waders, flies, the lot. Pots and pans. A gas stove and an inflatable mattress. Rat poison and hot English mustard, bows and arrows, knives and hot pies, rice, today’s national newspapers and lawn seed. “Mate, I call it an ‘eclectic mixed business’. If I don’t have it now, I’ll have it next time you call in. There will be eggs tomorrow.”
Sadly, Shane has put the joint up for sale. And fair enough I suppose. His wife and teenage kids live in Launceston, and he considers he has done enough lonely hard yards in the high country.
Wendy wants him home.
Last week when I bought my fishing licence I asked, “Sixteen years ago you were a miner. What did you know about running a shop?”
“Nothing. Not a f---ing thing.”
“Was it a good business when you started?”
“It was when the local pub was going well. Then there was a succession of new owners, the pub went badly, and the village went down the gurgler. Then the pub burned down in 2018 and it’s been very quiet ever since.”
Doesn’t sound good, does it? But let me declare my interest. I’m not trying to help Shane sell the place. I don’t want him to go. As a Hydro kid I remain sentimental about Bronte. The old Hydro Chalet, later the pub, was at the centre of my early life on the plateau. Christmas, Easter, Anzac Day, everything was celebrated at Bronte Park. It was the capital of my young world. And Shane has been part of my Bronte life now for almost two decades.
But as he tells it, the poor bloke has had more than his fair share of trouble.
“Not just losing the bloody pub, but two major bushfires and then Covid, where no one was allowed in for months. And after so many interest rate hikes I’ve lost count, now there’s a recession on the horizon,” he said.
“Fair dinkum, I reckon I know how the Pharaoh of Egypt felt in Exodus. We haven’t had the plague of boils yet, but we’ve had everything else.”
The point is my mate Shane is a survivor. I cooked him dinner last week – a big piece of silverside in a large second-hand pot I had bought from him for $5.
Pity there were no hard-boiled eggs for the white sauce that went with the cauliflower.
But there was plenty of hot English mustard. Years ago, I complained when there was only mild mustard available, and since then he’s never run out. It’s that kind of shop.
Over a few reds I congratulated him on his pioneering frontier endurance. He laughed, “Maybe I’m just too stubborn. And too stupid to say ‘enough’!”
“But wait a minute, you’ve got the joint on the market and you’re telling all this to a journo?”
But in fact I reckon the Bronte Store could be a goer for the right person.
My trout guide mate from a nearby up-market private fishery dreams of reopening a pub out the back of the shop. I share the same dream; a few steaks for sale, some salad and some buns and barbecue tables where trout fishermen could cook their own just as they like it.
We need a place to gather and complain about the fishing and the weather. With luck we might even chuck the occasional trout on the barbie.
As Shane puts it: “What the place needs is a dreamer with deep pockets.”
And no need to worry about financial stress. The place comes with a defibrillator.
Charles Wooley is a Tasmanian-based journalist.
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