Toni Cameron loves life in a country pub

TONI Cameron was in hotels when decimal currency came in and when six o’clock closing went out.

EAST GIPPSLAND: Publican Toni Cameron Publican Toni Cameron at the Imperial Hotel in Bairnsdale. PICTURE: ZOE PHILLIPS

TONI Cameron was in hotels when decimal currency came in and when six o’clock closing went out.

She has spent the best part of 40 years on the other side of the bar and, for the most part, has loved it.

“When I was a kid living at Lindenow (in East Gippsland), I can remember going to buy a pie, and I’d smell the beer at the pub, and I used to just
love that smell, and think to myself one day I’m going to come back and buy this. And I did,” she says of the Farmers Home Hotel.

But there would be other pubs first. In 1966, aged 16, Toni landed her first job, working for Connie and George Stephenson at the Metung Hotel.

She was just getting a taste for pub life when her parents moved the family to Richmond to manage the Royal Saxon on Church St.

“It’s a yuppie pub now, but it wasn’t like that when we were there. I have good memories of that pub,” she says. “There was Mum and Dad, (sister) Jan, myself, (brothers) Gary, Peter and (sister) Leanne. There were five of us kids, and we ran the whole hotel; we were all old enough to work in the bar.

“That really opened my eyes. What I didn’t see there? Even the tram. I didn’t know if you wanted to catch the tram, you had to be on the same side of the street as the tram, otherwise you just stood there all day.”

Toni talks of a time when 10 shillings — “that little brown note” — would last you all day “and get you a pack of smokes”.

The public bar was a men’s only environment and the women were relegated to the lounge. “That hotel had a snake pit,” she says. “It was an area where the real Richmond ladies would go and drink all day, drink hard all day. And then the men would come and get them at 9 or 10 at night and take them home.

“As the night would go on and they’d all get drunker and drunker, there were sections that Dad would close off. And then it’d be total shutdown and no one would be allowed in. I would have been 22.”

After the Saxon, Toni moved to run the hotel at St Andrew’s, describing it as “ a continuous swill.”

Eventually Toni returned to Gippsland and, after a brief spell in restaurants, spent seven years running the Buchan Caves Hotel.

“I should never have sold that,” she says.

But you get the feeling there are few regrets about Toni’s time as a publican.

In 2000, after the then publican was murdered, Toni and her mum bought the freehold at Lindenow. “It was the one I fell in love with as a kid,” she says.

Toni ran the Lindenow pub for 13 years, the first 10 in partnership with her mum, Flo Savige. “Country hotels are all about country people and what’s happening in the town,” she says.

“You’ve got to help the town; you’ve got to sponsor everybody even if you haven’t got the money. I sponsored the footy club once and the cheque bounced. But you can’t let them down.”

Toni says she’s seen plenty of domestics and fights.

“I’ve seen some really good fights,” she says.

She still has a cricket bat some men threatened to use in a fight at St Andrew’s. She threw a bucket of mop water over some people, another time she hosed down a few blokes with a garden hose late after a Buchan Rodeo.

“It was 11pm, so God knows how cold it would have been,”

But she’s still not sure how she should have dealt with the bloke who threw a snake into the open fire at the Buchan pub.

“It just crawled out the bottom”.