A glowing fireplace warms the wood-panelled room, while outside the season searches for gaps and thin walls. The timber wainscot is festooned with a mismatched profusion of framed photos, grog posters and beer company-sponsored blackboards – clearly proclaiming the tap-room is staunch Cascade territory.
A vintage jukebox slumps lazily in the corner, while a knot of hi-vis-clad men mills around the pool table.
The familiar, craggy face of Willem Dafoe enters stage left through double doors and heads purposefully through the room. The surly publican glances up from the newspaper he is pretending to read and buttonholes our protagonist.
“You right there, mate?”
“Just need to use the restroom,” replies Dafoe.
“Drink first.”
“Right.”
“Beer?”
“Sure.”
Dafoe soon discovers the brusque barman is the most amicable person in the room, as the hard-bitten locals make it known that they do not like outsiders, especially those who look like an environmentalist. Confrontation ensues.
Cut! This is a scene from 2011 film The Hunter, in which Dafoe plays Martin David, a mercenary sent to Tasmania by a military biotech company to find a live thylacine, and the fictional paralytic toxin in its DNA. Spoiler alert – he kills the tiger.
The pub exists, but the grumpy publican is a fiction. The actual landlord at the National Park Hotel, Gordon River Road, Mount Field National Park, Tasmania, is the jovial Joff Dorkings, who is British, and prefers wine.
Joff was on holiday in Tasmania in 2015 when he stumbled across the National Park Hotel. He decided he was due for a tree-change, and bought it. In the following lustrum there have been some changes: the vintage juke is gone, quality shiraz has joined Cascade on the drinks list, and you are just as likely to meet a dentist from Denmark in the front-bar as a hi-vis clad logger. But the pool table is still there, as is the fallow stag head over the door to the dining room.
Something else that remains from that scene from The Hunter are the extras, most of whom were elbow-bending regulars. They had agreed to add their colour and authenticity to the background – once the director had agreed to switch out the non-alcoholic prop-grog for full-strength and pick up the tab.
As Joff Dorkings puts it, in his Wessex accent, “You’ll likely see them today, wearing the same shirts and same hats, sitting at the same bar stool.” Now of course they mix with the more cosmopolitan patrons, no doubt sharing tales and anecdotes from their big Hollywood moment.
Joff has managed, metaphorically, to put new wine in old bottles without losing the rugged charm of the place. The National Park Hotel was built in 1920, when wild Tasmanian tigers did still roam the
surrounding hinterlands. The last known wildling was caught in the nearby Florentine Valley in 1933.
In 1920, as the taps started to flow in Mount Field, American kegs were being drained for the start of prohibition. In Europe, a power-drunk Austrian was taking control the German Nazi Party, and globally, the Spanish flu was in its death throws. Perhaps it is bleakly fitting and poignant that the centenary of the saloon falls amid the Covid pandemic.
. . .
I am selflessly helping Joff dispose of his kegs while he tells me stories passed down from owner to owner.
“… So, he trots this horse straight up to the bar and asks for a draught … ” Joff smiles wryly, and pours himself another grape juice.
“A draught horse?” I prod. He is kind enough to laugh, the consummate barman.
Joff is the latest in a lineage of many owners. One previous holder of the keys was Ken Britten, an ex-policeman who kept the rabble to a low roar through the rowdy logging boom years and forest wars. The carpark in those days was filled with logging lorries and utes. One day, a less utilitarian looking vehicle pulled in (think of an old Subaru wagon, or a battered Volkswagen). A hemp-wearing, possibly dreadlocked man emerged and ventured in Dafoe-esque fashion into the hotel, in search of rolling tobacco. His arrival in the tap-room prompted one disgruntled, irony-loving logger to seize the moment to chain himself to the waiting vehicle. When the environmentalist returned, the shackled man exclaimed “How do you like it!”
A protest against protests, as it were.
A few issues arose from there being no windows to the carpark. Sure, environmentalists couldn’t see patrons locking themselves to their cars, but also loggers didn’t like the idea of not being able to see their vehicles, full of chainsaws and other expensive equipment, while they drank. One out-of-his-tree logger had a novel solution. He saw an opportunity presented by the pub’s wide double doors, and attempted to drive his ute through them, right up to the bar. Unfortunately, the doors were not quite wide enough, and he found himself jammed between the jambs. By all accounts, the chainsaws were handy in freeing the ute from its predicament.
The windows that the tap-room does have face the road, and as such they made easy targets late one night in a drive-by shoot-out by a passing car. Was it a frustrated greenie? Maybe a punter who missed out on the chook raffle? Those responsible were never found. At least not officially.
Speaking of chook raffles, apparently it was tradition in those days for the winner to roast the chook over the pub’s open fire and leave the bones in the spittoons. Not really your average shiraz crowd.
Prior to Ken Britten’s watch was an owner whose name should probably be redacted. National Park lore holds that old Mrs X would provide the questionable public service of sly grog sales to teens, each afternoon at 3pm, from the back steps.
Those were frontier days when men were men, and kids were probably slightly worse; the days when the kegs were rolled up the hill from the railway station, where locomotives pulled stumptails of log-laden cars.
. . .
Memories of the frontier days can often be as mawkish as the smell of warm beer, but there was early recognition of the beauty of this place.
While great swathes of ancient forest have been logged in the area since long before the hotel’s arrival, the area around Russel Falls has been protected since 1885. And then four years before the hotel was built, more than 160 square kilometres of surrounding glaciated landscape, cascading waterfalls and towering ancient forest became Tasmania’s first national park.
Here, autumn is the season of colour. The slopes around Tarn Shelf are aflame with the golds, auburns and reds of Australia’s only native deciduous beech, their delicate, crinkle-cut leaves heralding autumn. It is the magnificent turning of the fagus, the tree locals so ingloriously refer to as Tanglefoot on account of its serpentine root systems.
In winter, snow blankets Mount Mawson and the hinterlands are transformed into a colourless wonderland of tree-skeletons and ice-rink lakes.
The hotel on the threshold of this spectacular national park is not the oldest in Tasmania, nor the prettiest, but it is warm, intimate and cosy by virtue of the frigidity that lingers at its doorstep and rimes the backyard lawn.
In the early days it was mostly a howff for loggers and hydroelectric workers, trying their damnedest to drink the watering hole dry. And while the patronage has changed, the stories and history remain as a romanticised backstory.
The frost that glistens down to the Tyenna River, and snowy woods and uplands beyond, enhance the feeling of comfort and comradery by the crackling open fire. It draws out stories and laughter, and the need for too-full glasses of port into the witching hour. It is a simple joy that makes the hotel’s plain face appealing. Her character and warmth make her beautiful.
When Joff tells me he is reluctantly thinking of selling, I ask him for how much.
Jonno Blood has been chased by angry gypsies in Hungary, arrested by soldiers in the Ukraine, and slept in a three-metre wide bed with a Red Yao chieftain and his five wives in China. He has also lived in London and Melbourne, before easing back into life in his native Tasmania. While still scratching itchy feet often, he loves his island digs, its often hidden stories, and the characters and capers that make it lavishly singular.
