Day 212 - Queensland. Each year a group of golfers from various clubs in Sydney (mostly Castle Hill) spend a week at Yarrawonga & Border Golf Club playing golf. At the left is the Culcairn Hotel where we stay on our way to Yarrawonga to play golf; the golf course is actually at Mulwala, which will become important shortly. We, all 12 of us had a wonderful time playing golf, except for the day it rained and we played Snooker, Drinking and Gambling. On Thursday 21 March we were sitting in the Golf club having dinner and watching the amazing storm that was taking place around us. Next morning we discovered that a Tornado had narrowly missed the golf club and had caused havoc in Mulwala and nearby towns. We saw the damage next morning as we left for Canberra and travelled through the affected towns, it was unbelievable, and whatever you saw on the news doesn't even half describe the damage. No pictures I'm afraid it was too dark to get what I needed.

That night in Canberra we were reflecting over the events of Thursday and the Tornado and I said everybody must have had lots of phone calls from worried spouses, children etc. Not one phone call apparently, one bloke rang his wife to let her know he was ok, she said "what tornado", obviously nobody loves us and I don't think we care.

As I have a photograph of a country pub it is probably a good time to reflect on the future of Hotels in country towns, especially the big old ones like the Culcairn Hotel. As a consequence of various factors the populations of country towns are shrinking alarmingly, many of the people left are old and the young ones move on to the big smoke. There are towns that are exceptions to the above but they tend to be regional centres e.g. Mildura and Wagga Wagga or have become the victims of the "Tree Change" phenomena e.g. Mansfield and Castlemaine. Towns that once had 3,4,5 pubs now have only 1 or 2, where the pubs have closed they are falling into disrepair and no longer have a meaningful future. At some stage they will be demolished or just fall down. Many of the remaining ones don't generate enough revenue to maintain them properly, many (not all) are in a sorry state of disrepair, the bar area may be ok but the accommodation area is often pretty ordinary. Its progress I guess, if want to enjoy having a beer, staying or just looking at some of these old pubs you best get of your arse and do it real soon before they disappear.

Someone knocked me off with 40 points at Tocumwal, still it was a good effort. Played at Federal on Saturday and scored a B Grade winning 39 points, yippee! Handicap is now 16.6.