Matt, Beat and Kay Crowe behind the bar that made Gundaroo famous. The village is back in the limelight as the Canberra region’s top tiny town. Photo: Gundaroo Historical Society.
Isn’t it the best when the right people or places are nominated for gongs?
Usually they go to the shiny new types, those who broadcast themselves as star material before they’ve even hit a stage. But in this era of clicks, clacks, whacks and smacks, we have to say: Well done to you, Gundaroo.
The tiny hamlet about 40 minutes from Canberra has just been named, sensibly, as Best Tiny Town in the Canberra Region Tourism Awards.
You probably know it from tasting the sublime food at Grazing, the former 1865 Royal Hotel, or maybe the music/horse/fireworks/something fun festivals they used to hold on the Village Common.
Yes, it also has at least one famous (part-time) resident and a couple of reality TV stars involving farmers needing wives and houses needing renos.
If you’re lucky like me, you lived there a couple of lifetimes ago when the blocks of land were huge, the houses authentically quaint and complaints about not having town water, septics, no garbage collection and the failure to pick up your dog’s poo, ruled.
That’s why, then, lots of us wanted to live there.
My house was Best In Village. It was half-finished, crumbly, rainwater-tanked, septically shitty and so old that one of the shelves in a bedroom was wallpapered with an original Bushell’s tea poster. My only gripe was that the previous owner had started building a new bluestone house onto the old cottage, and didn’t finish it. Neither did I, but I thought about it a lot.
It was freezing in winter, you’d have a boilover in summer, everyone knew what everyone else had for breakfast and with whom, it was just the best place to live.
Today it’s way too smart for the likes of me. You won’t get much change from a million bucks for a house and some people, rather than chatting over the fence, chat on chatlines – and not always kindly.
The market garden that welcomes you into the village doesn’t, and some people who moved there because they wanted a dirt change now want to come clean.
I’d like to think that the judges know the real truth about the village. About how innkeeper Matt Crowe told the worst jokes but the best stories when you went in for a cider or port and lemonade. How his wife Beat would, disclaimer here, politely drag certain women from the bar into her kitchen for a cuppa because the cider her husband sold so generously would rot your socks.
How their daughter Kay, who woman-ed the old petrol bowser out the front of the wine bar, could tell what car was turning in before she even saw it.
Many of Matt’s yarns grew as colourful over the years as the bar became more sticky and I’d hate to know what happened to that tea towel he seemed connected to. He used to swat flies and clean glasses with it – but fear not, never at the same time. But that’s why we loved the place, bright and shiny never came into it.
Gundaroo will now represent the region nationally when the big awards are held at Parliament House in Canberra on 10 September. We’ll keep our bits crossed. Chances are, there’s a handsome plaque involved.
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