NT: Volunteer barmaids keep beer flowing at Larrimah

00-00-0000
NT: Volunteer barmaids keep beer flowing at Larrimah

By Rod McGuirk

LARRIMAH, NT, Dec 17 AAP - Serving beer at an outback pub is a labour of love for AnnKanters and Irene Slater.

The two friends, both aged 55, each volunteer 16 hours a day to run the only hotelin the tiny Northern Territory community of Larrimah.

Fellow members of the local historical society help out behind the bar when they can.

But it is the unpaid efforts of the two women that has kept the Larrimah Wayside Innopen since licensee Dianne Rogers abandoned it in September.

They say their goal is not financial reward. It is to prevent the community of 13 adultslosing their historic pub.

"If you told me three months ago I would be running the pub, I would have said youhad rocks in your head," Ms Kanters, a disabled pensioner, said today.

"It's satisfying work. All you need is a smile on your face and an ear for the customers."

Larrimah is largely a tourist stopover on the Stuart Highway, 535km south of Darwin.

Economic times have been tough, with two caravan parks going into receivership this year.

Ms Kanters said she fell in love with the pub when she and her partner Barry Sharpe,60, decided to move to Larrimah from Dunedoo in central-west NSW eight years ago.

Any profits made are to be ploughed back into the pub, listed by the National Trustas a place of significance, to replace some essential equipment and missing memorabilia.

Ms Rogers had taken over Larrimah's Green Park caravan park and had hoped to take thehotel's liquor licence with her.

If the hotel ceased to trade from 7am until 11pm each day, it could have lost its licence.

The Birdum Historical Society came to the hotel's rescue after the Queensland-basedowners failed to find a new manager to replace Ms Rogers.

The community was already deeply divided between the supporters of Ms Rogers, a formerAlice Springs prison warden whose family dominates the Larrimah Progress Association,and the historical society.

The Larrimah hotel is the last surviving building from the extinct settlement of Birdum,20km south of Larrimah.

Birdum had been the southern railhead of the now defunct North Australia Railway, alsoknown as the Never-Never Line that began nowhere and ended nowhere.

Efforts to build a transcontinental railway from Darwin to Adelaide ran out of steam511 km out of Darwin on the edge of a swamp in 1929 due to a Great Depression money crisis.

Birdum was quickly built around the terminal but the town wound down after World War II.

The prefabricated hotel, built in the early 1930s, was relocated to Larrimah in 1952.

The historical society wants to run a tourist train on the old line from Larrimah toBirdum and maintain the hotel as another historical attraction.

Two months into the stifling wet season when tourists avoid the Top End, Ms Kanterssaid the pub could not afford wages.

"Coming in at the end of the tourist season, we knew that we would have tough times,"

Ms Kanters said.

"But we figured we could work those tough times out and we have so far - we've paidall our bills.

"It's definitely a viable proposition."

The historical society has yet to strike a formal agreement with the pub's owner onthe future management of the business.

Ms Kanters hopes that if the society can build the business up through their volunteerefforts over the next year, the owners will give a consortium of its members an optionto buy it for $120,000.

Profits could then be shared among the consortium and in furthering the society's dreamof reopening the rail to Birdum.

Ms Rogers, whose caravan park is making do with an in-house liquor licence, does notaccept that the pub is being maintained for love.

"They're making money under false pretences," said Ms Rogers, who opposes the tourist rail plan.

"The money's supposed to be going to the Birdum Historical Society but there is nothingat Birdum."

AAP rmg/mg/bwl

KEYWORD: KANTERS (PIX AVAILABLE)