This article was sent to me in an envelope titled with the return address as "love mum, Pinnaroo 5304". Enjoy.
THE Mallee is not rooted. It's tough country like its people – generous, real, good, strong.
They squint their eyes looking west for rain and they know how to have a good time. They are the memory of rain. I played the Pinnaroo Institute Hall Saturday night last week. I get around because a moving target is hard to hit.
Pinnaroo is 2 1/2 hours from Adelaide, dangerously close to Victoria. There'd be two reasons why tourists came to Pinnaroo – they'd be lost or tired.
This is wrong because, like every town, it's worth a look. I loved it because I love real people and some of them are even Crows fans. But it's a long way from Burnside.
Pinnaroo has a population of 800 and unusually the average age is 36, so there's no shortage of footballers. There are two unemployed.
Thanks to bore water they grow potatoes, carrots, onions, pistachios, olives and grain, and raise sheep, cattle and pigs.
It has a history of cockies, settlers, fettlers, battlers, one-teacher schools on corner roads, and hard scrabbled drought and more drought. If in doubt – drought.
I'm there to speak at a dinner to raise money for the Community Spud Fest. It's a grand night in the old Pinnaroo Institute.
A great community spirit, Ann Venning, is organising the dinner and the whole town. Every town has an Ann Venning and every town needs one.
I meet new best friends. Characters. "Taffy" the farmer is the barrel-chested B-grade football coach. Big bloke. Big laugh. Big heart. Loves John Howard.
"Budgie" the truckie and farmer staggers past the Institute at 10pm having spent a little too long at the 19th hole after winning his golf match at Lameroo. I invite him in. A fine fellow.
"Pav" is 18 and an apprentice agronomist. He has cut-glass looks and is celebrating his two goals, which won the B-grade footy that afternoon. He's surrounded by adoring netballers.
He's funny and he shines with the promise of a big sky. He's rotten on city pollie Dr Bob Such who recently suggested the Mallee artesian water be piped to the Murray.
Pav says: "That will bloody finish us, mate."
Glen is the new butcher – a Hackham boy who has found home. He's too new in town to have a nickname.
The night before he opened his shop in the newly community-owned and restored Victoria Building in the main street – his sausage machine broke and Ann Venning found a bolt and came in and helped him.
That's life in the co-operative country among the Pinnaroovians.
IT'S a warm Saturday arvo in Pinnaroo – the railway station, the bowling club, the disused croquet club, the swimming pool, the IGA supermarket (once Eudunda Farmers) with an Anzac display yellowing in the window.
The Lest We Forget clock has stopped. The War Memorial has War I and War II above the gold names with space for War III and War IV. God forbid.
The brass band rotunda; the football match at the oval, Pinnaroo v Border Downs-Tintinara, Pinnaroo victorious.
The Show Society Shed with a new roof glinting in the autumn sun, a monster Mallee root burning in a brazier, the netball mums selling pies and pasties from the servery in the clubhouse, the netball girls selling lollies.
A pastie, a Redskin and a winning local team is a prelude of heaven. Visitors are honoured.
The Institute Hall stands for culture. It replaced an old iron and timber hall that was moved and got stuck, and was finally shifted by elephants from Wirth's Circus.
There are murals ("muriels"), lurid and lovely, and a thrift shop in the old Commonwealth Bank. The walk-in safe contains the tax records of a local realtor and Christmas decorations. They're probably hoping it's robbed.
I stay in Room 7 at the ramshackle Pinnaroo Hotel.
"There's a lot of history here," I tell Rick, the former copper publican. "Yes," he says, "and some of it was made last night."
The room is a museum of hotels almost past: spotlessly clean – except for the dusty window; a bare bulb; a sink in the corner; a washstand with an ancient colour TV atop with a mysterious wire protruding from it; a double bed with moth-eaten Onkaparinga blankets; a rickety table with a lace cloth; and an oak veneer single wardrobe and dressing table combined.
The wardrobe door flies open when you walk past it on the creaky floorboards.
I call it the David Hicks Suite.
I'm oddly comfortable here. The room is across the road from the Institute and the Pinnaroovians tell me I won't hear the rock 'n' roll band 4Zs A Crowd.
They could have heard it in Peebinga or Lameroo, and I hope they did.
I fall asleep among the ghosts of this room; travelling salesmen, lovers, the sad, the lonely, those waiting for a knock on the door, the lost and the found.
The Gideon Bible is bookmarked with betting tickets.
The dinner was superb – cooked by volunteers with lovely local schoolkids as willing waiters.
I leave Pinnaroo at dawn in a fog like Brigadoon to be discovered by those who love the real South Australia.
I stop to plunk a few notes on a derelict piano on the return veranda of a derelict house.
It played for the Mallee. A song lost and found in eternal hope.
And the C-grade netball team is undefeated. Just like the Mallee.
What's funny is that it's all true. And i know all of the people in that article. Funny things is it has two things that Bendigo doesnt: agriculture and employment. Is Pinnaroo the promised land?
These clothes include:
