I’ve always been a dreadful passenger.

As a kid I was often carsick, and the rubber grounding straps Dad dangled from the back of the XY Falcon didn’t help. My skin went clammy, my face green, and my stomach leapt like a cornered cat.

Winding our way to Mystery Pub reminded me of this.

Claire was the Mystery Pub chaperone for the month of June. To preserve its integrity, I was on the front seat with a scarf wrapped around my noggin. Looking like a Merino mummy, I was sightless, and my gizzard was gurgly. It was a notorious pre-pub theme-park ride.

In the city, Mystery Pub works by car or foot. But in the Adelaide Hills, as John Denver sweetly sang, country roads take me home — and they rarely lie about which pub’s waiting at the end.

Here in these wide, antipodean spaces, we’re all prisoner to the hardhearted truth of geography.

After a lengthy and nauseous crossing from our Birdwood digs, our car came to a stop. Yanking off my scarf, I blinked. Claire proclaimed, ‘Here we are. In Palmer.’ Home of granite outcrops including Bear Rock. Home to one hundred citizens. I flung open my door and gulped at the fresh air like a stranded goldfish.

Palmer! Mystery Pub had delivered a most surprising surprise.

I get a Pale Ale and Claire asks for a house white. Mine Host flees through a door (startlingly quick for an ample fellow) before reappearing with a glass of vino. Sipping, her face makes a grim assessment. With superior powers of deduction, Claire asserts that it must be, ‘Banrock Station. From a cask.’

We go outside to the veranda and take in the vanishing orange light.

I’d be happy to have misjudged the fellas sitting at the veranda table, adrift in a mountainous sea of discarded bingo tickets. Each bloke — there’s about ten of ’em — has a black drink in front of him: stout, Bundy, Coke and something. They all wear black beanies, black coats, and, near as I can tell, black jeans.

Bingo tickets were once central to country pubs. Sold at the bar, punters would buy a handful, hoping to peel off a winner. Each batch held four prized reds, worth $50 each — a tidy sum and once enough to buy a busload of beer. 

The sharp-eyed punters — usually nursing a West End — let others burn through the duds. Then, like card sharks, they’d pounce. Spend $30, snag a couple of reds, walk off with a hundred. As my mate Dick used to say, ‘A nice earn.’ Looking again at the unsightly swell of bingo tickets, Apocalypse Now comes to mind when Captain Willard says to Colonel Kurtz, ‘I don’t see any method at all, sir.’

The blokes about the table talk in staccato ways — and all at once. But there’s laughter and warmth in their in half sentences. I catch the single newsworthy snippet. It’s from the gruff chap in the corner. He reveals, ‘Blue got a flat around lunchtime.’

With this Claire and I head inside.

The fire crackles along while there’s a flow of customers to and from the bar, ordering their dinner. Some dine in, others opt for takeaway. 80’s and 90’s ‘old school jams’ play on the TV until the VHS tape runs out. Sitting by a window, we flick through a tourist magazine and make a few amused observations.

We watch folks come and go, just like fictional Queensland bouncer and former Eastern Suburbs Rooster Les Norton at the Bondi Icebergs.

A painstakingly dressed woman presents at the bar to apologise for she and her husband being no-shows last Saturday. The barkeep, like the best of them, a social worker and bush psychologist, offers, ‘Yeah, well, it got to 6.30 and I thought — that’s unlike Marg and Blue (unsure at time of writing if this is flat-tyre Blue). Something must’ve cropped up.’

Marg replies. ‘The afternoon just got away from us. I’m so sorry.’ For atonement, she then buys a can of coke (to take away). Relationship repaired. Although an elementary exchange, it spoke of the rural values of mutual dependence and traditional courtesy. I remembered the country communities in which I’d happily lived.

Our week included visits to Lobethal, Mt Pleasant, Charleston. Palmer hadn’t been on the obvious itinerary — but then again, the best things often aren’t.

We return to the car. I throw my scarf on the back seat.