Desolate photographs capture the disappearing pubs of the Australian outback
No matter how small the town, you can be certain that there will be a pub that will greet weary travellers at the end of a long road trip in Australia.
Unfortunately, these country pubs are slowly vanishing, closing in the midst of a declining rural economy, or left behind to rot after disaster strikes.
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Titled Last Drinks, Albury-based photographer Ryan Cremer has been capturing these landmarks scattered in the Riverina region of New South Wales, which he came across out of mere coincidence.
"I like to do a lot of landscape photography when I'm not working nine to five," Cremer told Mashable Australia. "I'd often get out in a old beat-up ute and look for landscape photos, and along the way I'd come across these amazing pubs."
Eventually Cremer gathered quite a few of these photos of these monolithic buildings, beginning to understand the interesting, often sad histories some of these venues held.
"Like the Balldale Hotel, that closed. It got robbed like six times, and the owner had just a gutfull and walked away from it," Cremer said.
The pub's licensee, Maria Misic, told The Border-Mail in 2011 that the frequency of robberies were getting to the stage where she was "dreading" coming to work.
"You just don't know what you're going to find. We can’t make up that lost income overnight. It takes weeks to get over a break-in," Misic told the newspaper at the time.
Other pubs faced unprecedented tragedy, never managing to get back up on their feet again.
"The Conargo Hotel, it was first built in the 1850s and burnt down in 2014. It's basically left abandoned behind a wire fence. It'll never get rebuilt," Cremer said.
Small town businesses closing down due to a declining population are a familiar story in Australia, and pubs get caught up in it too.
"The Shanty Hotel in Alfredtown, just outside Wagga Wagga, that closed many years ago because it had a population of 88. It couldn't be sustained," Cremer said.
Cremer started taking these photos at the end of 2015 and they were shot over a four-month period. Many of these pubs were photographed at sunrise, giving them a "desolate feel" -- although not all of these establishments were shut completely.
"The Shamrock Hotel at Balranald, they're still going. They've got a population of about 2,000 people and they play a game called 'Shit Trivia' that's every third Wednesday of the month. I haven't sat in on a game, but it sounds pretty interesting," Cremer said.
The cheekiness and the charm of these country pubs is something that you'd rarely spot in the city, but as they disappear, they sadly become no more than a blip in one's rear view mirror.
[h/t Smith Journal]
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