The autobiography of Mayse Young is a great insight into and a tribute to the guts and enterprise of so many families in tough parts of Australia.
The blurb states she was born in the bush , the daughter of an itinerant railway worker , lived under canvas as a child, twice saw the destruction of her home and all possessions, survived the Japanese bombing of Darwin and Cyclone Tracy.
By Peter Simon
During a car trip from Darwin to Alice Springs , I took award winning author Xavier Herbert into the Pine Creek Hotel and told him about the extraordinary Mayse and her husband .
Herbert had been involved with several feisty women who ran pubs in the Territory in the l920s and l930s who featured in his writing . I also told him about the Territory's "Death Adders"- gnarled, crotchety codgers , who could turn nasty ,but were not really bad old buggers , all generally having led tough lives.
One of the adders at Pine Creek was Cranky Franky Atkinson , an Englishman , who lived in a tin shack , with whom I went digging for bottles and Chinese artefacts , which included part of the decorated end of a joss house roof .
He said a lot of modern people regarded picking up a shovel and doing some hard work as being like taking hold of a poisonous black snake. Franky claimed a person who gained a lot of publicity by making long distance outback trips on a bicycle faked photos in which he claimed to be threatened by crocodiles.
During a Royal Visit to Darwin , I informed the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh about the Pine Creek loyal subject Cranky Franky.
The Pine Creek adders included a Russian who used to drop into Ah Toy's famous store on pension day and shoot the breeze.
A copy of the l991 book was found in Townsville recently and discussed with veteran ABC Darwin journalist Richard Creswick who played a major part in last December's Darwin Cyclone Tracy 50th anniversary commemoration .
Creswick pointed out that multi -skilled Mayse Young, apart from running pubs and providing numerous other services , had been the ABC's Pine Creek contact for news items .
He recalled an episode when his schoolteacher wife was in a party which drove down to the UDP Falls in the Kakadu National Park, which featured in the Crocodile Dundee movie, Pine Creek a distant drive away .
As Richard had a few days off from the ABC, he decided to drive down in his Mini Moke and call into the Pine Creek Hotel and thank Young for her help as the ABC contact.
A stone smashed his windscreen and by the time he drove back to Darwin from Pine Creek and reported for duty, his workmates said he looked like a lobster.
(Outback. Pub. Adders.)
