Back in the 1990s a mate and I decided to go for a drive, which was something we did to amuse ourselves during days off from university. On this particular jaunt we ended up at the Robertson Hotel in the Southern Highlands, about 90 minutes south of greater Sydney. These days the Southern Highlands is a haven for celebrities, rich farmers and well-off retirees, but back then Robertson was still comparatively rural. My friend and I stopped off at the hotel to grab a quick middy, mainly for the novelty of having a beer at a country pub than anything else.
It was around lunchtime in the middle of the week and when we walked in, every eye in the place landed on us. I had never felt so unwelcome anywhere in my life, but we pressed on up to the bar and ordered our beers. While the barman poured them, he asked where we were from and then pointed to the pub’s timber-slatted ceiling. Thumbtacked to it were notes of various denominations. What you did, he explained, was push a thumbtack through a note, then wrap the note around a fifty-cent piece and throw it up at the ceiling. The thumbtack would embed itself and then the note would unfold and the coin would drop to the floor. Every few weeks the notes were retrieved and donated to charity.
“We get every tourist who comes in to make a donation,” the barman said.
My mate and I, who were lucky to make $120 a week from our casual jobs, smiled and chuckled at his little joke.
The barman didn’t smile or chuckle back.
That afternoon we drank the quickest and most awkward beers of our lives and got the hell out of the Robertson Hotel. We almost expected to hear twanging banjos and exhortations to squeal like a pig.
A few years later, while reflecting on that bizarre situation, I decided I should turn it into a story. In its initial form the story recounted true-life events pretty faithfully, only those who refused to donate got fed to the publican’s crocodile. It was a pretty charmless story, with no point or thematic weight, and I discovered years later that its premise was almost a carbon copy of the 1977 horror movie, Eaten Alive.
So the story sat unused on my computer for years and eventually I retired it. The Robertson Hotel incident never left my mind, though, and in early 2021 I decided to take another crack at writing a story based on it. The title, characters and situations presented themselves to me and I was ready to get started, except I still didn’t have a satisfactory ending. My initial thought was the pub’s occupants would turn out to be vampires, but that was too reminiscent of a story I had published many years earlier (and of course vampires have been done to death anyway).
Then one afternoon I was in the kitchen waiting for some toast to pop up when a mosquito landed on my arm. I swatted at it before thinking to myself, Imagine having to risk death every time you wanted a meal. That led to another thought: What if mosquitoes are so reckless because they get high from drinking our blood and are desperate feed their addiction?
That was it. My dinky ‘peculiar little town’ story bloomed into a novella-length piece full of themes about aging, masculinity, consumerism, and whether the modern world’s obsession with technology is a healthy thing.
Kris Ashton 