Revival of Outback Pubs: Future Crunch integrate both the head and the heart

Maria Konnikova, who wrote a whole book about con artists, on What Psychology Can Teach Us About George Santos. "Telling lies about yourself can actually make you feel more confident." 

This explains a lot of characters at the big 4 and even big organisations in public sectors …

 

“They’re the honey in the bitter tea of life, the artisinal jelly on the dry old crust of daily news, the unexpected wink from the cute guy once you’ve hit 40. ” 

— Agnieszka D, Atlanta, United States

At the heart of every Future Crunch presentation is an exploration of what’s happening on the frontiers of science and technology, and an intelligent, courageous optimism about the future. We’ve spoken at more than 500 events on five different continents, telling stories about how millions of people around the world are coming up with solutions to the big challenges of our time.

We create unique and memorable experiences. This includes integrating music and awe-inspiring visuals as a way to integrate both the head and the heart. You will never see the same talk twice. We pride ourselves on ensuring the insights we deliver are fresh and tailored to our audience.

We keep the facts sacred, and storytelling is at the heart of everything we do. We love science and technology, but also know that machines will never replace the qualities that make us uniquely human - adaptability, purpose, and understanding. 

Future Crunch integrate both the head and the heart

The Good News 🗞️ 📰
A few years ago, Egypt had the world’s highest burden of hepatitis C, with around one in ten (nine million) Egyptians chronically infected. In one of the greatest-ever public health accomplishments by a country, it has screened its entire population, brokered a deal for drugs and cured almost everyone, and now it's trying to help other African countries do the same. NYT

Spain is reducing violence against women. In the two decades since 2003, there has been a 29.57% decline in murders, thanks to ongoing efforts to address this critical issue. Spain's experience shows that progress is possible, but also that the journey towards a violence-free world for women and girls is also far from over. Ministerio Del Interior

Since 2016, 25 million people in eastern and southern Africa have gained access to electricity, including 8.8 million people in Uganda and 6 million in Tanzania. Now a new program is aiming to bring clean energy access to 100 million people in up to 20 countries across the region over the next seven years. World Bank

Togo introduced the HPV vaccine, which prevents most cases of cervical cancer, into its routine immunisation system earlier this week. Prior to the introduction, a catch-up campaign ran from the 27th of November to the 1st of December for girls aged 9 to 14, reaching approximately 656,240 girls within that age group. Gavi

A court in Ecuador has ruled in favour of the Siekopai Nation’s claim to their ancestral homeland, Pë’këya, on the border of Ecuador and Peru, restoring property title for 42,360 hectares of some of the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet, and mandating public apologies for centuries of violence, racism, and conquest. El País

Our elders and our youth are so happy to finally return to our home, our spiritual heartland where our myths and the spirits from other dimensions await us. Although colonizers have tried to uproot us from this territory, they have failed. Now we have officially been able to recognize our land for the Siekopai, the Multi-Colored People.

Justino Pianguaje
Siekopai Leader

Vietnam has made incredible progress in reducing poverty in recent years, recording an average decline in its multidimensional poverty rate of 1-1.5% per year since 2016. It is expected that the poverty rate will fall to 2.93% by the end of this year, and a new target of 0.9% by 2025 was set at a conference last month. Vietnam+

The World Bank just approved $266.5 million for improving internet access in The Gambia, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, and Mauritania, and for promoting a single digital market in West Africa. The program will make internet services in the region more affordable and unlock access for 1.3 million people, of whom at least 50% are women.

Don't tell anyone... but it's a golden age for workers.

Nepal has registered its first same-sex marriage, five months after its Supreme Court issued an interim order allowing same-sex couples to register their marriages. 'The fight for rights is not easy. We have done it. And it will be easier for future generations. The registration has opened doors to a lot of things for us.' BBC

The percentage of people living with HIV in South Africa, the country with the worst burden of the disease in the world, decreased from 14% in 2017 to 12.7% in 2022. Among people aged 15 years and older with HIV in 2022, 90% were aware of their status, 91% were on antiretroviral treatment, and 94% were virally suppressed. HSRC

The first results from the world’s biggest basic income experiment are in. 'So many people started their own businesses that overall wages in the village went up.'

The Ganges River is one of the world’s most sacred waterways—and one of its most polluted. To restore it, India is undertaking one of the biggest engineering programs in the history of sanitation. To date, it has cost $3.77 billion, and while results are still a long way from government claims, there has been genuine progress. Wired 

From Future Crunch, 99 Good News Stories You Probably Didn't Hear About Here are a few representative entries:

8. In Kenya, poaching rates have dropped by 85% for rhinos and 78% for elephants in the last five years, in South Africa, the number of rhinos killed by poachers fell by 25%, the fifth annual decrease in a row, and in Mozambique, one of Africa's largest wildlife reserves went an entire year without losing a single elephant.

16. China's tree stock rose by 4.56 billion m^3 between 2005 and 2018, deserts are shrinking by 2,400 km^2 a year, and forests now account for 22% of land area. SCMP

38. Type 3 polio officially became the second species of poliovirus to be eliminated in 2019. Only Type 1 now remains — and only in Pakistan and Afghanistan. STAT

We definitely don't hear enough good news from most of our media sources. It's mostly bad news and "feel good" news — that's what sells. (Note that "feel good" news is not the same as substantive good news and is sometimes even bad news, e.g. heartwarming stories that are actually indicators of societal failures.) In the past few weeks I've also posted links to Beautiful News Daily and The Happy Broadcast, a pair of sites dedicated to sharing positive news about the world.

But at this point I feel obligated to remind myself (and perhaps you as well) that focusing mostly on positive news isn't great either. A number of thinkers — including Bill Gates, Steven Pinker, Nicholas Kristof, Max Roser — are eager to point out that the world's citizens have never been safer, healthier, and wealthier than they are now. And in some ways that is true! But in this long piece for The Guardian, Oliver Burkeman addresses some of the reasons to be skeptical of these claims.

But the New Optimists aren't primarily interested in persuading us that human life involves a lot less suffering than it did a few hundred years ago. (Even if you're a card-carrying pessimist, you probably didn't need convincing of that fact.) Nestled inside that essentially indisputable claim, there are several more controversial implications. For example: that since things have so clearly been improving, we have good reason to assume they will continue to improve. And further — though this is a claim only sometimes made explicit in the work of the New Optimists — that whatever we've been doing these past decades, it's clearly working, and so the political and economic arrangements that have brought us here are the ones we ought to stick with. Optimism, after all, means more than just believing that things aren't as bad as you imagined: it means having justified confidence that they will be getting even better soon.

See also other critiques of Pinker's work: A letter to Steven Pinker (and Bill Gates, for that matter) about global poverty and The World's Most Annoying Man.

Greatest news ever:

Queensland’s bush pub revival

After years of decline, some of Australia’s remotest drinking spots are enjoying an unlikely resurgence

The Quamby Pub’s bulldog, an inflated sausage called Izzy, is lumbering along the terrace when she’s attacked. The aggressor is a mutt belonging to a customer, tied to furniture that is now dragged down the steps and into the dust.

Karen Sheiles glances up. Until recently she put up displays in supermarkets along Australia’s Gold Coast but now she’s the Quamby’s landlady. She shouts: “Your dog is trying to steal our chair!”

Outside on the highway, the Burke Developmental Road in the north-west corner of Queensland, a three-trailer road train thunders by, carrying concentrated zinc ore from the Dugald River mine to the rail terminal at Cloncurry, the nearest town, 46km to the south.

From the road, this “pub in the scrub” isn’t much to look at (in truth it’s not much inside either). A low-slung wooden barn with a corrugated iron roof, it has a terrace, a mural of a sleeping roustabout, a rusting car wreck by the steps, and plenty of ice-cold lager.

The Quamby Pub’s resident bulldog Izzy rests on the porch

But it has a history dating back to 1854 when, like many bush pubs, it was a stop for the Cobb & Co stagecoach. It catered to station (ranch) hands, miners and swagmen.

And then, in 2013, the Quamby’s landlord walked away, leaving it to rot. The bush had been emptying — the population of the Shire of Cloncurry declined 30 per cent during the two decades to 2016 — and all over the state watering holes were drying up.

I tell him I last visited in 1990. ‘Aw yeah?’ he replies. ‘Did they have the pig tied to the front porch then?’

A pub even further into the bush had closed four years earlier. The Kalkadoon in Kajabbi might have been “a dark little hole” (and that according to its owner), but having no metalled road leading to it, it was widely loved — if from a distance.

For the Betoota, far to the south, the end came in 1997. Its landlord of 44 years, a road grader called Simon Remienko, left because his health wasn’t what it used to be and he was the town’s last resident.

---

Now all three pubs are back. At the bar of the Quamby, I lean over to Bob Scott, a rancher from further up the road, and say it must be good to see it return. The wide brim of his felt hat rises and falls. “Aw well, it’s good for a bachelor like me to have somewhere to go.”

I tell him I last visited in 1990. “Aw yeah?” he replies. “Did they have the pig tied to the front porch then?”

The pandemic, oddly, is credited with the pubs’ return. Stuck Australians began buying RVs and exploring their vast backyard (and the trend seems to be continuing: according to the Caravan Industry Association of Australia, camping and caravan trips in the year to March were up 24 per cent on the previous 12 months). 

The Quamby’s landlady and her husband Nigel were among them. They passed the rotting Quamby. “We thought it was a shame,” says Nigel. They bought the wreck from the bank and spent two years rebuilding, reopening in April.

Jeff Bambrick bought the Kalkadoon Hotel after it had been abandoned and reopened it last year © Ruaridh Nicoll

Most guests pay $10 to park their RVs out back, but passing workers, like road repair crews, need accommodating. My room is in the back. I can’t claim it’s luxurious, but it’s clean and has hot water.

Come morning, I head north in a rented Land Cruiser — to my delight it has a CB radio — and after 40km, turn off the bitumen and on to red dirt. An emu herds four leggy chicks into the turpentine trees that poke out of a sea of buffel grass.

After a while, I cross the dry bed of the Leichhardt River, climb the other bank, and emerge into Kajabbi to find the Kalkadoon freshly painted yellow under a thirsty blue sky. It’s early; it’s populated only by the girls advertising Victoria Bitter on the posters on the wall.

A young indigenous barman greets me, and when I ask if he’s Jeff, he grins and says, “no, that’s my uncle”. Jeff Bambrick arrives, lined and sun-scoured in a sky-blue shirt and white hat. Although he is smiling, you wouldn’t want to cross him.

The Betoota Hotel has been taken over by mechanic Robbo Haken

He bought the abandoned pub eight years ago, reopening it in 2022. “I used to come out here as a young fella and have a great time,” he says. “The government is trying to push everyone down the south-east corner of the state. I just thought stuff it, let’s get everyone out in the bush again.”

The pub’s called the Kalkadoon Hotel after the local Aboriginal tribe. As yet there are no rooms but he has transformed it, making it airy and bright. I ask how big the town is that it serves. “It was 12 but two people just bought a house, so now it’s 14,” he replies.

Will it be enough? He shrugs: “The local stations support us. Their young people need somewhere to go. And we get caravanners too.”

---

Sadly I can’t reach Betoota, it’s 10 hours through the desert, but its new owner, Robbo Haken, is a mechanic and panel beater. And there are others too. The Mucka Pub in Muckadilla burnt in 2019 but is back under new, younger owners. And it sounds like a film should be made about Pam Forster in Urandangi, who is reportedly using the draw of her Dangi Pub to bring a famously wild town to heel.

It appears, post pandemic, that people are returning to the outback. Cloncurry Shire’s population has ticked up 2.3 per cent in the last year.

Sports team photos and beer adverts on the wall at the Kalkadoon Hotel © Ruaridh Nicoll

But there is little doubt these are passion projects. And the pubs may be harder work than the new owners’ imagined. Back at the Quamby, Karen says some RVers still park across the road to avoid her $10 charge, using her bathrooms, spending nothing but a penny. “Who do they think cleans that toilet?” she says, outraged.

Two sun-beaten men pull up in a “ute”, Aussie slang for utility truck, and Karen goes to greet them. They deliver the post, as they do twice a week, and come in for a drink.

That sun is setting in a blood red Australian sky, my amber nectar illuminated by its dying embers. Nigel emerges from the kitchen and Bob asks if he wants a drink. Nigel laughs: “Well, I didn’t buy a pub for my health now, did I?”

Details

Ruaridh Nicoll was a guest of Tourism and Events Queensland (queensland.com) and Tourism Australia (australia.com); for more information about travelling in the outback see outbackqueensland.com.au. Qantas (qantas.com) flies several times daily between Brisbane and Mount Isa (120km west of Cloncurry); for 4x4 rentals see fleetcrew.com.au. Rooms at the Quamby Pub start £45 a night (+61 473 282 828, quambypub@hotmail.com). Alternatively Audley Travel (audleytravel.com) offers tailor made trips to the outback

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