The Countryman 16th Oct 1958 – ARTHUR BENNETT.
Bill Faahan’s name creeps into most stories of early Coolgardie days.
Bill ran the Club Hotel, he was the town’s mayor in its heyday, and he was known to every prospector east of Southern Cross.
One of his many yardmen was a runaway sailor from a ship at Fremantle who roamed the world in barques, brigs and schooners. Pinching a bottle of whisky, the yardman had got merry and had gone into a drunken sleep in a hollow at the foot of a salmon gum. In the backyard of Faahan’s hotel was a hogshead of beer that had turned flat and stale on the trip up from ‘the Cross’ it was undrinkable and was to be emptied away. As Bill rolled the cask around the side of the hotel, he wondered where he could dispose of the liquor.
Then he spotted a chap with a horse and cart. “Take this barrel of crook beer down to Fly Flat and pour it down a shaft,” Bill told him. “Then bring the barrel back to me and I’ll give you half a quid.”
The carter looked at the barrel, then at the sleeping sailor and gathered a few bystanders to enjoy the joke. Rolling the barrel alongside the recumbent figure, the carter knocked in the bung, allowing the lukewarm beer to flow into the hollow surrounding the sleeping man. As the liquor poured from the hogshead it rose gradually until it reached the mouth of the snoring one.
As he turned uneasily in his sleep he involuntarily gulped a mouthful. As half a pint of the beer washed down his parched throat he raised himself on one arm and waved the other. He was imagining himself at sea in a wreck.
“Save the women and children,” he moaned. “I’ll go down with the ship.”
Moya Sharp
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Sounds very feasible to me – liked it