THE God father
SO GET THIS: no town in Australia is more firmly based on bad brandy, terrible hotel service and a scarcely-scrupled Godfather figure than Deniliquin, a town so self-deluded it won’t even accept it’s on a bloody island.
It straddles the Edward River, which no-one’s much heard about, and the main part of the town, with a beautiful but closed-down pub on pretty much every corner, is across the river as I come in from Hay, in what used to be known as Deniliquin South.
The original settlement was to the north of this anabranch of the Murray and back in the 1850’s things were progressing well. Then a bloke named John Taylor turned up.
He started out young and he started out savvy. He was one of several shepherds working for a squatter and when one of his work mates left, Taylor offered to take over the second flock as well, but on double pay and double rations. When a
