'Betoota's got no talent': festival revives ghost town

West Australian

31-05-2025

Betoota Hotel publican Robert "Robbo" Haken once went 15 weeks without seeing a single soul.
The 63-year-old soon learnt there isn't much point opening the pub, which sits smack-bang in the middle of a gibber plain in outback Queensland, during the oppressive summer months.
There's rarely a big queue for drinks at the 140-year old watering hole, a legendary fuel stop for grey nomads and intrepid travellers.
The tin-roofed hotel is the only building in Betoota, that is unless you count Mr Haken's workshop and the generator shed.
With no permanent residents and the closest town of Birdsville 170km west across unforgiving channel country, there is also no such thing as a daily bar fly.
"The closest person to us is about five kilometres away, the next one is about 80 and then from there about 240," Mr Haken told AAP.
"They generally get together here once a month and let their hair down."
After long stretches of isolation, intensified by recent flooding, the ghost town's population is set to increase 500-fold in early July, when the pub hosts the first Betoota Outback Desert Muster.
Mr Haken dreamt up the music festival after the 2025 Birdsville Big Red Bash was cancelled and he lost his one big "meal ticket".
He hopes caravaners and adventurers will still make their way to the Diamantina Shire to experience live music in the outback on a smaller scale.
Those who make the trek to visit the Betoota Hotel leave changed people, Mr Haken said.
"I walked in here when I was 25, then I was 30, and every time I was here I felt really at home.
"I love the joint - there's nothing else in town - and people come here and they want to stay, they treat it like their own home."
Country music artist Adam Harvey will headline the two-day event, while campers are set to take in bush poetry, stand-up comedy and an open-mic session called Betoota's Got No Talent.
Long before satirical newspaper The Betoota Advocate put the town of zero on the map, the tiny outpost has been a source of fascination for Australians.
A 1951 Adelaide newspaper article described the pub as a "strange outback hotel", which doubled as a store, a post office, a dance hall and an election office.
After widespread flooding, locals built an airstrip at the front door so a backlog of mail could be delivered by plane.
The publican's wife was said to keep a gun handy.
"Mrs. Michell carries a .22 rifle (she has never had to use it), because she has to stay at the hotel alone with her three children while her husband collects supplies from Adelaide, Port Augusta and Maree," The News reported in August that year.
Two decades earlier, a small column in The Sun described Betoota's only resident.
"Mrs Garrett, of Betoota, is perhaps, the only woman in Australia who can claim to constitute a town," the Sydney newspaper reported in February 1938.
It was this kind of storied past and the extreme seclusion that compelled Mr Haken to refurbish the pub in 2017, after it sat empty for 25 years.
Following the sudden death of his youngest son in an accident, he escaped to Betoota to figure out what to do with his life.
"I didn't know what else to do with myself, I'd lost that get-up-and-go," he said.
"When Betoota came around, that's all I could think about.
"I don't know where I would have ended up without it."