Accidental Publican, The

'I've taken a lease on a pub in Charleville.' My husband Gordon delivered this statement so casually as we sat by the fireplace in our Brisbane home on a cold winter night in 1984. I was 40 years old and a stay-at-home mum with eight children. The youngest was a baby in nappies. Then Gordon added, 'I put the lease in your name'. We arrived in Charleville weeks later to find our new family business was a run-down pub with cockroaches in every crevice and a bar trade of bushies who had seen better days. Gordon had dipped his toes into several careers in the 20 years we'd been married, but this one?¿the next 17 years would be a wild roller-coaster ride. My first narrative non-fiction work, The Accidental Australians, was a celebration of the Corones family and the pub empire they built in Western Queensland. The Accidental Publican offers up my own family's story, running Hotel Corones, and before it The Sportsman Hotel, for close to two decades. Harry Corones arrived with a suitcase and dreams. I came with a cot and some nappies - my suitcase had been lost in transit.