Never give up: A first-time publican's fight to keep the Town and Country legend alive

THE beer taps are full, and so are the fridges at the Town and Country Hotel in St Peters - and Helen Filips, as she marks five years as lessee, is enjoying her first uninterrupted year of trading.

Like the storied hotel itself, Filips is a survivor. To endure the setbacks she has encountered since taking on the hotel in July, 2017, takes true grit. Yet the born-and-bred local - who grew up in Marrickville and went to Tempe High School - is still smiling, and excited about what lies ahead. "I love this place so much," says Filips, who can count herself among the dwindling number of independent operators in an industry increasingly dominated by hotel groups.

The mother of two grown sons was undergoing treatment for breast cancer when the idea of becoming a publican began to form. She was driving past the hotel regularly on her way to the Chris O'Brien Lifehouse at the Royal Prince Alfred, and seeing, "for a very long time", the for-lease signs hung on the building.

The pub had changed hands in 2015 for $1.8 million - a relative bargain given its 2004 sale price of $2.235 million. But amid a dispute over the liquor licence between the previous and current landlords that ended up in the Supreme Court, the pub shut its doors in April 2016.

"It was a pub my brother drank at many years ago, and a lot of friends and locals I went to school with, so I had a fair idea of what that old building was all about," she says.

"I have always wanted to run my own business. Finally I built up the courage to ring the leasing agent.

"I was in a sales and marketing role, managing a team of sales reps, that was my background. I was never into pubs - my partner Alex ran a pub a while back, so he had a fair idea how to run the beer side of things, and I had a fair idea of how to run the kitchen - not because my background was in food, but I am a lover of food, I raised two sons and cooked all my life. We're Greeks. We have always been involved in food and drink."

Before a burger could be flipped or a schnitty thrown in the fryer, however, Filips had to fit-out the empty kitchen space. As well, the hotel's interiors were repainted, new furniture installed, and improvements made to the room that had housed the pokies (which were happily, from Filips' perspective, gone). The pub was ready to reopen - a fresh start for a hotel that has seen a few new beginnings.

The Town and Country was built in 1881 by one Henry A. Crause, and seven years after his 1899 death, it was bought by the famous Sydney brewers Tooth & Co. In 1923 the company rebuilt the pub into the landmark we know today, heritage-listed as an inter-war free classical style hotel designed by Sidney Warden - a prolific architect behind other iconic inner west hotels including the Henson Park, the Lansdowne and the General Gordon Hotel in Sydenham.

Fast forward nearly 60 years and the hotel became forever entwined with towering country music legend Slim Dusty, who sang about drinking at the Town and Country in the 1981 song Duncan. The video clip was filmed at the pub "where the atmosphere is great", and the song became Slim's second most successful single. On the morning it was released, lore has it that John Laws played it on his 2UE radio show 11 times.

Slim's No. 1 single of all time was The Pub With No Beer and, in a wicked irony, for six months in 2018, that is exactly what the Town and Country became as the previous liquor licence was withdrawn and Filips had to await approval of a new one.

"We continued running the kitchen, and put it out to the community that we were running it as a BYO pub, and the community all got together and backed me, so they would still pop in every night with their BYO bottle of wine - people would even bring in their eskies with their six-pack on the weekend," Filips recalls.

"Those six months were a little bit tough for me, but I battled through it in my own way."

In October 2018, the licence came through, and the beer began to flow once again.

They were unhappy times at St Peters when Filips took over the pub in its prominent corner position, on the junction of Campbell and Mary Streets and Unwins Bridge and Bedwin roads. With works under way on the WestConnex St Peters Interchange, homes were being torn down and people ripped from their community.

In 2014, as authorities knocked on the doors of more than 80 neighbouring residents to tell them their homes would be compulsorily acquired, it seemed the Town and Country - where distraught and angry residents gathered to digest the shocking news - might also be lost to road widening for the WestConnex motorway.

By the time Filips was seeing those for-lease signs, the pub was out of any danger, although despite years of protests, the locals' homes were not.

"I was there when the homes were acquired," Filips says. "It was a sad time, so I went through that with a lot of the locals." And those who had their homes compulsorily acquired weren't the only ones to ultimately leave. "A lot of the old residents and neighbours - around 20 families that I know - have moved on, even though they didn't lose houses. That whole scenario just hurt people a lot."

The Town and Country took a hit of its own, spending the whole of 2019 operating behind construction barricades as the road widening commenced, as well as upgrades to the stormwater drainage to address chronic flooding issues at the intersection. Filips reduced her menu, and dug in.

A bright spot of the year was a visit, with his extended family, from Bathurst-based Pat Alexander, who wrote the song Duncan and appears in the film clip with Slim and the song's namesake Duncan Urquhart. "When he came to visit me that one Sunday, it sort of resonated with me, how many people love this place, and in particular him and his family," Filips says. "I put on lunch, and I took some photos of him that day, and I sat with him when he sang the song, and it just broke my heart."

The barricades came down at last in January, 2020. The next month, Sydney copped its biggest deluge in 20 years and the stormwater works failed their first test. Flood water poured into the cellar of the Town and Country. Its beer kegs floated out onto the street.

"We lost our beer system." Filips says. "We got a new one installed, the insurance paid us out for that."

Weeks later, Sydney went into COVID-19 lockdown.

So what has kept Helen Filips, a youthful early-fiftysomething who's in dungarees and workboots when the Inner West Review drops by to take photos, going strong in the face of so many obstacles?

"Just the fact I don't want to see this beautiful pub close down," she says. The support of a close family and two sons who help out whenever they can has also been key, as well as her love of community. "My passion is to get involved - I was a local government councillor, many years ago, for Hurstville city council. I am a very strong advocate of community.

"And it is my livelihood - I did invest a lot of money into the pub, so that kept me going. I have also got a bit of a competitive nature. I love what I do, I love being the face of the Town and Country, and I didn't want to let people down, or my family, or myself."

Among the myriad events held at the pub - there's trivia on Wednesdays, drag bingo on Thursdays, gay and lesbian speed dating, live music from jazz to underground punk, comedy nights, open mic nights, dance parties and deejays - in June she held a 'Dine and Draw a Breast Cancer Survivor' fundraiser in which she posed topless for a drawing session.

"It is coming up to my 10 years now, so I'm all good, and that is one of the reasons why I did the fundraiser. It was nice, people had fun ... they got to draw me,so there are a few paintings around of Helen and her scars."

Filips is not the first woman publican at the Town and Country.

Old newspaper reports show that in 1902, licensee Margaret Ray, a widow, heard noises in the night, armed herself with a revolver, and found an intruder in the bathroom, keeping him there with weapon pointed until the police arrived. In 1954, another widow licensee, Phoebe Wilson, managed to sleep through a burglary where the culprits stayed long enough to drink two bottles of vintage sherry in her loungeroom before nicking off with 800 pounds cash and 50 pounds worth of Australian cigarettes.

Like so many inner west pubs, there is rich history to unpick at the Town and Country. But it is the connection with Slim Dusty, who died in 2003, that eclipses all and draws people to it like a tractor beam - "even younger people who have had their dads and granddads drink there, and they come in and say, I haven't been here since I was a kid. I've even had guys with the name Duncan come in, and I've advertised 'if your name is Duncan, you get a free beer'," Filips says.

And there is many a photo taken in front of the Slim Dusty mural, painted by local artist and pub patron Adam Green. Slim's Famous Beef Brisket Pie is on the menu, and there's a framed photograph of him on the wall, looking over the eight-ball table.

"I recently watched the Slim Dusty movie, on Netflix, and, I've got goosebumps now, I didn't realise how big he was and how much his wife [Joy MKean] got him to where he is," Filips says.

"I do use Slim as a bit of a drawcard. I have to. We are away from all the pubs in Newtown but I am starting to draw people down towards St Peters, and a lot of locals love that, that a little bit of Newtown is coming down towards this area.

"I don't want to lose what I have got there with Slim. But I don't want the pub just to be known for that."

After all the tumultuous years, sat on a now giant crossroads where the world thunders by every day, "there is a different vibe within the whole entire area," Filips says. "Factoring that we are in winter, when pubs do less sales, I am still seeing an upward tick. There is a light at the end of the tunnel."

In February 1981, Duncan was at the top of the Australian music charts for two weeks. In his Mushroom Music biography, the man who wrote the song, Pat Alexander, writes:

"Five years earlier, the song had come straight out of an experience selling life insurance, and the only good thing that came out of those two horrible years with AMP and CML, was Duncan.

I was knocking on factory office doors, in Sydney's southern suburbs, and the owner of a heat-treatment factory invited me in - his name was Duncan Urquhart. In his late 40s, he was free to talk, and suggested we might do that in the pub around the corner. That pub was the Town and Country Hotel at St. Peters.

I went back to see Duncan Urquhart three times before I twigged that he had no intention of buying any of my life insurance - he just enjoyed the yarn but, it was while driving home from the last of those sessions that the main verse (music and lyrics) came into being. I love to have a beer with Duncan, I love to have a beer with Dunc. We drink in moderation, and we never, never ever get rolling drunk. We drink at the Town and Country where the atmosphere is great. I love to have a beer with Duncan 'cause Duncan's me mate."

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