Hungerford exists because of cattle and wool. A great north-south stock route once ran from the Gulf country of far Queensland down through Cloncurry and Longreach, south to Hungerford and Bourke, then along the Darling toward the southern markets. Drovers pushed mobs of stock along it, following the watercourses, and where there was water and traffic there was money in a wayside inn. The Royal Mail got its first licence in 1874 - a year before the township itself was even gazetted - issued to John George Cooke, who doubled as postmaster. Such inns were lifelines: food and a bed for travellers, feed and water for horses, a blacksmith, a place to leave a message or learn whether the road ahead was passable. In country this empty, a pub was civilisation.

For years, nobody was entirely sure which colony Hungerford belonged to. When the Royal Mail was built it was thought to stand in New South Wales, and its licence fees were paid there from 1874. Then the border was officially surveyed in 1879-80, and the answer changed: the hotel was in Queensland after all, and from 1880 its licence was issued there. The town became one of fourteen customs posts along Queensland's borders, watching for smuggled goods - especially alcohol, which carried heavy duty. Lawson caught the absurdity perfectly. The post office sat in New South Wales, the police barracks in Queensland, and the pubs - characteristically, he wrote - were on the Queensland side. If a brawl broke out across the line, the police could do little but send to Brisbane for an extradition warrant.

Over December 1892 and January 1893, Henry Lawson and a mate walked from Bourke to Hungerford and back. He had built a reputation writing about the bush with little real experience of it, and the story goes that public jabs from his rival Banjo Paterson helped goad him into the trek. The country broke something in him. He found it harsh and pitiless, wrote to his aunt that he was finished with the bush, and poured his disgust into a short story simply titled "Hungerford," first published in The Bulletin in December 1893 and later collected in While the Billy Boils. The irony is rich: the place he despised gave him some of his most enduring work, and a humble pub at the end of a terrible road became a fixed point in the legend of the Australian bush.

Hungerford never grew into the town its surveyors imagined. Federation in 1901 ended the need for border customs posts, the artesian bores ran dry, the Cobb & Co coaches stopped coming, and the settlement that once held a courthouse, a school, four churches and three hotels dwindled to a handful of residents. Through it all, the Royal Mail endured - for most of the twentieth century the only pub in town, drawing trade from stockmen and the occasional traveller. Inside, little has changed: pine-board and ripple-iron walls, a brick-arch fireplace still in use, a cellar reached by a handmade ladder with shelving cut from the bare earth. Today, with Currawinya National Park just up the road, a new kind of visitor arrives - and orders, one hopes, something better than sour yeast.