No Place For A Woman

Pine Creek publican Mayse Young was a legendary beauty and outback identity by the age of twenty. In the Northern Territory of the 'thirties and 'forties she reared seven children. She was also 'Mum' to hundreds of stockmen, miners and drifters for whom her hotel was the best drinking hole on the track - the meeting place, unofficial bank, library, makeshift surgery and sometimes dog house for an entire community.
Mayse handled snakes, horses and trucks in her fifty years behind the bar, as well as her regular customers - and she could spin a yarn with the best of them.
Born in the bush, the daughter of an itinerant railway ganger, Mayse lived under canvas as a child, learned to cook in a camp oven, to make a home from packing cases and kerosene tins. Twice in her life she saw the destruction of her home and of all she owned. She survived the heat, dust and floods of the Territory, the Japanese bombs on Darwin during the war and, later, the devastation wrought by Cyclone Tracy.