In this episode, Neil chats to Bill from the Railway Hotel in Murtoa, Victoria.

Murtoa

<ul><li>Distance from Melbourne: 305km</li><li>Population: 865 (2016 census)</li><li>Number of pubs: 1</li></ul>

Grenfell - New South Wales

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics and specifically the 2016 census, about 71% of Australians live in major cities – that is, cities with a population of 100,000 or more. Just under 10% - or around 2.3 million Australians - live in places that are officially designated as small towns where the population is 10,000 or fewer.

In this podcast series, we are going to visit 100 of these small towns – in fact, we are going to focus our attention on those that are located more 100 kms from a state or territory capital and where the population is fewer than 5000.

We want to chat to a local – someone who has lived in our featured town for over 10 years and can tell us about their town and their region. And in keeping with the support provided by our podcast supporter – Pub Radio Australia – we have decided that the best person to chat to in each town is the owner or manager of one of the pubs in town.

We are hoping we get to chat about a range of topics. We’ll chat about what the town and region is known for, what people do for work, who their local sporting teams are, who their most famous resident or former resident is and get a better understanding about what makes their town unique. And we’ll get specific about the pub – where it is, what their signature dish is, what the most popular local drink is and of course, get to know our guest a little better.

We are going to try and cover the whole of regional Australia as best we can, trying to avoid featuring too many towns and pubs from a single area. Unfortunately, because of our selection criteria which includes being at least 100km a state or territory capital, we won’t be able to feature a pub from the Australian Capital Territory, but we will visit pubs in each of the six States and the Northern Territory.