The Place is in the Song.

During a ‘wet-day’ in the early 1970s, a grader operator in a Thiess Brothers construction camp near Greenvale, far-north Queensland wrote and performed a song for his drunken workmates.
In the years that followed, this song became an Australian country institution – covered by both Slim Dusty and John Williamson and immortalising the now defunct Greenvale line.
The man who penned it was also a country music great, Stan Coster – another icon of Australia’s old bush and the lesser-known songwriter for Slim Dusty.
The song’s name was ‘Three Rivers Hotel’ and was a tribute to the many characters that were involved in building the Greenvale railway line north-west of Townsville.
There is a Three Rivers Hotel in the town of Greenvale, which is still operational and serves as a small tourist attraction in the area.
Named in tribute to both Stan Coster and Slim Dusty, this creates some confusion as to what came first – the pub or the song… or the three local rivers – Burdekin, Star and Clark.
In late 1974, the ‘Three Rivers’ region of North Queensland experienced a lengthy wet season – this saw a lot of downtime for the workers.
Stuck in the camps, the men had nothing better to do than spend the days drinking in the camp “boozer” or “mess hall” – a basic demountable building with an outdoor covered seating area.
As the story goes, during one of these wet days, water started to flood the building’s makeshift beer garden, and as a result the workers dug up trenches to channel it away.
The trenches joined up roughly similar to the local rivers in town. So the mess hall was aptly nicknamed “The Three Rivers Hotel” after their improvised drainage system.

Three rivers hotel - Slim Dusty​

 
Raining on the Rock is a song written and performed by Australian singer-songwriter John Williamson.
The title is in reference to Uluru (Ayres Rock) with references in the song to Albert Namatjira*
He was an Arrernte^ painter from the MacDonald Ranges in Central Australia.

*He was widely considered one of the greatest and most influential Australian artists. As a pioneer of contempory Indigenous Australian art he was arguably one of the most famous Indigenous Australians of his generation. He was the first Aboriginal artist to receive popularity from a wide Australian audience.

^Arrernte is a dialect cluster in the Arandic language group spoken in parts of the Northern Territory, Australia, by the Arrernte people
There are about 1,800 speakers of Arrernte making this dialect one of the widest spoken of any Indigenous language in Australia.
It is spoken in the Alice Springs area and taught in schools and universities, heard in media and used in local government.

The song was released in January 1987 as the second single from Williamson's sixth studio album Mallee Boy.

Raining On The Rock - John Williamson and Warren Williams​

 
The Murrumbidgee River is a major tributary of the Murray River and the second longest river in Australia.
It flows through the Australian state of New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory.
The word Murrumbidgeeor means "big water" in the Wiradjuri language, one of the local Australian Aboriginal languages.

Murrumbidgee Man - Reg Lindsay​

 
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