THE Aberdare Hotel at Weston, NSW, was built by Englishman, John Champion who came to Australia at the age of 21 in 1876. Champion was coal miner, who later went into business, hosting the Rose, Shamrock, and Thistle Hotel at… Read More ›
NSW hotels
Pub customers’ loose change spurred the famous ‘Bulli Copper Derby’
By Syd Fairs* DURING the mid 1960s when middies of beer were nine cents and schooners a few cents more, customers generally left their copper change on the bars of local pubs where licensees usually donated this money to charity…. Read More ›
Club Hotel, Surry Hills: A favourite with confidence tricksters and other shady characters
By MICK ROBERTS © JOHN Ahern was enjoying a few after-work drinks in the upstairs parlour of Surry Hill’s Club Hotel, singing and socialising, before his brutal death in 1893. Barman, Tom Moss, who later became publican, explained at the… Read More ›
Tell-tale triple harps give away secret of an East Sydney former pub
THIS interesting old building at the corner of Stanley Lane and Riley Street, East Sydney, traded as the Harp of Erin Hotel for almost 50 years. The three ‘harps’ on the facade are the give-away that the building, currently used… Read More ›
Kosciuszko Hotel, Mt Kosciuszko
Kosciuszko Hotel in a picturesque setting, with the freshly fallen snow glistening in the morning sunshine, 1937. Picture: The Brisbane Telegraph. Credit card bar tip Would you like to make a small donation towards the publication of The Time Gents… Read More ›
Tilpa’s two pubs and the big drinking shearers
THE pub at Tilpa in far west NSW has more than a century of stories under its belt; although none can top the one about the man who built the single storey tin and timber wayside stop, late in the… Read More ›
Before Kings Cross, Wynyard was Sydney’s ‘trouble spot’ for drunken behaviour
EIGHTY years before Kings Cross gained a reputation as a trouble spot for drunken behaviour (which lead to the controversial 2014 Sydney lock-out laws*) the streets around Wynyard had earned a similar status. Police described Wynyard as “one of the… Read More ›
Hill End once had 28 pubs… Now there’s just one
IT is difficult to find a place in Australia where there is not someone, who, at some time or other, has been connected in some way, with the old mining village of Hill End (NSW). This is not to be… Read More ›
Barman charged with smuggling gold: Metropolitan Hotel, Paddington
By MICK ROBERTS © A YOUNG barman at Paddington’s Metropolitan Hotel was lucky to have escaped with a £75 good behaviour bond after he was caught smuggling £200 worth of gold out of Australia in 1948. While visiting the subcontinent on a… Read More ›
The resurrection of a city pub: The Belvedere Hotel, Sydney
Belvedere Hotel, Sydney 1930. Picture: Noel Butlin Archives, Australian National University. By MICK ROBERTS © SOME pubs just refuse to die. The Belvedere Hotel at the corner of Kent and Bathurst Street in Sydney’s CBD returned from the dead after closing… Read More ›