THE Rising Sun Inn was one of Sydney’s early roadside taverns, first licensed in 1840, and which continued to service travellers along Windsor Road for about 20 years before the site was purchased by the Catholic Church. The inn was… Read More ›
NSW hotels
The Rex Hotel empire
DURING the 1950s, 60s and 70s, Rex Investments, a division of real estate company, L.J. Hooker, established a number of pubs around the suburbs of Sydney and regional Australia. The Rex Group’s first hotel was in Canberra and trades today… Read More ›
French president was barred from Berry’s Great Southern Hotel
FORGET about Australia’s diplomatic crisis with France after the federal government dumped a $90 billion submarine contract with Paris in 2021. In 1995 our relationship with the French could have rock-bottomed a lot more if three blokes from Berry’s Great… Read More ›
Captains Flat Hotel, Captains Flat NSW
[The Canberra Times Wednesday 31 March 1976] OLD PUB TO HELP BURY ITS PAST The contractor reshaping and covering the mine dumps above Captains Flat, Cleary Brothers Pty Ltd, has bought the Captains Flat Hotel to house 30 employees. Mr Dennis Cleary said yesterday that the hotel had been bought… Read More ›
The Land We Live Inn: Drunken gold-digger had his locks lopped while asleep in Sofala pub
ONE afternoon in the year 1858 Bill Simpson visited a little weatherboard pub known as The Land We Live Inn for a few rums. The single-storey weatherboard pub traded in the gold-mining town of Sofala, about 40km north of Bathurst on the NSW central tablelands,… Read More ›
First Sir George Tavern was washed away by the 1852 Murrumbidgee River floods
THE most commanding building in the township of Jugiong, in the Riverina region of New South Wales, is undoubtedly the Sir George Tavern. An Irish settler, John Philip Sheahan, built the first Sir George Tavern on the banks of the… Read More ›
Memories of Bulli Family Hotel
DURING the 1920s and 30s, a pub on the NSW South Coast became the centre of social life for coal miners in the little town of Bulli. The Bulli Family Hotel, now trading as the Heritage Hotel, opened for business… Read More ›
Wollongong’s ‘Upper Crown Street Push’, were ‘artistic types’, who met at the Royal Alfred Hotel
By MICK ROBERTS © LONG before the Sydney Push met in pubs around the harbour city, a group of “theatrical types, well primed with soda and a dash” paved the way for artists by reciting poetry and “warbling” songs in… Read More ›
Flash light greeted Mrs Riley’s drinkers after hours
By MICK ROBERTS © DURING the days of the ‘six o’clock swill’, after last drinks were called at Thirroul’s Ryan’s Hotel – at the time, the town’s only pub – swathes of men would stagger down the road to continue… Read More ›
The Floyds: Illawarra’s beef & beer barons
By MICK ROBERTS © FOR over a century beef and beer were synonymous with the Floyd family name. Four generations of Floyds were successful butchers and hoteliers in the northern region of the Illawarra, south of Sydney, leaving a legacy… Read More ›