OUTBACK publicans have to be resourceful. During the early 1930s the body of a veteran prospector was discovered down an old shaft in Widgiemooltha, now an abandoned gold mining town 630kms east of Perth in Western Australia. As there was… Read More ›
Picture: The Sydney Sunday Herald, July 24 1949 By MICK ROBERTS © IN a small cemetery in Victoria’s highlands, legend has it that publican John Treffry was buried with his pub’s signboard as his ‘headstone’. John Treffry hosted the Running… Read More ›
By MICK ROBERTS © THE life of one of Sydney’s most successful publicans, a man who hosted some of the harbour city’s grandest tourist hotels, ended tragically in 1935 after he murdered his wife while she slept, and he then… Read More ›
TAMWORTH, Friday.— John James Healion is probably the youngest publican in the State. The Licensing Court transfered the licence of the Central Hotel to him although the police objected, on the ground that Healion is single,and only 21. The young publican will have… Read More ›
By MICK ROBERTS © A FORMER police officer, and one time host of the Cabbage Tree Hotel at Fairy Meadow, Mick Hanley was quite surprised, while going about his business as a licensing cop in 1990, to find his family name… Read More ›
MICK ROBERTS © WELL over six feet tall and solidly built, Andrew Lysaght was an imposing and colourful Illawarra publican pioneer. A magistrate, who resigned after a parliamentary inquiry found he called the Wollongong Police Sergeant an “old woman”, he wasn’t… Read More ›
By MICK ROBERTS © THE 19th century produced many notorious publicans. Arguably none though were as notorious as ‘baby farmers’, John and Sarah Makin, one time hosts of Wollongong’s Royal Alfred Hotel. John and Sarah Jane Makin were convicted in 1893 for… Read More ›
By MICK ROBERTS © A ROYAL romance with a murder conspiracy theory, a celebrity scandal, mysterious deaths, and a tragic love story ending in suicide, are the stand-out headlines during the Empire Hotel’s 35 year history. Rising from the ashes… Read More ›
67 years “at the bar” kept her youthful. By CYNTHIA STRACHAN “THEY say I’m a gay old spark – and I suppose they’re not far wrong,” Mornington’s 80-year-old hotel proprietor, Miss Edith Ruth Clifton, said with a mischievous chuckle on the eve of he retirement after… Read More ›
By LESLIE F. HANNON TURN down any of the jigsaw streets on the northernside of Wynyard Square, run down the rock-hewn steps, slip through the twisting lanes behind the bondstores, and you are standing in chapter one of Australia’s history. The stout chipped stone blocks of the hotels, shops, warehouses, and residential that crowd the foot paths can tell… Read More ›