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'A Profitable Pub' by Edward Dyson: the first published Australian Short Story.

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   About ten years ago, not a day’s tramp from Ballarat, set well back from a dusty track that started nowhere in particular and had no destination worth mentioning, stood the Shamrock Hotel. It was a low, rambling, disjointed structure, and bore strong evidence of having been designed by an amateur artist in a moment of vinous frenzy. It reached out in several well-defined angles, and had a lean-to building stuck on here and there; numerous outhouses were dropped down about it promiscuously; its walls were propped up in places with logs, and its moss-covered shingle roof, bowed down with the weight of years and a great accumulation of stones, hoop-iron, jam-tins, broken glassware, and dried ’possum skins, bulged threateningly, on the verge of utter collapse. The Shamrock was built of sun-dried bricks, of an unhealthy, bilious tint. Its dirty, shattered windows were plugged in places with old hats and discarded female apparel, and draped with green blinds, many of which had broken th
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Peter Grant Hay: How one bloke went from being a Tasmanian Hop farmer selling illicit booze to Chicago Mobsters to being a Victorian brewer supplying beer to the US Army.

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Happy to confess that until December last year I’d never heard of Peter Grant Hay, or knew anything about his brewery or his notoriety but then on a glorious summer afternoon I was paddling my kayak in Jervis Bay, NSW and pulled onto a rarely-visited beach for a break.   The top end of a beer bottle was reaching up from the sand and figuring it would be broken and with sharp edges, I grabbed it to take home and chuck out. Only it wasn’t broken, just full of sand and ocean debris. It had a lion’s head on its shoulder and ‘Richmond N.S. Brewery’ at its base. There was no message IN the bottle, but I brought it home, hit it with the gerni and then hit my books and the net to find out just exactly what was the message OF the bottle.    In mid-1927 Peter Grant Hay had a cash-flow problem.          At farms in Tasmania’s Derwent Valley and at Bright, Victoria, his family company produced the finest hops in the country and were the major suppliers to the Carlton United Brewery. Early in ’
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The Nindigully Hotel - where the burgers are almost mythical and the history is.

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  There's no doubt that the signature burgers and steak sandwiches at the Nindigully Pub are of near mythical proportions, but maybe, just maybe the claim that this is the oldest continually licensed hotel in Queensland is a far more undiluted myth.  Whether or not the Nindigully Pub deserves this title doesn’t affect the quality of the current pub – I’ll leave that to another time. But their longevity claim's been getting argued on a FaceBook page I follow i and so I went for a dig, and this is what I know at the moment.  As ever I stand to be corrected, in fact I love being presented with new - primary not secondary source - evidence showing I’m wrong or in the dark about some details.   I totally accept that the hotel at Nindigully has been known as the Nindigully Hotel, The Traveller's Rest, The Sportsman's Arms , the Grand Hotel and (seemingly in error), the Queenslander (in 1922) and that all these names refer to a single hotel. Such name changes are irrelevant
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Vasse Felix Vineyard in WA and the Extraordinary French Plan to Invade Australia

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        Dr Tom Cullity, an idiosyncratic and visionary surgeon, named his first vineyard after the unfortunate Timothée Thomas Joseph Ambroise Vasse who’d disappeared 166 years earlier during a storm at Geographe Bay, some thirty miles north-west of where Tom had found the ideal terroir for his new vines.        Vasse was a young sailor who went missing when members of a landing party from a French naval expedition led by Nicholas Baudin - which had spent over a week exploring the area where Bussleton now stands, was attempting, in heavy surf, to rejoin their ships which had been riding out a storm some miles off-shore.  Nicholas Baudin       To the young midshipman’s surname, Cullity appended, ‘Felix’,     from  the Latin for ‘happy’, ‘blessed’ or ‘fortunate’. It   was an   appellation that’d had come into vogue in what was to   become Australia when, in 1836 Thomas Mitchell, who’d had   his spirit nearly broken in the red heart of the continent, named   the fertile lush lands s
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