The Most Driven Past Country Hotel in Australia - The Tumblong Tavern

 

It has to be Australia’s most driven-by-but-not-gone-in pub. 

     You know the one! 

     You’re heading south down the Hume Hwy and you cross the Murrumbidgee at Gundagai and you’re thankful for the new bridge so you can stay on 110 (or just a bit over) and then five or so minutes later there’s an old pub on the left and it looks interesting with the old Cobb & Co coach out the front but you’ve missed the turn and so you keep going and promise yourself that next time you’ll remember to slow down and take the turn which was just 300 metres back and go in and check it out? 

     Forgetting that there’s another exit just a few hundreds metres on. 

     You know that pub? 

     Well it’s the Tumblong Tavern and it’s well worth keeping that promise. Perched slap beside the main south road to Melbourne, the settlement here was originally called ‘Adelong Crossing’ after the creek it straddled, and it sprang up to service not just travellers between Sydney and Melbourne, but hopefuls on their way to the Adelong diggings and the broken and disappointeds on their way back.

     There’s been at least four pubs here but, except of a four year stretch early on, only ever one at a time. 

    From 1853 the village rapidly grew around the first one and then one hundred and fifty years later slowly died around the last. And today Tumblong is the Tumblong Tavern and the Tumblong Tavern is, well, Tumblong. 

     The first pub, the Aidelong (sic) Inn, was back a bit to the north on the approach road – which of course is the old Hume Hwy - just south of the cattle grid and now there’s not a sign it ever existed. In

February the next year local notable Robert Pitt Jenkins advertised in the SMH that he was offering to let, “… a House now in the course of erection as an Inn, near to Gundagai, on the high road to Melbourne, to be completed by 31st March next."

        He soon found a tenant and in July that year, “John Lovett (late of Bland) beg(ged) to announce to overland travellers, and the public in general, that he has opened those admirable premises on Adelong Creek … eight miles on the south side of Gundagai and late the residence of R.P. Jenkins Esq, as a first rate Inn… (to be known as the Bangus Inn)” 

         By 1858 William Nixon, licensee of the Aidelong had ‘deserted his hotel’, and the township from then on only had the one hostelry, which had changed its name from the Bangus Inn to the Home Hotel. A bloke name ‘Charcoal’ Williams owned it in the early 1870’s but by 1873 he'd built a new wooden house to the south which he sold to a Mrs Lawson. 

     Old Charcoal let the original license lapse – probably because he’d hit pay dirt up at the Adelong diggings and had no need to put up with the spree merchants and the desperates and very quickly Lawson’s brother-in-law, John Tillett was granted a licence for the new place which was named the Coach and Horses. It was a decent name for the new pub – which had been built in the block which adjoins (to the south) the current hotel - as the hotel was also the local Cobb & Co depot (as well as the post office). 

     But, ah, seems like maintenance wasn’t always kept up and in 1883 William Eagan had to overcome the objections of the police – who thought the pub, especially the stables weren’t in a ‘proper state’ – before he could renew his license. And then around 1904 the licensee, Waldo Sibthorpe got the heads-up from the local cop that he was going to have a problem keeping the license if he didn’t sharpen the joint up. 

    He went to the owner, Mrs Lawson who thought, bugger it, the place is forty years old, is a wooden fire-trap and falling down so let’s build a completely new one?

 

So they did. Right next door to the (barely) existing current pub. In November 1905 the Gundagai paper reported that, “the brickwork of the new Coach and Horses hotel, Adelong Crossing, will be completed this week. The new building will very much improve the appearance of our village.” 

     Waldo took possession of the pub – though not yet opening it for business - the following January and immediately began shifting his family and stuff from the old hotel. With the new hotel, came a new name. Gone was “Coach and Horses”, to be replaced - with a hat-tip to its settings - the “Adelong Crossing Hotel”. 

     Now here comes a bit you’re going to find very hard to believe. In late February, after Waldo had removed all his and his family’s belongings, and all the hotel furnishings into the new premises, and with the unsightly old pub empty but still insured for reasonable £495 it, er …… well, er, it caught fire.

     Waldo, his family and of course Mrs Lawson, all had strong alibis to provide to the subsequent coronial enquiry but it was six months before the insurance was settled and by then the Adelong Crossing Hotel was going like a, well, going like a house on fire. 

     Eight years after the Coach and Horses changed its name to reflect the village it was in, the government changed the name of the village and so the “Adelong Crossing” was now the strange name of pub in township of Tumblong. 

     This name derived from the original run of Henry Stuckey whose family achieved more fame in October 1857 when the Goulburn Court spent the bulk of one day hearing two cases. The morning was occupied with hearing the trespass case brought by Peter Stuckey against Henry Stuckey, and its afternoon session deliberating on a trespass case brought by Henry Stuckey against Peter Stuckey. Happy families!

       Anyway Waldo Sibthorpe kept the hotel until his death in 1924 and at some time during the 1920’s the pub changed its name to the ‘Tumblong Tavern’ (or ‘Hotel’), and so far, the government’s not altered the surroundings’ moniker. 

     It then changed hands a few times until Elsie Selina Smith obtained the license of the “Tumblong Hotel” in 1949 and things went fine until she tried to offload it to Herbie Dever in late 1953. Dever had run the Rhondda Hotel up near Newcastle and it would seem he may’ve had trouble lying straight in bed. During the first application, “A police sergeant from Newcastle, Herbert John Walton, who for the past three years has been engaged on licensing duties in the coal city, gave evidence in relation to Dever's management of the hotel, and said that apart from the four convictions he satisfactorily conducted the licensed premises.” After hours of rubbish testimony from Dever about his bona fides and his finances, the hearing was adjourned but when it reconvened the magistrate refused “saying the only real decision he had to make was whether to charge Dever with perjury "for his testimony at the previous hearing. He chose to leave that to the police but wanted it on record that he didn’t think “the applicant (was) a fit and proper person to hold a license." 

 Less than 3 weeks later, just in time for Christmas, Elsie Smith’s hopes for off-loading the pub were back on track when the Court held a hearing at the Gundagai Railway Station. This time one Nellie Meadows was found sufficiently fit and proper and the hotel was hers. 

     So seventy years later, I’m heading down the Hume and 5 miles north of Gundagai I cruise past the contrived, cleansed and cliched Dog on the Tuckerbox. (The original poem said ‘shat on the tuckerbox’, you wowsers, not ‘sat’! and it was 9 miles not 5 bloody miles from Gundagai but that would’ve made Coolac – which is ON the bloody Muttama Creek which is in the poem – the nearest town!) 

     Anyway I keep going til I’m south of the river and then heed the signs to Tumblong, take the left, quickly bear right, over the cattle grid and pull up outside the fair dinkum Tumblong Tavern with the old coach out front.

 

Walk into the bar and there’re no clichés, no wowsers, no sanitized views of history and nothing contrived. Just a big grin under a big hat and an obviously bigger personality. Talking ‘fit and proper’, this bloke is so damn obviously perfectly suited to gig and it so very much isn’t his first.

     This is Owen, long time helper-outer here and soon to be licensee and I don’t usually bother with surnames but his is “BlundelL”. And he’s one of the few publicans (the rest are mostly ex-footy players) I’ve come across who has a Wikipedia entry and certainly the first who has some of his own music CD’s on the bar. To quote Wiki:’

Owen Blundell is an Australian country music singer. He began to be successful in the mid-1980s, was a five-time finalist at the Australian Country Music Awards in the Male Vocalist category, and received an award from APRA for a most-played country song.” 

     He also owns the only ambidextrous guitar in Australia (which he can play allegedly – it’s away getting ‘fixed’), a pair of perfectly trained rabbits, an electric mini violin and will teach you a string trick with which you’ll amaze every one of your not even totally inebriated mates for (what’ll seem to them) hours. This bloke’s a hoot. A welcoming, relaxed, proud publican along the lines of Wazza up at Thallon only with music. 

    And he has great plans – including heaps of live music, extending the hours to seven days a week, and opening up some camping grounds where the Coach and Horses once stood. (It’ll operate on a voucher system of $15 per adult per night with the voucher fully redeemable at the bar for drinks or food.) 

     Also, the heavy horses that used to pull the carriage out front and provide rides to visitors are coming back from the exile they were sent to after they kept breaking down the pub’s back fence when they were left to graze in the back yard. 

     But even without these add-ons, the Tumblong Tavern/Inn/Hotel - peacefully free of pokies and gambling -  is way too good to pass by. So when you get to that rest area about 7 kms south of the ‘bidgee, put on your indicator and take the next left. Order a drink or a feed, but before you head out to the beautiful beer garden out back, get Owen to show you the extremely rare blue, green and red bee that he has in a box under the bar. Truly incredible!

     Rated: Memorable.

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Drinking in the Rivers