Nothing but the Pub

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 supplier...

  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 ar...