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...

        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 18...

   The Woolpack at Parramatta      So, a while back there was a stream of comments about ‘traditional pub grub’ and just what ‘traditional pub grub’ is and it got me thinking and, well, I’ve done little ever since but burrow down an astonishingly interesting rabbit hole of research on the history of Australian pub food.         This isn’t the resulting story – more a despatch from the front line - but it reveals once again why researching our unique pubs is so engrossing and rewarding.         It seemed to make sense to begin by finding out where and when the first pub meals were served in the Colony and it turned out they were probably served up by James Larra at his Freemason’s Arms on the intersection of George and Marsden streets at Parramatta, just down the road from where I grew up in Dundas. Almost my local.   The first mention of food at the pub was by an Irishman in 1800, but it was a Frenchma...

  I always thought rules come in three main categories: Legal rules, agreed rules and - in Oz and Kiwi since around 1910 - Rafferty’s Rules. But, ah, out in Western Queensland they invented a whole new category.  Muttaburra Rules.  I park Super Ten out front of the Muttaburra Pub where someone’s added an ‘S’ in front of its displayed name turning it into the SExchange Hotel and head in past a few old fellas on the small veranda and grab a black fish.   Behind me, high up on one wall of the bar – so high it can’t be used anymore - there’s what I grew up calling a ‘hookey’ board. A round board about 18 inches across with 12 or 13 hooks on it, each with a number from 1 to 13 underneath. Stand back like you do at darts and throw rubber ring seals from mum’s preserving jars at the hooks.   Below this board, pinned to the wall in a plastic sleeve there’s some doggerel verse written on a sheet of paper. I don’t see them when I first walk in but then, first...