Pubs

The road to Albert and The Rabbit Trap Hotel is about as picturesque as you could imagine. Set on the Western Plains of New South Wales, the landscape has a fresh, flourishing green appeal,...

Sitting high at the crossroads of the small village of Watervale in South Australia’s Clare Valley is the beautiful old Watervale Hotel. The building is perched on the side of the valley with...

It's a typical Saturday afternoon at the Mountain View Hotel, where a few locals and the odd traveller have gathered for a barbecue. Across the road children play on swings, running and laughing as...

Utes with echidna-like aerials line up outside the Armatree Hotel, waiting for the opening time of 12 noon. Men lay on the bonnets in the shade of huge gum trees on the eastern side of the pub....

Entering the tiny 300-person hamlet of Auburn, in South Australia’s Clare Valley, is like stepping back into another time. The English cottage gardens, stone buildings and 19th-century...

  It’s a chilly Sunday night in Barcaldine, Qld. At the Ironbark Inn, Rob and Deb Chandler have just opened their bistro and, in a well-choreographed routine, are quickly making things...

 Growing up on a station in Queensland’s central west, Slim Dusty’s songs were a staple of Lou Fletcher’s childhood. So when she heard that the pub that bears the name of one...

Lisa Willems clearly remembers calling into the Noojee Hotel as a young girl during regular snow-skiing trips to Mount Baw Baw, Vic, with her parents. “Mum and Dad always made a point of...

Not surprisingly, there is little standing room in Australia’s smallest bar on record. At the byway to Gulf Savannah country, the Oasis Roadhouse could in fact have the smallest bar in the...

Most outback towns have a pub. Some are a pub and that’s the case with the Mount Mary Hotel, south-west of Morgan in south-east South Australia. Out in the saltbush country, it’s now run by...

There’s nothing quite like a crackling open fire and some decent music to lure you in from the cold, especially during a Victorian High Country winter when the winding roads can be covered in snow....

A grand old timber building stands at the top of a substantial, sloping lawn, backed by a rainforest of palms, Moreton Bay figs, pandanus and quandongs, and coloured in front by a spreading mauve...

It’s quiet in the Willalooka General Store. Traffic on the Keith-Mount Gambier road is light. The pool table is unattended – no ‘seven ball in the corner pocket’ going on at...

THERE ARE beer and spirits behind the bar these days at the Cuttabri Wine Shanty but most of the regulars prefer to stick to their traditional tipples – brown dog or red dog. That’s local...

On the western edge of the West Australian wheat belt, Goomalling is like so many towns with a heritage built on grain and sheep. The type of town where you don’t just wipe your boots when you...

The lights are on in town, but no one’s home because practically everyone is at Kalangadoo Hotel.  It’s Friday night and the place is buzzing. Billy Joel’s Piano Man cranks at...

FROM the outside the old red brick building, built in the early 1900s, is unassuming. It’s a lot like many pubs in Australia built around that period – there to provide patrons with food...

In the days before pay TV, gaming machines and karaoke, pub life revolved around horse racing, football and cricket. “That was it,” John Williams says. “You either played football...

Marree Hotel is as old as its namesake town. Then called the Great Northern Hotel, it was built in 1883, the same year that the town – located at the junction of the Oodnadatta and the...

For those heading from the east coast of far north Queensland to the waters of the Gulf of Carpentaria via the Burke Developmental Road, it’s best to stop off at the Post Office Hotel in...

Pirron Yallock is a ‘blink-and-you’ll-miss-it’ type of place. Driving down the Princes Highway between Colac and Camperdown in south-west Victoria, travellers find themselves in...

Although they might have the odd bouncer on the door when big name bands are performing at Soden’s Hotel Australia in Albury, on the NSW/Victorian border, this security is nothing compared to...

If Elvis Presley had made it to the Northern Territory, he’d have surely agreed that it’s a very lonely street that leads to the Heartbreak Hotel, some 115 kilometres south-west of...

The electricity comes from a generator, the water by truck some 70 kilometres from Walgett, NSW, and the ice that keeps the beer cold from Lightning Ridge, NSW, which is 70km in the other direction....

The old timbers of The Tattersalls Hotel reverberate with the sound of good times. Known fondly as ‘The Tatts’ since it was built in 1885, the walls could also tell their share of yarns....

There’s nothing so lonesome, so morbid or drear than to stand in a bar of a pub with no beer.” Not to mention turning up and the pub’s not even open. For four years the Arltunga...