THE LIST
AUSTRALIA’S BEST BUSH PUBS It’s a wide, brown land, covered with excellent watering holes. Why not stop for the night?
P
ubs are a key pillar in the mostly sturdy, occasionally wobbling architecture of Australian history. When something big happens, it seems, there’s often a pub involved. Ned Kelly made his last stand outside one (The Glenrowan Inn, Victoria). Slim Dusty sang about one pub that had no beer (The Day Dawn Hotel, Ingham, Qld) and another that had both beer and a chap called Duncan (The Town and
WORDS MICHAEL BENN
Country Hotel, in Sydney’s St Peters). We build them fast—during the Gold Rush, Ballarat opened 22 new pubs in two months—and take it poorly when they shut (4,000 Novocastrians rioted when The Star Hotel was shuttered in 1979). “This is what happens,” a sardonic BBC nightly newsreader told England, “when they try to close a pub in Australia.” Australia loves pubs, whether they’re in the duck’s guts of a CBD or literally in the
back of Bourke. But if you’re looking for an authentic place to nurse a frosty glass, there’s something particularly special about proper, old-school bush pubs. Scattered across the country, they’re both the heart and soul of rural towns and often the last vestige of an Australia that’s slowly fading into history. All the more reason to visit these ones while you can. Time to belly up to the bar and make yourself at home.
Scattered across the country, they’re both the heart and soul of rural towns and often the last vestige of an Australia that’s slowly fading into history. 34
MAX*D GO YOUR OWN WAY
