The Keeps Rolling

The crowds keep coming in droves and with the Caravan Music Club having almost 30,000 Facebook followers Peter needs to do very little in the way of promotion to guarantee ticket sales. Any hopes of a restful sojourn into retirement have been dashed. Not for the first time, the club has taken on a life of its own and Peter has something that would be better described as a runaway train than a caravan on his hands.

So how does the story begin?

“It all started in the loungeroom of the home in Murrumbeena I was living in back in 2004, when I arranged for Tracey Miller to perform for my thenwife’s 50th birthday,” Peter reflects.

“We had about fifty guests come along on that first occasion, and we continued with the house gigs which we called our ‘Live in the Lounge’ sessions for the next two or three years.”

It may have commenced with a birthday booking, but the main motivating force behind the house gigs was in fact a very challenging family situation that brought a layer of sadness amidst the joy of the music.

“Our son Jack had muscular dystrophy and required constant care, so the idea was to bring the world to us,” Peter reveals.

“Jack unfortunately died in 2007 at the age of 21 and I couldn’t ever bring myself to do another house gig after that. It felt like those were something that we’d done with him, so it was just too hard to do that again.”

Peter understandably lost motivation for regular work in the wake of his young son’s tragic passing.

“I had to find some kind of occupation or activity that was beyond merely making a buck,” he says.

“It had to have some kind of meaning or spiritual component where I felt like I was doing something positive for the world as a way of honouring Jack.”

From there, what has become the Caravan Music Club evolved on the back of the passion and hard work of its creator, often with meagre profit after drawing a basic wage. Peter’s first organised gig at a public venue was at the Oakleigh Bowling Club in 2007, with Tracey Miller again the performing act as she had been at his inaugural house gig.

In the ensuing years, he arranged shows at several Melbourne venues including the Memo Music Hall in St. Kilda and the Flying Saucer Club in Elsternwick, but the Caravan Music Club’s main base was at the Oakleigh-Carnegie RSL in Drummond Street in Oakleigh which became its permanent home for a decade. A documentary by Chris Franklin focusing on the Caravan Music Club’s final night at Oakleigh in 2017 and its historical back story titled Closing the Caravan won the People’s Choice Award at the 2018 Shortcuts Film Festival.

A subsequent move to the South Oakleigh Club in Bentleigh East proved short lived before Peter ultimately hitched up the Caravan Music Club for the ride to Archies Creek.

“By then both Mary and I were aware that we’d had grown tired of the city and had decided we wanted to move permanently down the coast,” he recalls.

“We had already bought a house down this way at Venus Bay. We were renting in Melbourne and commuting between both properties. One day while Mary was at the Kongwak market she ran into someone who told her the pub was up for sale. She went and had a look and liked the whole vibe of the place. I then received a text from her saying that she’d found the location of our next business.”

Whenever driving to the house in Venus Bay, Peter always travelled through Kilcunda and knew nothing of Archies Creek or its pub.

“It was a Sunday when I drove down from Melbourne to check it out. I made the short detour off the highway to reach Archies Creek and the light in the hills was beautiful. I thought it was just fantastic,” he remembers.

“I continued on to Venus Bay and said to Mary why don’t we just sell up and have a crack at the hotel. We put a manager in the Caravan Music Club in Melbourne while we were setting up the pub, but when the venue in Bentleigh East we were using went broke that just left us with Archies Creek, so we are fortunate that everything has worked out as well as it has here.”

Anyone who visits the Archies Creek Hotel will enjoy the quaint ambience, excellent food and refreshing beverages, many of which are sourced locally from Gippsland. But it’s the music that sets this destination apart.

At the 2022 Music Victoria Awards in December, the Caravan Music Club at the Archies Creek Hotel rose above its competitors to be named the winner of the Best Regional Venue Award.

“Having been nominated lots of times before, it was great to finally snag one,” Peter remarks.

Peter says the nature of his work in providing musical entertainment places him in the “happiness business” and he prides himself on being real. He believes that staying true to his ideals and beliefs has been an integral part of the Caravan Music Club’s enduring success.

“We’ve always been a little gig that’s been able to punch above its weight,” he suggests.

“It started out as my loungeroom, but it’s become everyone’s loungeroom. The way I often describe it is that was a hobby that got way out of control.”

Peter has no intention of trying to expand the Caravan Music Club at Archies Creek beyond how it is operating at present.

“Some weekends we have seven hundred to a thousand people here. That’s all that we have the energy and resources to cope with,” he insists.

“We recently made the decision to outsource the pub’s kitchen and concentrate our focus on the music, which is what we’re renowned for and what we do best.”

Peter says although the Caravan Music Club continues to attract some of its loyal devotees from Melbourne, he has been overwhelmed by the reaction from the local population around the South Gippsland and Bass Coast areas.

“What’s made it so special is the level that we’ve been embraced by the local community. The people down here are just so excited to have us. It’s transitioned from being a bit of a Melbourne curiosity to the local people now having totally attached themselves to it,” he comments.

“Major acts like Kate Ceberano or Joe Camilleri are always guaranteed to sell out quickly. The locals love to see artists of that calibre from the big smoke coming down here and we get just as much excitement out of making it all happen.”