PUB WITH NO BEER

“The Herbert is also a first-rate place for teamsters to spell their bullocks. There is one public-house and another promised, where good entertainment for man and beast is guaranteed.”

Much of Ingham’s story is that it is on a path to somewhere: to pasture lands for stock, to the gold fields, to urban centres and battlefields north. The Telegraph Hotel was established in 1874 on the Camping Reserve, later Town Reserve, to take advantage of the Palmer gold rush trade. It only traded for a year and then reopened later as the Day Dawn Hotel, today known as Lee’s Hotel.

The hotel is deservedly famous as the birthplace of the poem “A Pub without Beer” penned by bush poet, Dan Sheahan, adapted by Gordon Parsons to become “A Pub with no Beer’ sung by Slim Dusty. But the story of the Day Dawn Hotel and it’s reincarnation as Lee’s Hotel is equally an intriguing tale. At its centre are the intrepid Chinese men and women who came to work the northern gold fields and an architect whose “design philosophy was very much about honest expression of structure and response to climate”. 

Rupert Lee (Snr)’s father toiled on the Palmer gold fields, married a woman of mixed Irish and Chinese descent and together they had eight children. She returned to China with the children and later at only 12 years of age Rupert Lee (Snr) returned to Australia and to Ingham. He worked the steam trains at Victoria Mill, borrowed money and opened a baker shop and then a grocery store. When he purchased the Day Dawn Hotel in 1958 it was so far gone restoration was impossible and it had to be demolished, though local folklore has long had it that it was burnt down.  Rupert then engaged a young fledgling architect, Ian Ferrier, to design a modern hotel, Lee's Hotel, which opened in 1960.

Ian Ferrier became renowned for his designs which incorporated innovative adaptions to the tropical climate like completely openable walls of doors to allow cross ventilation. While countless schools, commercial buildings and homes across Queensland and northern Australia bear his inimitable imprint, cathedrals, churches and chapels became a speciality amongst them the Cairns and Darwin Cathedrals. His notable, local achievements are St. Peters Church in Halifax and St. Patrick’s Church in Ingham.  

Sources:

“Herbert River,” The Queenslander, September 25, 1875, 7.

Ferrier Baudet Architechts, http://catherine-baudet.squarespace.com/history/.

 “Slim poured a Legend,” news.com.au, November 2, 2007, http://www.news.com.au/news/slim-poured-a-legend/story-fna7dq6e-1111114967360.

Day Dawn Hotel, 1919. Source: Hinchinbrook Shire Council Library Photograph Collection.

Postcard, circe 1970. Source: Centre for the Government of Queensland. Publisher: ACP.