I have no in-focus photos of the cane toad races that took place on a table inside the Iron Bar hotel in Port Douglas a few years back as evidence, but I can assure you, they happened.
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I witnessed it with my own eyes and ears, as the enthusiastic crowd of international backpackers and domestic travellers alike hollered at their sponsored amphibians to win.
Having been of legal drinking age for more than two decades, I’ve stepped inside more than a few pubs both here in Australia and around the world.
I’d have no hope of remembering them all.
But some stand out more than others
Take the bar made completely of ice in Melbourne’s CBD, for example (kids welcomed with adult supervision).
It’s not just a cold room with furniture sculpted from ice; it’s more of a cave that’s been built with 40-plus tonnes of frozen water, with most of everything inside made of ice, from the walls to the vessels you drink from.
You wear gloves and capes to combat the cold throughout your time-limited session, but it had still set in before we could finish our first drinks, so we got our photographic souvenir and got the hell out of Dod… Fridge… before our time was up.
Once on a work trip to Sydney, a couple of colleagues and I were whisked inside the state’s narrowest pub by our local host.
The Lord Wolseley Hotel has been serving beer on tap in its skinny little Ultimo location since 1881.
I’d not have known any of this passing by this, quite literally, little watering hole on our way back to our accommodation after a day of meetings, had it not been for that invaluable local knowledge inadvertently imparted on us as we walked inside its doors.
A shorter drive from home up the Hume, just past Albury, you can find the cartoon pub that was featured in Australasian Post magazine (no longer in circulation), The Ettamogah Pub.
This quirky and eye-catching complex in Table Top, NSW, based on the concepts of artist Ken Maynard, was opened in 1987.
It’s distinctive architectural style with its curved and disproportionate walls, truly bring a cartoon to real life (and make for fantastic photos).
You can even put your kids in the tree/lock-up out the back while the resident cockatoo babysits and you enjoy some peace at the bar (wink wink).
Memorabilia adorns the walls inside this beauty, just like it does right throughout the Daly Waters Pub in outback Northern Territory.
We flew into Darwin at the start of this month and drove almost 600km south to visit this iconic drinking hole with its trademark bright pink Bougainvillea above its entrance’s arbour.
The sign states it was established in 1930 and I reckon reverse-souvenirs (ones visitors leave, instead of take with them) have been getting stapled to its structure since its very first day.
It wouldn’t matter how many days and nights you stood (crouched, climbed, leaned over) there perusing every inch of every wall, you still wouldn’t see it all.
There are licences (Australian and international), Medicare cards, service patches, Polaroids of thousands of visitors, bras, licence plates, signed footballs — the list goes on.
But more than just being something unique to look at, there is a whole lot more alluring about this place.
Maybe it’s its remoteness. Maybe it’s because all of its visitors were travellers with a desire to tick this legendary pub off their bucket lists. Maybe it was the atmosphere. Maybe it was the delicious food. Maybe it was just because it was the last place you get a cold one for a while.
On our meandering through the Territory on our way back to Darwin in the ensuing days, we found a couple more corkers.
While we didn’t step inside the establishment itself, the ‘Pink Panther pub’ — the Wayside Inn — at Larrimah was worth turning off the highway to see the flying Pink Panther sculpture in the sky, and the other one lounging on his deck chair right next to the giant stubbie out the front.
Closer to Darwin was the Humpty Doo Hotel, which had little in the way of memorabilia or quirkiness. Its novelty is its famed trio of sliders menu item, which includes mini burgers filled with crocodile, buffalo and barramundi fillets.
They were as delicious as the cold drinks were welcome to the thirsty mouths of a car full of travellers, who were all breathing a sigh of relief at getting the hire car back to the capital unscathed after a couple of thousand kilometres on 130km/h speed-limited roads where large, unfenced stock roamed freely.
Somewhere less remote, and the closest to home of all the pubs I’ve mentioned — although you wouldn’t think it if you’d been driven there blindfolded — is the Bush Pig Inn, in Jackass Flat (a suburb of Bendigo).
Situated next to the Big Bendi Water Slide, stepping foot inside this incredibly rustic pub would absolutely have you believing you were deep in the outback.
Timber ceilings, corrugated iron walls, mounted horns and skulls, open fireplaces and outdoor fire pits, lanterns and live music, with bush cabin accommodation right next door in the ironbark forest surrounding it.
It’s all just a stone’s throw from the GV distance-wise, but able to transport your mind to a place that feels like you’ve had a faraway adventure.
There aren’t enough pages in this paper to talk about all the pubs I want to visit, in the same way there aren’t enough weekends in my life to visit all the ones I’d like to, but, take it (or leave it) from me, all of these ones are family-friendly venues well worth checking out if you ever find yourself in those areas.
Cheers, big ears.
The Young and the Restless