IT offered a cool drink to the gold diggers who were passing Keilor on their way to the goldfields of Castlemaine and Bendigo during the 1850s and 1860s.
Now, almost 150 years after the establishment of the Keilor Hotel, the heritage-listed building is still going strong under its current owner Ray Dudd. He has inherited the tradition of hotel keeping from his great-grandfather Matthew Goudie, who purchased the hotel in 1862.
The historic hotel, which is well known for its Georgian-style bluestone building, has been documented in a book called Keilor Hotel, written by the Keilor Historical Society’s president, Susan Jennison.
As a foundation stone, the 79-page book aims to “get people talking” about the area’s true jewel, Ms Jennison said.
“It was here before the gold rushes and goes right back to the very first days of Keilor’s history and Melbourne’s history,” Ms Jennison told Star while sitting next to Mr Dodd around a wooden table at the hotel.
The book was a project that was talked about a lot but not until last year did Ms Jennison decide that the material she already had collected in a booklet needed to be put in a book.
Mr Dodd was pleased that she took on the task. “We’re too close to it to write its history,” he said.
“We needed somebody like Susan to come and do the research and put the story together, otherwise if it was left to me it would get lost,” he added.
After its opening, the hotel was the area’s only public building, which not only offered a drink and accommodation, but also a sense of community spirit where important decisions such as raising money to build churches and schools were made.
“I think the hotel has shaped the community more than the community had shaped the hotel,” Mr Dodd said.
The hotel came close to not surviving during the 1930s Great Depression while only selling one barrel of beer a week and receiving no rent from the manager. But Mr Dodd said his great-grandfather’s general principle, which still rings true today, was “give service to the people in order to get people to come back”.
“Part of our way of running a business is that we feel that we still need to be a community centre. We don’t see ourselves as a drinking place,” Mr Dodd said.
He became the licensee of the hotel in 1974 and renovated the hotel, which had not been repaired for 100 years.
One innovation was the introduction of a fine-dining area, and the proportion of women visiting the hotel jumped from 5 per cent to 35 per cent.
“I’ve got a copy of the liquorette (laws of hotel keeping) in 1885 saying it was illegal to employ a woman in the hotel other than the member of the family. Women were not allowed in public bars until the 1960s,” Mr Dodd said.
Mr Dodd showed Star the wine cellar-cool room, which used to serve as a morgue for locals in the early days. It is only a few metres from the bar.
“The one thing that stands in my mind is the sign that used to be on the door of the bar that said, ‘No gumboots allowed in this bar’,” Mr Dodd said.
“They were all farmers and of course they didn’t clean their boots when they came in.”
