Posted
Country pubs have long held a special place in the
heart of rural communities, but for publicans operating in smaller towns
to make a living off alcohol alone is becoming a tough sell.
All of these pressures put the once venerable institution of the country pub under threat.
David Canny, a publican for more than 20 years and vice president of the country division for the Australian Hotels Association's Victorian branch, said to survive it was no longer enough for pubs in small towns just to have beer on tap.
"They've had to change the way they do business," Mr Canny said.
"Opening the doors and having people flood your bar seven days a week just doesn't happen anymore."Instead, country pubs are adding new strings to their business as varied as art galleries, laundromats and gourmet pie shops.
Others are hosting festivals and markets, or focussing on serving high-end restaurant meals, breakfast, coffee and cake to keep the punters and the dollars trickling in.
Festivals draw out-of-towners
When Sally Gebert and her husband bought a pub in the regional Victorian town of Warracknabeal in 2011 they soon realised they would need to do more than pour beer to make their new venture profitable.Not only was Warracknabeal — a town of just 2,500 — not on a major highway or tourist route, their business also faced the challenges many country pubs are up against.
They started hosting food festivals, then approached the Australian Barbecue Alliance to stage a barbecue competition to tap into the craze of American style slow-cooked meats.
"They (the barbecue alliance) said 'look, you're really in the middle of nowhere, you're not in a city, we don't even know where Warracknabeal is. We're happy to sanction it, we're happy to promote it, but I don't think it's going to be a really big comp'," Mrs Gebert said.
"Three years later it's one of the biggest competitions in Australia with one of the biggest prize pools and we get people from all over Australia coming to compete and have a look."
It is an event that has put the town — and the pub — back on the map.
The exposure from the barbecue festival has combined with a reputation for good food and being on the route of another winning rejuvenation program, the recently-developed silo art trail.
The pub has gone from serving 15 lunch meals on a weekend to around 150 regularly nowadays, making food core to their business.
"The whole drink driving thing means the pub culture has really shifted," Mrs Gebert said.
"If your food offering isn't there, if your coffee, tea and cake selection aren't there, you're not going to make money out of a pub."
Country pubs need to adapt
Long-time NSW publican Colin Waller, a representative of the state's Australian Hotels Association, said the number of pubs in country towns shrank dramatically in the 1990s.Many pulled up stumps in the face of tough economic conditions and random breath testing.
Mr Waller said he believed the recent rationalisation of regional pubs was happening as the tide shifted towards people drinking at home and population decline in some smaller towns.
"Country towns like Forbes used to have 11 or 13 hotels. I think they are down to four or six," Mr Waller said.
"Probably the bottom line is that in some towns there were too many hotels."
One pub which seemed destined for closure was the Willow Tree Inn in the small town of Willow Tree and a population of less than 500 on the Liverpool Plains.
"It was going downhill at 100 miles an hour, had very few customers and was virtually going to close the doors. Like so many small country pubs," said Charles Hanna, a Sydney businessman who stepped-in and bought the pub in 2009.
But Mr Hanna, who had previously bought a farm in the region, had plans beyond just serving beer.
"I think it's almost impossible for a small country pub to make a living off just regulars coming in and having their schooners of beer in the afternoon," he said.
He established a fine dining restaurant that serves beef from the cattle raised on his property just down the road and built boutique accommodation on-site.
Mr Hanna reckoned that if country pubs were to survive and prosper they needed to focus less on alcohol and more on food.
"Beer is beer. You can buy beer from Dan Murphy's. You can buy beer from anywhere and beer is beer," he said.
"It's what you give the customers apart from that. You have to give them an experience and a reason to come to your hotel."
As the drinking culture changed, Mr Hanna said pubs needed to appeal to more than just male drinkers.
"We made a place that was attractive to women and particularly families to come to," he said.
"When I bought it (the pub) you wouldn't have seen a woman there on a Saturday night in a million years.
"It just wasn't conducive to families or women. Now it's the reverse. Quite often there'll be more females there than men."
Finding a point of difference
Across the country, pubs are finding unique ways of standing out and drawing crowds.From the western Queensland pub that holds nightly chook races to the northern Victorian hotel that has a menu featuring 101 different types of chicken parmigiana, including desert varieties with toppings such as marshmallow and chocolate fudge sauce.
In the tiny town of Parachilna in South Australia's Flinders Ranges it is feral food that draws visitors from far afield to the Prairie Hotel, 470 kilometres north of Adelaide.
Jane Fargher and her husband Ross, who live on nearby Nilpena station, bought their local hotel in the 1990s.
"When the railways pulled out of town, people had pretty much written the hotel off as being another one of those regional hotels that would close," Mrs Fargher said.
With a population of just three residents in Parachilna, Mrs Fargher said they needed to work hard to bring business to the hotel.
"It was really important to us to have a point of difference, to make people stop. So, we chose to introduce Australian native food to the menu."
With the availability of kangaroo meat from a kangaroo harvester and processor in a nearby town, the Farghers started serving kangaroo and soon expanded the menu to include emu, camel and goat.
"We've become renowned for our native cuisine," Mrs Fargher said.
"Our feral mixed grill, which is one of our more popular dishes, has been listed in the top gourmet experiences in Australia."Our feral food menu has been recognised as an unmissable outback experience."
But they did not just stop at food, also adding accommodation, tours, scenic flights, a range of bush produce, an art gallery and their own lines of craft beer and wine to the pub's offerings.
Mrs Fargher likened it to the model of a small-town post office that has increasingly become more of a mixed business, taking on a bit of everything to remain profitable.
Future of country pubs
David Canny of the Australian Hotels Association said he believed pubs needed to adapt and find new opportunities to continue to play a vital role as a meeting point and social hub in country communities."We don't want to see small towns without a pub," he said.
And he believed the accelerating rate of people drinking at home, rather than at the pub, was a concern.
"It takes away that social aspect of what going to a pub means and meeting with other people and talking to other farmers," Mr Canny said.
In a number of rural towns where pubs have failed, they have been resurrected by local residents or sporting and community groups who recognised the vital role the pub plays in the town's social fabric.
In Victoria's far west, a syndicate of local farmers banded together in 2014 to reopen their local pub The Border Inn at Apsley which had been shut for three years.
Nearly four years later on a Friday afternoon, regulars are trickling into the bar and there is much banter about a competition the pub is running to find the longest yabby in the district.
Bartender Flo Burgwin said the yabby competition was creating a bit of interest among locals and a reason for people, including those from nearby towns, to pop in to the pub.
Here the value of keeping the local pub going can not be overstated.
"It just keeps people in the area. You know you've got a meeting place and you can chat about your problems, or good times," Ms Burgwin said.
"I think it's a necessity to have a little pub like this going with all the others that are shutting around us. It makes it even more important to keep it open."
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