TWO DAYS OLD ON THE BAR: MY CONNECTION TO THE PALLY PUB
By Brian AJ Newman
My father placed me on the bar of the Pally Pub when I was just two days old.
I cannot remember it, of course. But that piece of my family history has stayed with me.
Before I could walk, talk or understand anything about the village where I would grow up, Dad had already brought me into one of its gathering places.
The hotel’s official name was the Golden Grain, but when I was a kid growing up in Pallamallawa, we always called it the Pally Pub.
That name belongs to my childhood. It was part of the language of home long before it appeared in the pub’s modern branding. When I say “the Pally Pub”, I am talking about a place woven into my own beginnings, my father’s life and the community that helped shape me.
Knowing I was placed on its bar at two days old gives me a connection to the building that is difficult to explain through dates and ownership records alone. Somewhere inside its history is that moment: my father, his newborn son and a village carrying on around them.
I do not know every detail of that day. I will not invent who was there, what was said or how people reacted. What I know is enough.
Dad took me to the Pally Pub at the very beginning of my life.
As I get older, I find myself wanting to understand more about the places that formed the background to our lives. Who built them? What stood there before? Who kept going when a project stalled? Whose names have slipped out of the story?
Those questions led me back through the history of Pally’s hotels, including the devastating fire that destroyed the Pioneer Hotel in 1922 and the community effort that eventually brought the Golden Grain into existence.
Local journalist Bill Poulos has preserved valuable parts of that history. His article published by Moree Online News on 30 June 2026 includes the recollections of Ron Munn, whose father, Ernie, played a central role in the campaign to establish the Golden Grain.
Read alongside the original newspaper coverage of the Pioneer fire, it tells a story of loss, persistence and people willing to put their hands to work for their village.
On 4 January 1922, between three and four in the morning, fire took hold of the Pioneer Hotel.
The following day, the Moree Gwydir Examiner and General Advertiser reported the disaster under the heading “PALLAMALLAWA FIRE”. The account was written while the destruction was still fresh and the hotel’s publican was recovering in hospital.
The hotel was owned and conducted by E. C. Cavanagh. According to the report, the fire appeared to be near the middle of the building when first noticed. It had already developed beyond any realistic chance of saving the premises.
The Pioneer and its contents were destroyed.
The flames spread to the neighbouring office of Strange and Kingham, auctioneers. Its contents were removed before the building was lost, but the danger continued along the street.
With Hutton and Fishpool’s store threatened, residents chopped down two vacant adjoining shops. The newspaper credited their action with stopping the fire’s further advance.
It is a remarkable detail.
In the early hours, confronted with a spreading fire, people deliberately pulled down buildings to protect what remained. The decision must have been urgent. The work would have been difficult. The result mattered to everyone whose livelihood or property lay in the flames’ path.
The report also describes what happened to Cavanagh.
Everyone inside the hotel had escaped, but he lost sight of his wife and child in the crowd.
He went back into the burning building to search for them, wearing pyjamas and no boots.
Part of the burning roof fell. Cavanagh suffered severe burns to his feet and ankles and was taken to Moree Hospital.
That contemporary account gives the event a painful human clarity. His family had escaped, but he could not find them. His return to the hotel began with the fear that they were still inside.
As a father, that is the part that stays with me.
A hotel was burning, people were gathering, neighbouring buildings were in danger, and one man was searching for his family. A short newspaper report preserves something of that confusion and fear more than a century later.
Poulos’s later history also recounts the inquiry conducted by Coroner Phineas Rosenthal. The inquiry established the destruction of the hotel but could not determine whether the fire was accidental or otherwise.
Its cause remains uncertain. The losses and Cavanagh’s injuries are recorded.
The period after the fire also deserves careful attention.
It would be easy to jump directly from the Pioneer’s destruction in 1922 to the Golden Grain’s opening in 1963. However, historical accounts describe an intervening attempt to keep a hotel operating in Pallamallawa.
Poulos’s 2020 account records that Ellen Matthews acquired the site and licence. A former hotel building at Ashley was dismantled and rebuilt in Pallamallawa. The Matthews family operated the hotel before Matthew McLaughlin took over. During the Depression, the licence was surrendered and the building was later moved to a district property.
That chapter belongs in the story. It recognises another effort to maintain a local business after the disaster and avoids treating the entire period from 1922 to 1963 as one uninterrupted absence of a hotel.
Local history often comes to us in pieces. Newspaper accounts provide one part, family recollections another, and later research helps connect them. Being careful with those pieces is a way of respecting the people whose lives they describe.
By the 1940s, a campaign for a community hotel was taking shape.
Poulos’s 2026 article records approaches to government and the Boolooroo Shire Council. The question was being raised with the Minister for Justice in 1946, and the Pallamallawa Progress Association pursued discussions about a site in 1948.
The years passed through correspondence, meetings, proposals and delays.
There is a familiar kind of work in that history. Before anyone can lay a foundation or lift a wall, someone has to keep a proposal alive. Someone has to write the next letter, attend the next meeting and return to an application that has not progressed.
Ernie Munn and Les McLachlan were among the people who did that work for Pally.
Through the progress association, they helped sustain the campaign, with support from Member for Barwon Geoff Crawford.
In the recollections recorded by Poulos, Ron Munn also described the assistance of Police Sergeant Mark Bradbury. Bradbury questioned why Pallamallawa lacked a hotel and helped Ernie pursue the licensing process.
For a proposal that had faced years of difficulty, that practical assistance mattered.
Even once the licensing effort advanced, further setbacks followed. Ron recalled a prospective operator from Goondiwindi arranging timber for the project, only to die before it was completed. Harold Cummins, associated with the Coolatai hotel, subsequently acquired the timber and the undertaking continued.
Then the village helped turn the plans into a building.
According to Ron’s account, local people gave their spare time to carrying timber, using saws and lifting sections into position. Their contribution was physical and immediate. The hotel took shape through the efforts of people who wanted it to succeed.
That is something I think about when I picture Dad placing me on the bar.
Before he could bring me through those doors, other people had spent years helping to make the place possible. There had been applications and setbacks, investment and labour.
There had been people willing to persist.
My family’s story sits inside their effort.
The Golden Grain Hotel officially opened in 1963.
Ron remembered his father receiving the first beer across the bar. The place where Ernie sat that day remained his usual spot in the years that followed.
It is a small detail with a great deal of meaning. People become associated with particular places. A chair, a corner or a position at the bar can hold someone’s presence in local memory long after they have gone.
For Ernie, that spot followed years of work to help establish the hotel.
For me, the bar holds the story of my father bringing me there at two days old.
Other families will have their own connections. People who helped build the place, worked behind the counter, supplied it, maintained it or spent part of their lives gathering there will remember things that never appeared in a newspaper.
Together, those memories give a building its place in a community.
The progress association’s ambitions continued beyond the hotel. Ron later followed his father as president, with Les McLachlan as secretary, and recalled campaigning for a town water supply.
Their work shows a continuing commitment to the village. The hotel campaign was part of a broader determination to secure the facilities and services that would help Pallamallawa endure.
These are the kinds of achievements that deserve names attached to them. We should remember who kept the correspondence going, who pursued the applications and who gave up their spare time when there was work to do.
Decades later, the pub faced another uncertain future.
Poulos’s account of its 2020 reopening describes local concern about a possible closure and the families who came together to purchase it. Members of the Diprose, Taunton and Tighe families took over in January 2017, with Anthony Diprose remembered as an instigator of the purchase. Extensive renovations followed, and the renewed premises reopened in September 2020.
The modern business adopted the Pally Pub name formally, but for those of us who grew up calling it that, the name was already familiar.
It was the name we had always used.
The renovations gave the building another chapter. The local name carried an older connection through it.
I am grateful that another group of people was willing to invest in its future. When a familiar gathering place survives, it gives a community somewhere to carry its memories forward while making new ones.
For me, those memories and connections reach back to the very start.
Being placed on the bar at two days old is a family story, but it has come to mean more as I have learned about the people who made the pub possible. It connects my father and me to a building that others had campaigned for, financed and helped construct.
I was too young to understand any of that. Now I can appreciate the years of effort that preceded my arrival.
It also explains why I have been searching for a photograph of the old Pioneer Hotel before the fire. I want to see the earlier chapter of the village’s hotel history. I want to connect the newspaper account with a real building and understand more about the place that came before the pub of my childhood.
A photograph cannot answer every question, but it can bring distant history closer. So can a remembered name, an old newspaper or a story passed down within a family.
We should gather those things while we can.
There will be people with photographs tucked into albums, details remembered from their parents, or stories about the Golden Grain that have never been written down. Each one may add something to the history we already know.
The Pioneer, the rebuilt hotel that followed, and the Golden Grain all belong to Pallamallawa’s story. So do the people who protected their neighbours’ businesses during the fire, those who persisted through the licensing campaign and those who helped the pub continue into another generation.
My part began with Dad placing me on the bar.
The sign may have said Golden Grain, but the name I grew up with was the Pally Pub.
That is what we called it then. That is what I call it now. And my connection to it began when I was just two days old.
Historical sources and acknowledgement: This article draws on “Pallamallawa Fire”, Moree Gwydir Examiner and General Advertiser, 5 January 1922, page 2; Bill Poulos’s “Watering hole history: From the community-built Golden Grain Hotel to the Pally Pub”, Moree Online News, 30 June 2026; and Poulos’s 2020 reopening history, reproduced by SMK Consultants.
Ron Munn’s recollections are drawn from Poulos’s reporting. The account of my father placing me on the bar at two days old, and my recollection that we always called it the Pally Pub during my childhood, are my own family history and personal recollections.
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