SYDNEY—At the tip of the steep-sided sandstone peninsula called the Rocks, which juts north into Sydney’s harbour, the first European settlers created in miniature the England they’d left behind.
There’s a village green surrounded by beautiful, Georgian-style sandstone houses from the 1820s that might have been airlifted from the English Cotswolds.
There’s a sandstone neo-Gothic church. And there are pubs.
The Rocks was Sydney’s first settled area, and retains to this day some of Australia’s oldest surviving houses.
A pleasant way to explore its haphazard layout, with streets that writhe around the peninsula’s contour lines, and steep, stone-stepped passages that climb to cross them, is to wander between historic drinking establishments, soaking up the area’s charm along with something restorative at each stop. These four pubs, within a kilometre of each other, can easily be visited in an afternoon.
The Fortune of War, opened in 1828, claims to be Sydney’s oldest pub, and displays a copy of the List of Certificates for Publican’s Licences granted July 1, 1830 with itself in first place.
This warren of small rooms is actually Sydney’s “oldest continually licensed” pub, but was rebuilt on the same site in 1921, although the ancient tiling on the walls and the ornate central bar seem to have been there forever.
It once had five neighbours, and at one point so many licences were issued in Sydney there was a pub for every 10 people in the colony. Publicans were required to provide lights outside their premises, so the ubiquity of drinking places accidentally led to the down-at-heel Rocks becoming one of the first parts of Sydney to have the luxury of proper street lighting.
Some of the original gas street lamps are still in operation on the way to the second on that first list of licensees, the wedge-shaped Australian Hotel. Newspaper clippings prove it opened earlier than the Fortune, in 1824, but was at a different address until 1900. Still, the frosted glass, ceiling mouldings and big mirrors behind the bar proclaim its antiquity.
Convict labour built the Hero of Waterloo, which opened as it is in 1843, and has chisel marks still visible in the sandstone. Tradition has it a secret tunnel was once used to smuggle in illicit liquor from the docks and to carry the inebriated unwillingly off to life as sailors. The cellar still has shackles in the wall and tunnel entrance.
But the Lord Nelson, licensed in 1841, claims to be “the oldest continually licensed hotel still trading within its original fabric.” It began as an imposing, three-storey private house with big windows and high ceilings, and also operates Australia’s “oldest pub brewery.”
Once the preserve of sailors and dockers, the Rocks is on the way to gentrification. A warehouse is now the elegant Harbour Rocks Hotel. A police station is now a wine bar. Some pubs have dining rooms and serve excellent food.
Try not to drink too much. To decide which is the oldest pub, you’ll have to focus on the small print.
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