LIFE IN A COUNTRY PUB
UNNING a country pub at the back of Bourke hasn’t always been beer and skittles for Janine and Glenn Fowler but a decade on, the couple say they are finally “living the dream”.
It’s a dream many middle-aged Aussies — sick of the rat race and skyhigh city housing prices — aspire to, according to business brokers.
One of Australia’s biggest hotel brokers, CRE, last year sold more than 40 rural and remote pubs in Victoria and New South Wales.
“Most buyers are looking for lifestyle and tree-changes,” says CRE business broker Phil Mammolito.
At 69, former hotel owner and commercial real estate agent Peter Moore says he sells country and outback pubs more as a hobby than an occupation these days, using his small plane to inspect pubs with prospective clients in remote locations across Australia.
It’s a small, niche business — run largely out of his home at Mansfield, in Victoria’s high country — which relies on word-of-mouth, and never a suit and tie. Still, Mr Moore manages to sell about 10 country hotels and two or three outback pubs a year.
The outback pubs have been as remote as William Creek and Marree, on the Oodnadatta Track in South Australia, while his criteria for “a proper country pub” is a hotel in a town that doesn’t have traffic lights.
Most people who come to him to buy a country pub are “50-plus”, and looking to make a lifestyle shift, Mr Moore says.
And with country pubs often for sale for less than the cost of a threebedroom house in suburbia, buying a hotel with accommodation included can be a sensible investment, he says.
“They’re basically buying a home, a business and new friends with one purchase,” Mr Moore says.
Following a marriage breakup and sick of driving semi-trailers, Victorian-born Ben Houlihan says he needed to find somewhere to live and a new job.
Priced at just $350,000, the 10bedroom, two-storey Einasleigh Hotel in Far North Queensland seemingly solved all his problems.
The former shearer, drover, truckdriver and auctioneer is a Jack of all outback trades, and backing himself to turn the fortunes of the century-old pub around.
He bought the run-down hotel just ahead of his 50th birthday and has been operating it since his liquor license came through in mid-April.
“I’m the doctor, the priest, the social worker, the barman, the cook — you name it,” Mr Houlihan says.
While he’s never owned a pub before, he’s poured beers — “and consumed a hell of a lot of them as well” — so working behind a bar doesn’t worry him.
“I’m reasonably gregarious and I can talk to fellas about pretty much anything,” Mr Houlihan says. “I’m pretty handy. I can fix things and I stay calm in a crisis.”
Patronage in the bar can vary from five to 50 on any given night, Mr Houlihan says, and his biggest fear is that a fight breaks out and turns ugly.
“If a big blue erupts — if someone from out of town comes in and stirs the locals up, and they get stuck into it — it could get nasty because the nearest copper is 77km away,” Mr Houlihan says. “You’ve got to be able to handle everything in a pub this far out.”
Former legal secretary Janine Fowler can handle the outback hotel lifestyle now, but it was a different story the first night she stepped behind the bar of the Brewarrina hotel; she ended up sobbing on the floor.
The 130 year-old pub — about 100km east of Bourke — was full of thirsty locals and the mum of three, fresh from the Newcastle suburbs, couldn’t cope.
“I couldn’t pour a beer and I just didn’t want to be there,” she says.
Husband Glenn Fowler, a former miner, had to clear the pub of patrons that night. Bewildered locals went home and Mr Fowler, whose dream it was his wife had followed to the outback, tried to offer words of solace.
It would get better, he told his wife. And it did.
“There were tough times that nearly sunk us but we dug deep,” Mr Fowler says. “When we eventually got out of the hole, it was good and it’s been good ever since.
“I don’t stress now. I open and shut the place when I want. I don’t work much and I don’t answer to anyone. I’m my own boss and every day’s different. Now we’re living the dream.”
Former Coles workers John and Phyllis McCarthy decided to quit their supermarket jobs and sell their home in outer-Melbourne in 2012 to buy their first country pub in the small town of Newstead, in Victoria’s goldmining region.
They sold the pub in the town of 750-odd people in 2015, and in August last year bought Violet Town’s Ellen Frances Hotel in Victoria’s northeast.
Running the pub, which has a bar, restaurant, motel accommodation and a manager’s residence out the back, is a full-time job, even in a town of 900 people.
“It’s a huge adjustment at first, having to work every day and not getting weekends off,” Ms McCarthy says. “But it’s a good life.”