The last of the publicans

UNTIL selling all but a minority stake in his Currumbin pub recently, Tony Condon was one of the last of his kind still standing at the bar.

The rise of supermarketowned hotels has meant last drinks for most old-school publicans like Condon (pictured) in Australia’s cities and bigger towns.

Hospitable hoteliers who’d have a beer and a yarn with the regulars, and maybe pass on a few sly racing tips, have been replaced by uniformed venue managers in the now heavily corporatised and regulated hotel industry.

Condon, who was recently granted life membership of the Queensland Hotels Association, reckons he saw the best of the pub game during his 45 years tapping kegs at establishments across the Gold Coast and interstate.

Running bars at famous Gold Coast watering holes including the Playroom and The Patch, booking bands like INXS, Midnight Oil and Cold Chisel before they made it big and becoming mates with pubs and pokie baron Bruce Mathieson have been among his career highlights.

An electrician by trade, Newcastle-born Condon came to Queensland in the mid-1970s to work at Groote Eylandt in the Gulf of Carpentaria.

“After the Groote Eylandt job, I flew across to Cairns and then drove down to the Gold Coast where a mate of mine was working,” he said.

“I called into Coolangatta and never left.”

Condon landed a job “picking up glasses and clearing ashtrays” at the old Port O

Call hotel (now The Sands Hotel) in Coolangatta and later worked at the Coast’s first disco, the Hang Five Bar, in the same establishment.

He then did four seasons managing the Valley Inn at Perisher Ski Resort.

“I’d work down there in the winter and come back up here for summer,” he recalled.

Between ski seasons, Condon ran a bar at the Tallebudgera Playroom, probably the Coast’s most iconic live music venue, for owner Beryl Carnell.

From 1982 until 1986, he ran the Coolangatta Patch for renowned hoteliers Joe and Ron McLaughlin, another of the Coast’s most raucous pubs and live music venues of the era.

“We did the (infamous) dollar drink nights at The Patch and had all the big bands playing there like INXS, Cold Chisel, Midnight Oil and The Angels,” he said.

One of Condon’s favourite memories is booking a band called The Cockroaches for a $200 gig.

“The Cockroaches went on to become The Wiggles and make millions as one of Australia’s most successful bands ever,” he said.

“I got ‘em for 200 bucks before they made it big.”

Then there was Ron McDonald, another licensee of the Queensland Hotel of which The Patch was part.

“Ron used to play cards with the locals – if he lost he’d pay them money but if he won, he’d make them shave off an eyebrow,” Condon remembers with a chuckle.

“Half of the locals were walking around Coolangatta with one eyebrow.

“We also had a manager named Snow Collins who used to tell everyone at closing time: “You don’t have to go home but you can’t f-----n stay here.”

Condon says the arrival of Alan Bond on the Queensland hotel scene in the early-1980s – when the Perth entrepreneur bought XXXX brewer Castlemaine Tooheys for $1.2 billion – “changed the whole industry as we know it”.

“Bond wanted the breweries (Castlemaine Tooheys and WA’s Swan Brewery) as cash cows but there were all these hotels that came with the deal,” Condon said.

Mathieson, a rough-andtumble former toolmaker raised in working class Port Melbourne who bought his first pub in 1975 with his wife Jill (they now live at Mermaid Beach), saw an opportunity and snapped up the 350-plus hotels as part of the Austotel consortium with Bond.

“All the Fourex pubs were on sweetheart deals but Bond’s consortium made them pay proper commercial rent, based on the property value,” Condon recalled.

Condon became licensee of one of Austotel’s flagship properties, the Currumbin Hotel, overlooking Currumbin Creek – a position that saw it dubbed “the pub with the million dollar view”.

“Beryl Carnell was one of my referees to get my first liquor licence and she lived next to the pub,” Condon said.

“She told me, ‘I’ll vouch for you as long as you keep the f-----n noise down’. That was quite ironic because Beryl was always in strife with the council because of noise from the Playroom.”

During his decade running the landmark watering hole, Condon saw more seismic changes to the hotel industry, including the introduction of random breath testing in the late 1980s, and then poker machines.

“RBT changed big-time,” he said.

“People started drinking things