The Loaded Dog as it stands today. Photo: Tenele Conway.
Sitting on a four-way intersection in the regional town of Tarago is The Loaded Dog Hotel. The current building with its two-storey federation frontage has overlooked that intersection since 1912. It’s likely seen a lot in those 114 years and more than its fair share of fender benders.
Its location at a crossroads has long made it a popular destination for day-trippers, car clubs, motorcyclists and anyone looking for a hearty feed and a cold brew, and across all those years, that hasn’t changed.
Ever in search of a cold brew myself, I made my way to The Loaded Dog one recent Sunday and dug a little into its colourful history over a schooner and some exceptional rissoles and was delighted to find that the pub is embedded in bushranger folklore with exciting tales that include an outlaw burial under the pub’s former floorboards.
Much of what happened at The Loaded Dog Hotel happened within the walls of a different building, but the liquor licence has been continuous since 1848, so I think it’s fair to credit the current pub as the location.
To further confuse matters, Tarago wasn’t even called Tarago until 1884 when a railway mapping debacle meant that Tarago and Lake Bathurst had to switch names; this later prompted a change of names for the Lake Bathurst Hotel, which became known as The Loaded Dog Hotel in reference to a comedic short story by Henry Lawson.
The Loaded Dog in 1930. Despite the town changing names in 1884, the pub still goes by The Lake Bathurst Hotel in this image. Photo: Time Gents.
So in summary, the Lake Bathurst Hotel, located in the current town of Tarago just 10 kilometres down the road from present-day Lake Bathurst, became The Loaded Dog Hotel, and Lake Bathurst, well, it doesn’t have a pub. Clear as mud, isn’t it.
Back to the bushrangers – as far as bushrangers go, Frank Gardiner didn’t leave the legacy of Ned Kelly, but for a period of four or five years in the early 1860s his activities escalated and culminated in the 1862 ambush and robbery of the Forbes gold escort at Eugowra Rocks, the largest gold robbery in Australian history.
Prior to going down in history for that infamous heist, it is said that he arranged a summit between the region’s most prolific bushrangers, himself, the Clarke Gang and Ben Hall. This summit took place at the crossroads that met at The Loaded Dog Hotel (then the Lake Bathurst Hotel). Together these notorious bushrangers plotted to ambush the gold transport from the Majors Creek Mine that would be laden with one million pounds of bullion, in today’s currency.
This is where folklore and fact intersect. The ‘bushranger summit’ is a story based on an oral history, and the value of the gold referenced here doesn’t check out when compared with the output of the Major’s Creek Mine, both historical and present-day, and there is no existing documentation that supports the events. But we wouldn’t be truly Australian if we let little details like that get in the way of a good yarn.
At this summit Frank Gardiner was confident that with the hilly terrain, the ambush would be successful, and with the proceeds, he would run away to America with The Loaded Dog innkeeper’s daughter Bess O’Reilly, a good Irish girl when she wasn’t stashing funds illegally obtained by her bushranging boyfriend.
Frank Gardiner inspired many young men of the time to take up bushranging. Image: Freeman Bros. Photography 1864 via the National Portrait Gallery.
It’s said that the scene at The Loaded Dog went down like this. Gardiner and Hall were planning ‘the big one’ when an argument broke out between some of the younger gang members, Bill Robeson and Johnny Keith. These two men are not noted in Australian history, and maybe they didn’t live long enough to make their mark with Bill Robeson shooting Johnny Keith dead that night.
Not wanting to invoke a scandal right before they pulled off the big one, Hall and Gardiner decided to bury the body under the floorboards of the pub.
The Major’s Creek robbery never ended up getting off the ground. Hall and Gardiner did team up for the Eugowra robbery which by all accounts was ‘the big one’, but by the turn of the decade, all of these bushrangers were either arrested and serving extensive sentences, hanged or killed by police.
In what may seem just a little too like a Romeo and Juliet-style death, poor Bess, the daughter of the innkeeper of The Loaded Dog, is said to have shot herself in the head upon receiving false information about the death of her lover, Frank Gardiner, at the hands of the troopers.
Frank, in fact, was captured in 1864 and served 10 years, with no hangable offences conclusively taken to trial, and upon his release from prison in 1874, he made his way to the United States without his Bess.
It’s a funny thing that in NSW we don’t tend to leverage our bushranging past for tourism purposes like our near neighbour Victoria does. Maybe without the romance of a siege, a handmade suit of armour and a movie in which Mick Jagger does his best with an Australian accent, the stories don’t live in our psyche.
But next time you’re at The Loaded Dog, grab a schooner, or maybe even a pint, and conjure up a time when bushrangers met at those crossroads and made plans over a beer. I wonder if rissoles were on the menu then?
The Loaded Dog Hotel is located at 1 Wallace Street, Tarago. Keep up with them via their Facebook page. For a comprehensive overview of bushrangers in this region, pick up a copy of The Clarke Gang, Outlawed, Outcast and Forgotten by Peter C Smith. Copies are stocked at the Braidwood Museum.
