Grazing is located in the historic Royal Hotel building in Gundaroo. Photo: Ash St George.
How many lives can one building lead? If you take a look at the building that used to house the Royal Hotel in Gundaroo, the answer is many.
Just clicking over to its 161st birthday, the building located on the corner of Cork and Harp streets, in the tiny town of Gundaroo is currently known as Grazing, a popular and often awarded fine-dining restaurant that attracts visitors from across the region.
Although now modernised with all the comforts one would expect from a fine-dining establishment, the building still retains the heart of what it was born to be: a place for people to gather, enjoy each other’s company and have a yarn over a beer or a fine glass of wine, as the case may now be.
Over the years, the drinks have flowed in various quantities, sometimes more, sometimes less and sometimes none as this building shifted uses based on the needs of the owners.
In 1865 when the pub was built, owner and licensee William Affleck, a man recognised as one of the founders of the township itself, built it to meet the needs of travellers passing through the region and beer was firmly on the menu.
The Royal Hotel Gundaroo pictured here in the 1920s. Photo: Lyall Gillespie, Hall Heritage Centre and Gundaroo and District Historical Society.
Despite being a staunch teetotaller and promoter of abstinence from alcohol, he was also a businessman, and he recognised that if Gundaroo was going to be the town he envisioned, it needed an inn, and an inn serving tea wasn’t going to cut it, no matter what his personal beliefs might be.
It opened with little fanfare, and minimal references can be found among the myriad Trove stories on the region.
The beer flowed all the way through to 1928, when the pub’s licence was transferred to Queanbeyan, and for nearly 40 years, the pub went dry as the building became a private home.
For many pubs of this era, this would have been the end; buildings like this rarely revert back to a country pub, but in 1968, a Mr Ron Murray had other ideas and a bunch of buses in need of a destination, and that destination was to be the ‘Old Royal’, so he purchased it and set about renovating.
This purchase and what was to follow was the founding of Murray’s Coaches that we still know today, and this initial phase of the business saw Mr Murray transporting patrons from Canberra to the ‘pub with no beer’, as without a liquor licence, Mr Murray had set up an Australiana-themed billy tea room, complete with themed rooms.
By his own account, Mr Murray was having a hell of a time, telling the Canberra Times in August 1970, “I take visitors out there by coach, and I wear riding boots, jeans, an old shirt and a five-inch brim.”
Accompanied by his wife in pioneer costume, Mr Murray felt that the ‘vicarious pleasure’ of eating freshly prepared bush damper, kangaroo tail soup and steak BBQ, all washed down with billy tea would be enough to satisfy punters.
The purchase of the Gundaroo Pub and the opening of a Queanbeyan-based travel agency was the founding of Canberra’s Murray’s Coaches. Photo: Murray’s Coaches.
By the 80s, Mr Murray had tapped into the Japanese market, and when he wasn’t in costume, he drove a Rolls Royce and wore a pinstripe suit, and at some point in the intervening years, the business had gone from being a tea room to being fully licensed again and named The Gundaroo Pub.
This quintessential Aussie experience that Mr Murray had crafted was of the all-inclusive, fully pre-paid variety and tourists flocked to it in droves for Australian folk songs, staged bushranger hold-ups, T-bones on the barbecue and even a chance to buy a toy koala in the gift shop, with some tourists reportedly spending up to $200 on the way out the door.
It was in this era that Mr Murray also cracked the Canberra market, and there are more than a few Canberrans who fondly remember the day trip that became known as the Gundaroo Gallop, named after a potent drink that patrons received on arrival. By all accounts the experience was of a weekend booze bus that picked up a “hitchhiker” on the way. That hitchhiker on occasion was played by Ron Murray, a man clearly invested in all chances to pull off a shenanigan.
With the bus offloading its contents at the pub door, many drunken nights ensued with Canberrans recounting steaks that looked like they’d come off dinosaurs, campfires, hayrides, roaming minstrels and many a blurry trip home on the Murray’s bus.
Kurt and Tanya Neumann have been running Grazing at Gundaroo since 2011 with the fine-dining restaurant first opening its doors in 2003. Photo: Ash St George.
As with most parties, the party eventually ended. Mr Murray’s business expanded nationwide in the 90s; in 2005 he received the Order of Australia Medal for his services to tourism, which all began at the Gundaroo Pub, and in 2003, the building took a deep breath and moved into its new fine-dining gig with ease.
It’s a bit of a chameleon, really. For such a distinctive colonial building, it’s been able to morph into whatever it’s needed to be at the time, an ability that’s kept it alive all these years, and certainly Gundaroo has been the better for it.
