Life in the Bush-Arrival of the Mail.

Rare colonial engraving depicting what bush hotels looked like in the early colonial days.

BUSH HOTEL. RESIDENTS in Australia will readily recognise in the Royal Hotel a type of the old bush hostelry of former days of outly- ing country districts, and more distant readers will learn some- thing of Australian bush architecture by our engraving. The bush hotel is generally of the most primitive description, little better than a sort of aristocratic extensive gunyah ; walls of slab and roof of bark. The hotelkeeper is also generally a store- keeper and postmaster, these avocations being found to contri- bute to the success of the hotel business, the arrival of the weekly or bi-weekly mail being sufficiently important to attract visitors from the neighbouring stations, to whom the receipt of a letter or newspaper forms a change in the monotony of station life. The shearing season is true harvest for the bush hotel ; shearers and shepherds, with plethoric purses, find their way to the bar, and at once place their ‘ orders ‘. in the publican’s hands, to be ‘ sweated out ‘ by themselves and as many others as they can find to accept ‘ a shout.’ The extension of agricultural settlements, the establishment of schools of art and other places of instruction and amusement, are tending to break down the old routine of life in the bush, and in a few years the low bush hotel, like many other unsightly excrescences of colonial life will have no existence save in the remembrance of old residents.

From the original edition of the Illustrated Sydney News.

References:
Gibbs & Shallard. Illustrated Sydney News. ISSN 2203-5397.

Collections:
State Library New South Wales: F8/39-40
State Library Victoria: PCINF SLVIC=1853-1872
National Library Australia: Bib ID 440095