Historic Pubs of the SouthHistoric Pubs of the South

Includes 180 stunning photographs of pubs and accommodation houses of Southland and Central Otago from the mid 1800s to present day have been brought together with entertaining and enlightening stories about their past by well-known Southland historian John Hall-Jones. This book is not meant as some guidebook to a marathon pubcrawl around the South of New Zealand. Instead, it is the history of the early hotels and taverns of the South, which has always intrigued the author.
The historic Cardrona Hotel and how it became dry. The Bannockburn Hotel, where incongrously a meeting was held to form a branch of the Temperance Society. Here too are the stories of the Oasis Hotel, where there was plenty of grog but no accommodation; the United States Hotel, where the bedstead consisted of manuka scrub with sacking nailed across it; the hotel where a man sleeping in the loft above fell atop a man sleeping on a settee below; the bush inn, where the innkeeper quelled a riot by throwing a lasso over the most noisy of the ‘bottle imps’. Here too are the stories of the “cooper’s schnapps”: illicit distilling of Hokonui whisky” and Jules Berg’s “parsnippy wine”.