Breakfast at the Port Hotel: a memory of a country pub

The port at Hopetoun, in its heyday in the early 20^th century

About 40 years ago, my colleague Steve and I (on an assignment to do with bushfires in the neighboring Fitzgerald River National Park) stayed a winter’s night in The Port Hotel on the seafront at Hopetoun, way down on the south-east coast of Western Australia.

Back in the days when the port had been busy (exporting gold from the mines at Ravensthorpe, and importing miners, timber and mining machinery), the Port Hotel had been a hub of lively activity, catering to sailors, lumpers, teamsters, prospectors, railway men and the local townsfolk. But in the 1920s the mines had closed, the port shut down, and most of the townsfolk left. When we stayed there in 1986, Hopetoun was almost a ghost town, nothing left of the superb old timber jetty, and the pub partly derelict.

It was a stormy night.  I still remember a bitter wind moaning down the upstairs corridor, the flapping of loose iron on the roof, and the single unshaded 20-watt light bulb on a long, frayed cord hanging over my narrow bed, swinging from side to side. It was like something out of Wuthering Heights.

We were, I think, the only guests.

The Port Hotel at Hopetoun, as I remember it

At breakfast in the hotel dining room the next morning, the young waitress approached. She was a sweet, but unsophisticated bush girl, maybe 16, fresh off the farm and trying her best at what might have been her first job.

“What have you got for breakfast?” asked Steve.

In reply she recited: “Bacon and eggs, ham and eggs, steak and eggs, chops and eggs, sausages and eggs, toast and eggs, or just eggs”.

Steve paused for a moment, considering the options and then asked: “Have you got fish and eggs?” 

“I’ll have to ask” she said and flitted off through the swing door to the kitchen. She returned in a few moments to say that Cook would do them as a special. Which Cook did.

Being a culinary conservative, I had the bacon and eggs, and they were very good. I hadn’t fancied the fish and eggs combo, but Steve did, and he made short work of it. Mind you, in his younger days this was the same Steve who had batched in forestry camps, was a connoisseur of the Seven Day Stew, and who once lived for three days in London on pigeons that he rustled from Trafalgar Square and cooked on a gas ring in his flat in Earl’s Court.

Our breakfast waitress was the same young lady who had served us at dinner the night before (menu: steak and chips, or chops and chips, followed by tinned fruit salad with custard).

When we finished our dinner Steve said to me “Fancy a port?” I said I did, and he called over the young waitress and ordered two ports.

A few minutes later she re-appeared with two glasses of port on a tray. They were brimming 12-oz schooners. (The 12-oz "schooner" was the precursor of the modern "pint" glass)..

I think we must have been the first customers who had ever ordered port from her, and possibly she did not know any more about bartending than pouring a beer for her Dad out on the farm.  We didn’t want to embarrass someone on their first job, and she was a sweet young thing, so we accepted the drinks, as served, and manfully dealt with them.  

As we drove off towards Esperance the next morning, having slept surprisingly well considering the cold and the racket, we agreed that The Port Hotel was aptly named.

 Country pubs

Like most of us who are old enough and once were forestry students on field trips, or had jobs that took us far and wide in the bush, in my younger days I spent many nights in country pubs the length and breadth of the land. I always especially enjoyed the old “railway pubs” with their broad upstairs verandas, dining rooms with slowly revolving overhead fans to counter the summer heat, and saloon bars with log fires to offset the winter cold. I especially liked how, at night, you could hear the trains going through on the railway line just across the road.

The Everloving and I stayed in a classic old railway pub in the Great Southern at Dumbleyung last year, and it was great. But the long chilly walk in pyjamas to the bathroom in the middle of the night reminded us that staying in the modern motel with an en suite has made us soft.

The ‘GODI” – the Good Old Dumbleyung Inn – a fine example of a Western Australian “railway pub”

Staying at the GODI and eating a breakfast of bacon and eggs in the beautiful old dining room, triggered memories of that night forty years ago when Steve and I stayed in the Port Hotel at Hopetoun. How has it coped over the years, I wondered?

I am happy to say that it has prospered. I was in Hopetoun recently, and the old town was, well, not exactly booming, but definitely looking up. There were mine workers from the nickel mine at Ravensthorpe, former farmers and city folk who had secured a cheap and pleasant seaside spot to retire, lotus eaters on their caravan circuit of Australia, and botanists studying the wonderful flora of the Fitzgerald River national park. There was a grocery and a bakery, both busy.

The Port Hotel at Hopetoun today: thoroughly gentrified

I didn’t stay at the Port Hotel, but I did call in there after work, for old time’s sake.  The pub has been gentrified, is a tourist attraction, has an upmarket restaurant and folk singers on a Saturday night.

I looked closely but found no sign of the sweet young farm girl of my memory. Had she been behind the bar, I think I would have recognised her and been unable to resist … ordering a port.