FAIR DINKUM, MATE
DOWN ON THE southern coast of Victoria, the Royal Hotel at Portland used to be the favoured watering hole of both the tough working waterside workers and tug crews from the port, and also the blokes from the Borthwick meat works who’d spent their working day with blood on their hands and saw little reason that the evening should be any different!
They didn’t care too much for each other and the endless blues earned the pub the moniker of the Duck and Weave – you needed a degree in both to survive any kind of bout at the bar.
Still one of my favourite pub aliases and I was thinking about it riding around the back streets of Koorawatha, 25kms south of Cowra, searching for remnants of an ex-pub that had no need for a colourful nickname. Its real one was the evocative enough - “The Bang Bang Hotel”
The Bang Bang was built in 1861 as a travellers’ rest on the
