Armatree HOTEL

SO ANYWAY, in all the joints I’ve been to and whose muddy backgrounds I’ve dug into, I’ve never come across a pub whose myths, legends and stories contain more intrigue and surprises than the Armatree Hotel.

By bush standards, this isn’t an old pub. It was built in 1929 but it probably should’ve already celebrated its centenary. In 1917 the local wowsers petitioned the Licensing Court over in Coonamble in opposition to an application by a bloke named George Shanklin to build a pub in Armatree.

The local rag noted that the application was adjourned but in fact it was never heard of again and when Shanklin shifted to the great pub in the sky in 1925, the same paper only mentioned that he’d been the mailman. So Armatree stayed dry and the future looked bleak until a fella named Macken, one time Mayor of Hurstville in Sydney, applied to shift the license of his pub at Tyrone