RATED 4 OUT OF 5 HELMETS
The Royal Hotel
74 Best St, Sea Lake, Vic.
T: 03 50701050
SO, YOU WANT A feel-good story? Wanna read something inspiring? Sit your tired arse down and let me tell you about the people and the pub of Sea Lake.
In 2015 the hardware store in the main street of Sea Lake closed its doors pretty much overnight leaving a hole in this small farming town in the Mallee district of western Victoria.
John Clohesy feared this might be the first of a few bad dominoes for the town where his family had farmed since 1901 so he called a public meeting and just over a quarter of the town’s population of 600 fronted.
They decided they weren’t going to be a dwindling village of empty shop fronts and they weren’t going to be a town without a hardware store. And by the time the meeting had finished, sixty-eight locals had offered to stump up enough cash to stop the rot before it started.
Minimum buy-in was $500 and only a few offered this base-line investment. So, they did the legals and created a community co-op, then approached the fellas who owned the building, worked a fair price for the freehold and bought the place.
