In classic QLD vs NSW fashion, both states claim to be the home of the famous A Pub With No Beer. But who's right? And why is it so confusing?
Slim Dusty's classic drinking anthem, A Pub With No Beer, was recorded in 1957, becoming the biggest-selling record by an Australian at the time, and the first single by an Australian artist to enter the British charts at number three.
But it was actually written by his long-time roadshow companion Gordon Parsons. Sometime in the 1950s, while working the Nambucca Valley, NSW, Parsons heard a yarn about the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Taylors Arm running out of beer after major floods cut off supply lines.
According to his wife, someone handed him a piece of paper with the opening stanza, which he finished and later recorded with Slim about this NSW incident. However, years later, Slim was playing in Ingham, QLD when a group of locals pulled him aside and said their father was the one who originally wrote that opening stanza.
As the ABC recalled a few years ago, a group of US servicemen who were travelling from Brisbane to Port Moresby in 1943 rolled into the Day Dawn Hotel in the early hours, waking up the publican and drinking the pub dry.
Due to heavy rationing during WWII, these stocks weren't replenished straight away, leading Dan Sheahan, a cane farmer who was just visiting his local, to find himself in a pub with no beer.
He put his frustrations to pen, writing a short poem titled A Pub Without Beer, something Slim himself has acknowledged as indisputable, appearing in papers across North Queensland from 1944 onwards, eventually making its way to Taylors Arm in NSW.
So really, they're both The Pub With No Beer, because without the Day Dawn Hotel, you wouldn't have a poem to lyrically inspire the song about the Cosmopolitan Hotel.
And both can still be visited today. The Day Dawn Hotel in QLD is now known as Lees Hotel, famous for their signature steaks, while the Cosmopolitan Hotel has actually changed its name to The Pub With No Beer, becoming something of a pilgrim's stop amongst country music fans and artists.
Whatever the case, this discussion has left us thirsty, so will it be a pub from New South Wales or Queensland that quenches that thirst?
