IF you’re old enough to remember ’80s TV show Cheers and its theme song, Where Everybody Knows Your Name, you’ll understand the nature of the front bar at Gordonvale’s Great Northern Hotel.

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The bar which fronts the little sugar town’s main street is a micro-community where everybody knows each other and probably their missus, kids and old man who used to drink there.

On a Thursday after knock-off at the Gordonvale Sugar Mill, the pub is full and nobody is a stranger.

Mill workers drink alongside cane farmers and truck drivers, fishermen swap yarns and a couple of young fellas play pool and rule the selections on the jukebox.

There’s Barry Ehrke, who is called Sir Barry because of the OAM he earned a few years ago for his work in the fishing industry, chatting to Syd Stevens, a bin-tipper at the mill for the past 33 seasons, who has been drinking at the pub “all my life”.

At the pool table is Contacts, … so-called “because I know all the people and they know me”.  He claims the pub as his local even though he lives 30 minutes’ drive away.

“We all come here because it’s the nearest pub to home and we get good service here … and the people who run it are not racist,” he says.

Contacts’ father knew the hotel’s late owner, Bill Dawson, a professional fisherman who built a beach shack at Bessie Point and was well respected by the local Giangurra mob.

The people subsequently claimed his pub as their own and Bill’s son, Brett, has continued the relationship over his 17 years at the helm.

“We’ve carried that on … I don’t care if you’re black, white or brindle, you’re welcome here,” says Brett, who used to have a butcher’s shop next door before turning publican when his dad died.

“Instead of serving the wives, I serve the husbands now … and some of the wives too and their kids who have grown up,” he said.

Under Brett’s helm, there have been a few changes, including poker machines and an early-opening drive-through bottleshop, popular with fishermen and water-skiers wanting to stock up on ice and beer before heading out of town.

“We’ve got an hour’s jump on the other pubs because we open at 9am … We sell more between 9am and 10am than between 9pm and 10pm,” he said.

Not so popular has been Brett’s decision to close the kitchen.

Truckie Dennis Nichol remembers great meals in the old dining room and Christmas parties 60 years ago with hundreds of people.

“There’s a few old blokes left from that time but a lot have passed on, Dennis said. “That’s how life goes.”

Brett also closed off the upstairs accommodation. For an old timber pub believed to have been built over a century ago, the fire hazard was just too great. He remembers taking the last boarder, a 97-year-old gentleman, to his new lodgings at a nearby retirement home and settling him in, only to have him walk back to the pub to ask for his old room back.

“He did that a few times. He didn’t want to move,” Brett says.

Not much is known about the pub’s early history, apart from a 1927 photo taken when its roof blew off in a cyclone. But Brett says there is no doubt it has always been a working man’s pub – “the mill is only 500 yards away”.

Gordonvale once boasted seven pubs but there are now only four, although Brett says that is probably still two too many.

“A lot of the patrons pub-hop when the raffles are on … it’s hard getting enough bums on seats sometimes,” he said.
Brett’s niece, Tegan Kidner, a law student who “funds her life” by working behind the bar, says the customers make her work fun.

“None of them was ever really friends before but they’ve all become friends since, drinking together,” she said.

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