28 pubs checked · updated 18 September 2026
The short answer
Oldest proof
On record from 1815; the building is dated to about 1815.
Grade A · DocumentedBy claim, the oldest pub in Australia is the Woolpack Hotel in Parramatta, said to hold one of the first ten publican's licences issued in the colony, in 1796; the trade later moved across George Street into an 1890s building, and the industry site PubTIC reports that the provenance of the claim cannot be confirmed. By evidence it is the Macquarie Arms Hotel at Windsor in New South Wales, built at Governor Macquarie's direction and opened on 31 July 1815 — although even that house spent decades as an officers' mess and a private residence before it was relicensed in 1874.
Australia's oldest-pub argument runs the opposite way to England's. The dates are rarely in doubt, because colonial governments printed publicans' licences in their gazettes and the newspapers that recorded an opening night are now digitised and searchable. What is in doubt is the word "oldest". Almost every Australian claim turns on a qualifier: continuously licensed, continuously trading, still in its original building, still on its original site. The pub-history site Time Gents has taken several famous claims apart on exactly those grounds, finding that the Surveyor General at Berrima lost its licence for three and a half months in 1895, that the Bush Inn at New Norfolk was a private residence in the 1870s, and that Nindigully surrendered its licence in 1904. Add the brewery rebuilding programmes of the 1920s, which gave Sydney a set of handsome hotels standing on very old licences, and you have a country where the paperwork is often older than the plaster.
Sorting the Australian contenders is mostly a matter of asking what each one is measuring. Oldest licence: the Woolpack says 1796, though sources disagree even on which governor granted it. Oldest surviving hotel building: the Macquarie Arms of 1815, with its cedar staircase and stone-flagged cellars. Oldest continuous trade in original fabric: the Lord Nelson, licensed in the early 1840s in a house of about 1836, restored in the 1980s with the help of a photograph taken in 1852. Oldest licence still attached to a trading business: the Central Hotel in Hobart, granted to Thomas Richardson on 3 October 1818 as the New Inn — although the original corner building was demolished in 1882 and the business shifted next door into its own billiard room.
The longest-running rivalry in Australian pub history is between the Hope and Anchor in Hobart and the Bush Inn at New Norfolk, and it is a friendly one. The Bush Inn was begun about 1815 and finished in April 1825, with Ann Bridger granted its first spirits licence later that year; it received the first trunk telephone call made in Australia in 1888 and Dame Nellie Melba sang there in 1924. We set the two side by side in Australia’s oldest pub: Hope and Anchor, Bush Inn or Woolpack. State lists for Tasmania, New South Wales and Victoria go further, and there is a walking route through the oldest pubs of The Rocks.
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Parramatta, New South Wales
The hotel says on its own front page that it was founded and licensed in 1796, and it is often counted among the first ten houses licensed in the colony. The sources do not agree on who granted it, crediting Hunter or Phillip, who had left the colony in 1792, and the trade press reports that the provenance cannot be confirmed. The business was rebuilt across George Street in the 1890s under a different name, so
Hobart, Tasmania
Robert Knopwood's diary for 25 July 1807 records Hopkins opening a public house at the Sign of the Whale Fishery, and the ABC has reported doubt about whether that house stood on this site. The premises went on the Tasmanian Heritage Register in 1998, on the strength of their archaeological importance. The trade has not been unbroken: the pub was closed to the public from 2008 to 2014, and earlier in the 1980s, with
Windsor, New South Wales
The State Heritage Register quotes the notice that opened the house: a large and commodious building lately completed at considerable expense in the town of Windsor for an inn, called the Macquarie Arms and kept by Thomas Ranson, 'who formerly was an Innkeeper in England', to open for the public on Monday 31 July 1815. Hawkesbury People & Places, a local history site for the district, cites the same notice from the
New Norfolk, Tasmania
Building began about 1815 and the house was finished in 1825, with the first licence granted to Ann Bridger, a widow who had arrived in Hobart two years earlier. The Derwent Valley Gazette, marking the inn's two hundredth year in October 2025, dates that licence precisely to 29 September 1825 and names Belinda Smith as the licensee now, after the lease changed hands in April 2023 when the twins Peter and Don Smith
Hobart, Tasmania
A licence was granted to Thomas L. Richardson on 3 October 1818 for the New Inn, known as the Ship Inn by 1821. That date rests on one pub historian's reading of the Hobart records; we have not seen the licence itself. The Tasmanian Heritage Register lists 73 Collins Street as the Ship Hotel and reads the standing building as an Old Colonial Georgian public house behind a Federation front of about 1900. The two
Sydney, New South Wales
The State Heritage Register has the emancipist Samuel Terry building a terrace of three on this site, completed in the mid to late 1820s and constructed as a public house known as the Fortune of War; its footprint appears in Robert Russell's survey of 1834, and the register places that terrace at today's 139-143 George Street. The first recorded licensee was John Boreham in 1830, for the sale of wines, malt and
Berrima, New South Wales
The inn says it was built in 1834 for James Harper and licensed a year later, of local sandstone and rendered sand stock brick under a shingle roof, raised with convict labour in the new village of Berrima where Thomas Mitchell's new southern road crossed the Wingecarribee. The licence went to Harper on 29 June 1835. Its claim to be Australia's oldest continuously licensed inn is technically broken: the trade press
Albany, Western Australia
Two accounts of this corner of York Street are in print and they do not agree, which is the whole of the reason for the grade. The claim, as the Albany Advertiser and the agents selling the freehold put it, is that the site holds Western Australia's first liquor licence of 1836, and the ABC quoted the researcher Suzanne Thompson in 2022 saying the original building was licensed around 1836, became the Horse and
Adelaide, South Australia
The hotel makes the claim itself, in the line across its website: good company since 1837. The City of Adelaide heritage sheet supports it and sharpens it, recording South Australia's first publican's licence issued for the site on 31 May 1837, for Guthrie's Hotel, renamed the Edinburgh Castle Inn in 1839. The current building is an 1878-79 rebuild. The pub closed in September 2018 and reopened in December 2023, so
Hahndorf, South Australia
The 1839 date — "Hahndorf's meeting place since 1839" — comes from the hotel's own material. South Australia's heritage register confirms the German Arms Hotel at 67–69 Mount Barker Road as a State Heritage Place from November 1986 but records no construction date. The register also lists a separate State Heritage Place at 84 Mount Barker Road as the former German Arms and the former Jaensch senior house, so the
Guildford, Western Australia
Western Australia's heritage record for the place says Thomas Jecks moved to Guildford in 1839 to open a general store and in 1841 extended the business to include an inn he named the Rose and Crown, its buildings grouped in a U set back from the street and used as a public meeting place, for the Town Trust and for the court, in the absence of a public hall. Its description of the fabric puts most of what stands
Canberra, Australian Capital Territory
The 1857 is the date the travel press and Wikipedia give for the slab hut Joseph Shumack built, not for an inn: Australian Traveller has it beginning as a home for Irish immigrants in 1857 and becoming a coach stop serving beer and food by 1876, which is when it was licensed. It then passed to the Read family as a private home, The Pines, from 1887 until the Commonwealth bought it in 1974 and restored it as an inn
Australia has 28 old pubs on this site, and every one of them sits in one of the areas below. This page is the comparison; each area page carries its own full list, in the same order and graded the same way.
Oldest claimWoolpack Hotel, 1796
Oldest recordMacquarie Arms Hotel, on record from 1815
All 7 in New South WalesOldest claimHope and Anchor Tavern, 1807
Oldest recordHope and Anchor Tavern, on record from 1807
All 6 in TasmaniaOldest claimGordon Hotel, 1842
Oldest recordCaledonian Inn, on record from 1844
All 6 in VictoriaOldest claimHope and Anchor Tavern, 1807
Oldest recordHope and Anchor Tavern, on record from 1807
All 5 in HobartOldest claimGrand View Hotel, 1851
Oldest recordVictory Hotel, on record from 1855
All 4 in QueenslandOldest claimDuke of Wellington Hotel, 1853
Oldest recordDuke of Wellington Hotel, on record from 1853
All 3 in MelbourneOldest claimFortune of War Hotel, 1828
Oldest recordFortune of War Hotel, on record from 1830
All 3 in SydneyThe photographs above are other people's work, used under open licences, or in the public domain. Every photographer, licence and source page is named in the image credits. A pub with no licensed photograph shows an illustrated façade instead.
