4 pubs checked · updated 18 September 2026
The short answer
Oldest proof
On record from 1855; the building is dated to about 1855.
Grade A · DocumentedBy claim and by record, the oldest pub in Queensland on this page is the Grand View Hotel at Cleveland on Moreton Bay, which the hotel dates to 1851–52 and the Queensland Heritage Register to about 1852, when it was built as Cleveland House; the register records it trading as the Brighton Hotel by 1862. The best-documented licence belongs to the Nindigully Pub on the Moonie River, where the State Library of Queensland has traced a certificate granted to Thomas Bradford in 1864.
Queensland's contenders are young by British standards and unusually well documented, and in each case the superlative needs a qualifier the pub does not print. The Nindigully Pub is the case to study, because someone did the work properly: the State Library of Queensland went to the Queensland Hotels and Publicans' Index 1843–1900 and to digitised newspapers, found the 1864 certificate, and then kept reading. The house traded as the Traveller's Rest from 1876 and the Sportsman's Arms from 1880, its licence was cancelled in 1903, and the seventeen-room hotel standing on the riverbank today was opened by Mary Ann Haines in April 1911. So neither the pub's claim to original condition nor any claim to unbroken licensing survives contact with its own archive, while the 1864 date itself comes out of it intact. The Farmers Arms at Cabarlah, which claims the state's longest continual licence from 1863, lost its building to fire and rebuilt in 1904. And the Grand View, which has the oldest fabric of the three, began life as a private house. Three pubs, three superlatives: one traced to a certificate, one to a heritage register, and one to a newspaper report and no further.
The Nindigully Pub is the best example on this site of good research cutting both ways. The State Library of Queensland’s work confirmed the 1864 licence that the pub advertises, which is more than most claimants anywhere can manage, and in the same breath dismantled the two adjectives usually attached to it. The shearers’-quarters origin story is repeated in the same account without a citation. The result is a pub whose founding date is documented and whose two adjectives are not, and it remains a genuinely remote place to drink beside a river. The wider Australian version of this argument, where almost every claim turns on the words continuously licensed, is at Australia’s oldest pub: Hope and Anchor, Bush Inn or Woolpack.
The Grand View Hotel sits on the Redlands coast east of Brisbane and has the tidiest documentary trail of the three: Cleveland House about 1852, the Brighton Hotel by 1862, the Grand View by about 1910, with the heritage register carrying the dates. It is also the reminder that the oldest building and the oldest pub are rarely the same thing, since nobody was buying drink in it at the start. The Farmers Arms Tavern at Cabarlah, north of Toowoomba, is the roadside version — a site that has served as house, store and lock-up as well as pub, rebuilt in 1904 after a fire. For the national comparison see the oldest pubs in Australia, for the coaching trade Nindigully once served, coaching inns, and for how we grade these claims, the methodology.
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Cleveland, Queensland
The Queensland Heritage Register's entry, number 600771, sets out the chain. Francis Edward Bigge, a grazier from Mt Brisbane Station and one of the men pressing for Cleveland Point to be made the port for Moreton Bay, bought the site in August 1851. The earliest section appears to have been up by 1852 and then to have stood empty for several years: it was a dwelling, not an inn, and the town knew it as Bigge's
Brisbane, Queensland
This one rests on a licence. Brisbane City Council's heritage citation, written in January 2008 for a listing that took effect on 1 January 2009, records that Michael Costello applied in August 1855 for a publican's licence for the Prince of Wales Hotel and that it was granted on 4 September 1855, and quotes his first advertisement in the Moreton Bay Courier offering a large and conveniently arranged house for
Cabarlah, Queensland
The ABC (2022) reports its claim to be Queensland's longest continually licensed pub, licensed in 1863. An earlier building burned down and was replaced in 1904. The licence has not been checked against records. Its own site showed current opening hours when we checked in September 2026.
Nindigully, Queensland
The State Library of Queensland, using the Queensland Hotels and Publicans' Index 1843-1900 and Trove newspapers, records a certificate granted to Thomas Bradford in 1864 for the Nindigully Hotel: a publican's licence at the claimed date. The shearers'-quarters origin is repeated there without a citation. The house traded as the Traveller's Rest from 1876 and the Sportsman's Arms from 1880, its licence was cancelled
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