6 pubs checked · updated 18 September 2026
The short answer
Oldest claim
Says 1842. No document from that date has been found.
Grade B · Building datedBy claim, the oldest pub in Victoria is the Gordon Hotel in Portland, which opened in 1842 as the Commercial Inn and which the Portland historian Noel Learmonth credited in 1949 with the longest continuously held licence in the state. By evidence it is the Duke of Wellington in Melbourne, licensed to Richard Dalton as announced in The Argus on 30 June 1853, and recognised by the City of Melbourne as the city's oldest pub still trading. Port Fairy's Caledonian Inn makes a rival claim to an 1844 licence for which we found no primary evidence.
Victoria's oldest pubs are not in Melbourne. They are in the two small ports on the far south-west coast, Portland and Port Fairy, which were whaling and sealing stations before Melbourne existed and which were trading with Tasmania in the 1830s. That is why both towns hold licence claims a decade earlier than anything in the capital, and why both are hard to check: the paperwork of a small colonial port is thinner than that of a gold-rush city. Melbourne's pubs, by contrast, can be dated to the day, because their licences were announced in The Argus and the paper has been digitised. The trade-off between the two halves of the state runs all through this list — early claims with local-history sourcing in the west, later claims with newspaper evidence in the centre. Three of the five reach our top grade on that basis, and two of the five have closed and reopened within the last twenty years, which is a useful reminder that continuity is not a historical question but a present one.
The Gordon Hotel is a timber-and-portico hotel in a town that was trading before the Port Phillip settlement began, rebuilt piecemeal between the 1870s and 1928 in pit-sawn Tasmanian timber, and still an unpretentious country pub with a beer garden. Its 1890s publican Oliver Dolphin also photographed Portland life, which is the sort of detail that makes a local claim worth taking seriously even when the licence cannot be produced. The Caledonian Inn on Bank Street is the other half of the coastal argument, now serving Great Ocean Road travellers with trivia nights and motel rooms.
The Duke of Wellington has the documentary win and the least original fabric — a note on the Victorian Heritage Database records the demolition of its 1857 and 1904 sections around 2004. Young and Jackson opened as the Princes Bridge Hotel on 1 July 1861 in a bluestone building of 1853, and has kept Chloe upstairs since 1908. The Mitre Tavern is the one down a laneway, licensed in 1868 and saved from demolition in 1937. All three are on the city list at the oldest pubs in Melbourne, with a route at Melbourne’s oldest pubs. The national list is at the oldest pubs in Australia.
Coastlines: Natural Earth · Pub locations ©OpenStreetMap contributorsNatural Earth · ©OpenStreetMap contributors
OpenFreeMap · © OpenMapTiles · Data © OpenStreetMap contributors
Map tiles unavailable — showing the outline map.
Portland, Victoria
The 1842 is a pub historian's: Time Gents has the house established that year as the Commercial Inn and renamed the Gordon in 1890. The hotel's own website tells it differently, saying the present building was built in 1885, replacing the 1840 Commercial Hotel, and claiming the oldest continuous licence issued in Victoria. In 1949 the Portland historian Noel Learmonth wrote that it held the longest continuously held
Port Fairy, Victoria
The Victorian Heritage Register's report for the house records that the Scottish-born David McLaws entered into a lease for the block at the corner of Bank and James Streets in 1844 and is first recorded as the licensee of the Caledonian Hotel in the same year. The size of the house he held then is not known, and it was built in stages: the interior of the whole attic storey on the James Street elevation remains
Port Fairy, Victoria
The Victorian Heritage Register entry for the house, H0248, does two things worth separating. It dates the fabric: William Middleton executed a lease with James Atkinson for the corner of Campbell and Gipps Streets in September 1845 and apparently began building the inn then, and it was named the Royal Merrijig to tell it apart from an earlier Merrijig Inn that Archibald McNeill had built nearer the Moyne River
Melbourne, Victoria
The Victorian Heritage Register puts the core of the house at 1850, designed by the architect Richard Dalton for the carpenter and businessman Timothy Lane, with additions of 1857 and 1904 and a stripping of the original facade detail in 1969. Lane applied for a licence in 1850 and failed, applied again in 1851 and failed again; the place was run as a boarding house by a Mrs Smith until 1853, when Richard Dalton —
Melbourne, Victoria
The Victorian Heritage Register has the bluestone corner building of 1853 designed as a three-storey residence with a butcher's shop on the ground floor, and records that it opened as a hotel in July 1861 with John T Toohey as licensee. Henry Figsby Young and Thomas Jackson took over the licence in 1875, extended the house with the architect John Flannigan and the builder Henry Wright, and gave it the name it still
Melbourne, Victoria
The Victorian Heritage Register says the building probably dates back to before 1850 but was not established as the Mitre Tavern until 1867, when the first publican was Henry Thompson; the trade press has a publican's licence granted on 3 April 1868 for an existing house in Bank Place, so the two accounts differ by a year and the page carries both. Rate books of the 1870s give the house fourteen to sixteen rooms
The 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.
