IT’S history you can see and touch. But, if you half close your eyes and listen closely, it’s also history you can hear.
If you stand on the intersection of Auburn Road and Victoria Road in Auburn Village and look over at the imposing Italianate pub that stands grandly on the corner, you can almost hear the sounds that once came from the Auburn Hotel echoing down the years.
The first sounds could be the clip-clop of horses’ hooves on Auburn Road in the early 1890s, making their way past the 40 or so shops which by then had opened between Burwood Road and Victoria Street forming Auburn Village, trotting past this magnificent new hotel, built just a few years earlier in 1888.
Auburn Village was bustling by then. In 1885 the first cable tram in Victoria was operating along Flinders Street to Richmond in 1885. Within five years, trams were ferrying people between the city and inner suburbs along 65 kilometres of tram tracks.
The city to Hawthorn railway was extended to Camberwell in 1882. The Glenferrie, The Auburn and The Palace Hotels were built to take advantage of the traffic, says local amateur historian John Torpey, who is writing a book for the Hawthorn Historical Society about Hawthorn’s pubs over the past 150 years.
John says Auburn Road would have been a reasonably busy thoroughfare even back then. “The horses would have pulled a gig, a light two-wheeled cart, taking merchants along Auburn Road into town,” John says. “Or the horses may have been pulling drays loaded with timber or grain, possibly transporting it to Murphy Brothers Grain Store on the corner of Auburn and Burwood Road.”
The Auburn was built at a time when Melbourne had developed an international reputation as one of the greatest cities in the world, dubbed ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ by British journalist George Augustus Sala when he visited in 1885. The city demonstrated its pride and status with magnificent, lavishly decorated banks, hotels and coffee palaces. The Auburn, designed by architect M. Woolf, was one of those statements of huge civic pride.
Melbourne glittered and grew. As the Melbourne Museum has noted: “The city’s facilities simply couldn’t cope with the rapid rise in population. Visitors to Melbourne in the 1880s were amazed. Here in the Southern Hemisphere was a city larger than most European capitals. In just a decade the population had doubled, racing to half a million. Citizens strutted the streets, bursting with pride as their city boomed.”
Let’s go forward a few years. Maybe it’s another echo you can hear – joyful laughter by groups of people leaving the Auburn 60 years later in 1952 when it was managed by the legendary Essendon footballer John Coleman. A youthful prodigy who kicked 12 goals in his first game and 537 goals in just 98 games, Coleman retired at just 25, succumbing to a knee injury. The Coleman Medal, awarded each year to the player who kicks the most goals in the AFL, is named in his honour. Named the second-best Essendon player in the club’s history (after Dick Reynolds), it is hard to overstate the slender, humble footballing phenomenon’s fame in the Melbourne of the 1950s.
After he retired in 1955, Coleman went into managing pubs and looked after the Auburn Hotel for several years in the early 1950s.
The man who brought Coleman to the Auburn was the hotel’s licensee Ted Rippon – also a former Essendon and St Kilda footballer and one-time footballer commentator. Having John Coleman running the pub and Ted Rippon as the licensee naturally conferred glamor onto an already popular pub, at a time when football was one of Melburnian’s main weekend recreations, when players were gods and – before the arrival of television to Melbourne – pubs played an even more critical role as local meeting spots.
Coleman and Rippon’s involvement meant having a drink at the Auburn, already a popular pastime, had even a little more sparkle. The Auburn was well-known for attracting football fans living in the area. The pair’s involvement gave the pub a strong sporting feel. Wine barrels in the courtyard – used as tables – were painted in the colours of every League team.
The Auburn Hotel has been a much-loved local landmark for 135 years, then and now the grandest building in Auburn Village. It still dominates the village in size, historical significance and the affection of locals who feel a strong connection to it.
But it is not alone in historical significance. The village itself is a fascinating piece of Hawthorn history. It is, according to a study called Auburn Village Heritage Study Volume One – written for Boroondara Council in 2005 – “a remarkable collection of often elaborate and richly ornamented late Victorian shop rows that are complemented by a number of landmark buildings including the Auburn Hotel, Auburn Railway Station and the three-storey shop rows on the west side of the street.”
Auburn Village, one of three major centres in Hawthorn – the others were Glenferrie Road and Burke Road – saw significant growth in the boom times of the 1880s. According to the heritage study, among the 40 shops on Auburn Road between Burwood Road and Victoria Street the late 19th and early 20th century were an ironmonger, a boot maker, a fishmonger, a tailor, a fruiterer, an undertaker and a piano tuner.
These businesses came and went, and were especially impacted when hard economic times hit in the 1890s and later during the Depression of the 1930s.
But always the Auburn remained, as solid and permanent as its imposing façade.
Now let’s move forward to the 1980s – that sound you’re hearing might be a crowd at the Geebung Polo Club, as The Auburn was known for 28 years. The Auburn became the Geebung Polo Club in 1987 and remained that for 28 years until 2015 when it reverted to its original name.
There are many echoes from those Geebung days. Maybe it’s the music in the band room – now the wine room – on a Sunday afternoon in the early 2000s, at a time when the “Sunday session” was beginning to be a Melbourne weekend institution, with the Auburn’s Sunday session a popular event for years. At its peak there was a line of people at 4pm on a Sunday which stretched from the front door in Auburn Road around the corner into Victoria Road.
The wine room was, in the Geebung Polo Club days, a room where bands played on a big stage with a solid sound system. A covers band called Adam 12 had a nine-year residency at the pub, from 2004 to 2013. Kristin Holland was the band’s lead singer and bass guitarist. He remembers legendary “hot and sweaty” Sunday sessions at the then Geebung. “During the peak was madness,” he says. “We had to load in through a window on the side of the building because there was no way we could get through the crowd to get to the stage,” he says.
“I remember standing on a raised platform singing to a room that was wall-to-wall, sweaty, excited people singing every word along with you. The windows would be running with moisture from the sweat and the heat from all the bodies in the room.”
Kristin still maintains this 20-year relationship with the Auburn, still playing there, now in a duo called Adam 2 with bandmate Andrew Gatenby.
“I’m happy that the venue still has live music, albeit in a gentler kind of way.”
Today there are new sounds coming from the Auburn. Maybe those sounds are people enjoying a meal and a bottle of wine either in the dining room or the beer garden, whether it’s a Parma and pint on a Wednesday night, a roast on a Sunday or Trivia Night on a Tuesday. As the sign outside on Victoria Street says: “There’s always something happening.”
As manager of the Auburn Hotel, Andy O’Brien is across all of those happenings. Indeed, he has influenced the interior decoration of the pub in crucial ways. He tells a story about the row of framed cartoons on the wall celebrating Hawthorn Football Club’s 13 premierships, some drawn by the legendary cartoonist Bill ‘Weg” Green and after Green’s death in 2008, drawn by Mark Knight. Celebrating the Hawks in one of Hawthorn’s most beloved pubs naturally makes sense. So why are there posters celebrating the Western Bulldogs and Richmond’s wins? “I was running the pub when Richmond won the flag in 2017 and I am a Tigers supporter,” Andy says. “They came from seventh to win the flag.”
The win broke a 37-year drought, so it’s perhaps fitting that a pub which has, over the years, had a strong sporting connection, should celebrate this achievement.
And the Bulldogs? “A local made a bet and said ‘If they win the flag I am going to bring the poster down for you to put up,” Andy explains. “On the Monday morning after they won he was sitting there holding the framed poster. So up on the wall it went.”
It’s not the only football tradition at the Auburn. If Hawthorn are in the finals, the Australian flag on the hotel’s flagpole is temporarily replaced by the Hawks flag.
If you stand on Auburn Road and look up at the hotel, you can see the top floor where the publican once lived and the present-day function rooms which once served as accommodation. Walk inside and you see the impressive, grand staircase which leads up to the second and third floors. There’s the front bar with its historic circular bar, where local man Tex was a regular.
Tex, who sadly died in early 2023, organised raffles and meat tray prizes, ran the footy tipping competition, got a birthday card signed. Every pub needs someone like Tex. “You weren’t a local if Tex didn’t know your name,” says Andy. “He was happy-go-lucky, would always find a positive. If there was a flood Tex was the one lifting up the chairs and putting them on the bar.”
The hotel did indeed have brushes with flooding, in 2014 and 2016. The Auburn sits at the lowest point from several directions so when there’s a downpour water has found its way through the beer garden and through the front bar. Once garden tools washed out of a local’s shed and through the pub. The neighbour came in to ask at The Auburn whether anyone had seen his garden tools. They were duly returned, a little damp.
The band room became the wine room in 2014, the year before the hotel’s name change. This pointed to the shifts in demographic in the local area. The Auburn’s story is one that reflects the social changes around it, and Hawthorn and surrounds were changing. Eating and drinking habits were changing too. In the Geebung Polo Club days, the culture was more around a drink than a meal, and there were more 25-40 year-olds dropping in for a beer than families bringing the kids in for an early dinner.
Now, with many young families having moved into the area and a shift towards expectation of good food at pubs, The Auburn – still a favourite to enjoy a drink – has its focus increasingly on food. The menu sits between casual and fine dining and offering excellent wines. The mantra is good food in a casual and welcoming environment, with a particular lens on Victorian wines and produce. On the menu you’ll see ‘Drink Victorian’ highlighting any Victorian-made beverages on offer. At the Auburn, among the highlighted wines are Oakridge, Penfolds, Scotchmann’s Hill, St Hubert’s, Hare & Tortoise and Alkimi.
Kids are also catered for with petting zoos and face painting on offer. On Sunday mornings.
There are more changes happening. Adjacent to the beer garden The Auburn is building an indoor/outdoor al fresco dining area which will include a pizza oven, outdoor kid’s playground and seating for 200 people.
The Auburn is for everyone, young and older, local and visitor. It remains a welcoming place to gather and enjoy fine food, wine, music and company.
In a world of change, stepping into the Auburn Hotel feels like brushing up against our story. Through the ups and downs of Melbourne – and Hawthorn – the Auburn has survived and thrived, and as it now moves into a new chapter of its 135-year life, it is ready to create new stories.
But, if you listen carefully, the old ones are never far away.
