The Pubs of the Pacific Highway: Past, Present and Forgotten

Tracing the history of Ku-ring-gai’s highway hotels, from sly grog shanties to enduring local icons.

The Pubs of the Pacific Highway: Past, Present and Forgotten

Walk the Pacific Highway today and you will see leafy streets, schools, and cafes—but for most of the nineteenth century this whole ridge-and-valley country was not referred to as Ku-ring-gai at all. Locals simply called it Lane Cove, and official papers referred to the Parish of Gordon. Convict timber cutters were here by 1805, felling the great blue gums, blackbutts, ironbarks and prized turpentines. Logs were dragged to Fiddens Wharf on the Lane Cove River, punted downstream, and turned into the wharves and warehouses of Sydney. From the 1820s Crown grants carved big estates out of the bush; by mid-century, as the ridges opened to sun, those estates broke into orchards and dairies. Lane Cove oranges and apples made the area famous—hard, repetitive work that created a thirst. And where there’s a thirst, there’s a pub.

“Sly grog” and the thirst of a colony

Early New South Wales was a spirits-drinking society. In the 1830s the colony averaged 3.6 litres of pure alcohol per person, per year. Licensed hotels were scarce—about 210 across all NSW in 1830, contrast with 1880 the number had exploded to 3,829. In the gaps, unlicensed “sly-grog” shops flourished, and up this way there was an extra twist: the river.

Contemporary reports spoke of illegal stills hidden along quiet reaches of the Lane Cove, with product rowed to town by night. In February 1845, Captain Watson seized an active still in a remote pocket of the Parish of Gordon.

Against that backdrop, it’s no surprise that the first local “pubs” were rough huts that doubled as grog shanties, then stepped–sometimes reluctantly–into the licensed world. Those early inns weren’t just taprooms; they were stables, paddocks, orchards, trading posts and newsrooms for a district where the track north was long and the neighbours few.

Killara’s stalwart: from timber hut to the Greengate Hotel

Local lore has it that a timber hut at today’s Killara traded sly grog as early as the 1810s. In 1832 it emerged into respectability when John Johnson obtained a licence and hung out the sign of The Green Gate Inn on old Lane Cove Road (the future Pacific Highway). Set on a productive Green Gate Estate with orchard and livestock, the inn serviced bullockies, timbermen and, increasingly, orchardists and travellers bound north.

Johnson sold in 1836, and after several hands the place was bought in 1853 by Thomas Waterhouse, great-great grandfather of bookmaker Robbie Waterhouse.  Waterhouse and his sons were natural sportsmen and enthusiastic publicans. Under them, the Green Gate became synonymous with agrarian pastimes and frontier passions: drinking and dealing, racing and breeding, trading and fighting. It hosted matches and musters and, in a district proud of its horses, it was a social hub. The Waterhouse era ran until Thomas’s son John died in 1903; the estate was finally sold in 1906.

The original inn, patched and extended over the decades, came down in 1942. In 1943 a handsome new building opened as The Killara Greengate Hotel, the spelling tidied, the reputation intact. With a licence dating to 1832, the Greengate ranks among Australia’s longest-licensed hotels—a living through-line from bullock track to commuter belt.

A short-lived rival at Killara: Sawyers Arms / Grey Horse Inn

After selling the Green Gate, John Johnson didn’t stray far. He opened the Sawyers Arms Inn a little down the road, near today’s Pacific Highway and Stanhope Road. In 1841 he sold to Owen McMahon, who renamed it the Grey Horse Inn in honour of his favourite racer. The Grey Horse flickered only briefly; records suggest it closed by 1844 and the site is now part of the garden of a grand house. But it planted a seed: the McMahon name would soon loom large up the road at Pymble.

Pymble’s roadside houses of call: New Inn to Travellers’ Rest

In 1842 Johnson reappeared again, this time on land that corresponds to 859 Pacific Highway, Pymble, near the junction with Ryde Road. He called his new venture the New Inn. In 1845 he sold to Owen McMahon, who rechristened it the Travellers’ Home Inn, then the Travellers’ Rest Hotel.

From the 1850s, a spirited rivalry brewed between the McMahons at the Travellers’ Rest and the Waterhouses at the Green Gate Inn—two dynasties, a few miles apart, each staking a claim to custom, sport and local influence. The Travellers’ Rest remained in McMahon hands until 1899, when Tooheys purchased it. Under brewery ownership it was known for a time as the Lane Cove Hotel (the highway was still “Lane Cove Road”). By 1913, the license had been cancelled, the next year the building was on the market as having 12 rooms, kitchen, cellar, verandahs, and balcony; suitable for boarding house or school. 

Happily, the building endures. Look closely at 859 Pacific Highway and you will still find the bones of the nineteenth-century hotel behind later shopfronts.

Pymble’s other early houses: the Orange Tree and the Gardeners’ Arms

Licensing records hint that William Pymble opened an Orange Tree Inn in 1846, almost certainly along Lane Cove Road and aptly named for the orange groves that once quilted these hillsides. Its life on paper is brief with just the one year is recorded. 

More firmly anchored in memory is Richard Porter’s weatherboard Gardeners’ Arms Hotel, licensed in 1864 on Pymble Hill beside the district’s first Roman Catholic church. This cluster of church, pub and a scattering of shops became the early commercial centre at the top of the hill (near today’s Pacific Highway and Bannockburn Road). It was re-built prior to 1890 and in 1898 renamed to the Pymble Hotel.

Then the railway arrived. Because the station could only sit at the foot of the hill, commerce slowly gravitated downhill. Sensing the future, John Toohey of Tooheys Brewery bought the Pymble Hotel, secured land closer to the station, and in the late 1930s opened a fresh two-storey Art Deco Pymble Hotel. The old hilltop house was demolished (between Grandview and the church), but the Pymble Hotel survives today still pouring drinks and offering rooms to travellers, just as its predecessors did up on the ridge.

Why these pubs mattered—and still do

These were not just places to wet a whistle. In a landscape that shifted from bush camp to sawyers’ village to orchard belt to suburb, the pubs anchored community life. 

Today, the Greengate Hotel and Pymble Hotel carry those threads forward—two modern venues with deep roots. Next time you pass, pause a moment. Beneath the paint and glass lies a story that begins with timber huts and sly grog, winds through orchards and race meetings, and ends—so far—on a Friday night as locals swap news over a beer, just as their predecessors did, two centuries ago.

By Elliot Lindsay