Lees Hotel in Ingham — better known for its link to the `Pub with no Beer’ — is on the market

A renowned Queensland regional pub which is part of Australian music history is on the market … and it won’t be running out of beer.

A renown regional Queensland hotel — which claims to be the site of the original “Pub with no Beer” — is on the market with expectations of a wave of interest from local and interstate owner-operators.

The Lees Hotel in the centre of Ingham in North Queensland is being sold as a freehold and going concern through JLL Hotels with a $3.3m price tag.

Made famous by Slim Dusty, the song was first written as a poem — A Pub without Beer — in the original Day Dawn Hotel in Ingham in north Queensland in 1943, by an Irish cane cutter Dan Sheahan, after some American soldiers drank the pub dry the previous night.

The song was later transformed to “A Pub with No Beer” by composer Gordon Parsons, who had spotted the words of “A Pub without Beer” in The North Queensland Register” newspaper.

The Day Dawn Hotel was demolished and rebuilt as The Lees Hotel in 1960 but there has been a cross border battle over the site of the true Pub with no Beer with claims the true site for the song’s birth is the Taylors Arm Hotel in northern NSW.

Regardless, The Lees Hotel, which has a statue of Dan Sheahan on a horse on top of the pub, along with memorabilia and images displayed throughout the pub to mark the iconic story.

Lees Hotel in Ingham which claims it is the site for The Pub with no Beer.

JLL Hotels’ Mark Walsh said the world-renowned Lees Hotel will attract strong interest.

“This hotel is famous not only for this story but also for the QHA award-winning Herbert Valley steakhouse which attracts customers from far and wide, as does the beautifully maintained original 1960 restaurant,” he said.

“Lees Hotel is a proven business in a strong regional town, and the strong interstate attraction to regional Queensland properties should see good interest in this iconic property.”

The Lees Hotel is owned by Ken Dark, who with his business partner Shane Punton Pty Ltd bought the freehold of the pub in 2020.

Tom Sheahan, son of legendary bush poet Dan Sheahan, in The Lees Hotel in 2017. Picture: Lachie Millard

However, circumstances habve changed and they’re teaming up with the owner of the lease to sell the whole lot in one parcel – the first time this had happened in almost five decades.

With colleague Tom Gleeson, Mr Walsh is also selling the freehold and going concerns of the historic Newmarket Hotel, and the Cobb & Co Hotel in St George about 500km west of Brisbane.

Mr Walsh said the hotels were being sold through three different vendors and should attract strong interest.

“If you are a buyer looking for a pub, particularly with gaming and a good quality business they are hard to get in Brisbane, The Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast because the big operators have snapped them up,” he said.