The rise of supermarket-owned hotels has meant last drinks for most old-school publicans like Condon in Australia’s cities and bigger towns.

Hospitable hoteliers who’d have a beer and a yarn with the regulars, and maybe pass on a few sly racing tips, have been replaced by uniformed venue managers in the now heavily corporatised and regulated hotel industry.

Condon, who was recently granted life membership of the Queensland Hotels Association, reckons he saw the best of the pub game during his 45 years tapping kegs at establishments across the Gold Coast and interstate.

Running bars at famous Gold Coast watering holes including the Playroom and The Patch, booking bands like INXS, Midnight Oil and Cold Chisel before they made it big and becoming mates with pubs and pokie baron Bruce Mathieson have been among his career highlights.

An electrician by trade, Newcastle-born Condon came to Queensland in the mid-1970s to work at Groote Eylandt in the Gulf of Carpentaria.

“After the Groote Eylandt job, I flew across to Cairns and then drove down to the Gold Coast where a mate of mine was working,” he said.

“I called into Coolangatta and never left.”

Condon landed a job ‘picking up glasses and clearing ashtrays’ at the old Port O Call hotel (now The Sands Hotel) in Coolangatta and later worked at the Coast’s first disco, the Hang Five Bar, in the same establishment.

He then did four seasons managing the Valley Inn at Perisher Ski Resort.

“I’d work down there in the winter and come back up here for summer,” he recalled.

Between ski seasons, Condon ran a bar at the Tallebudgera Playroom, probably the Coast’s most iconic live music venue, for owner Beryl Carnell.

From 1982 until 1986, he ran the Coolangatta Patch for renowned hoteliers Joe and Ron McLaughlin, another of the Coast’s most raucous pubs and live music venues of the era.

“We did the (infamous) dollar drink nights at The Patch and had all the big bands playing there like INXS, Cold Chisel, Midnight Oil and The Angels,” he said.

One of Condon’s favourite memories is booking a band called The Cockroaches for a $200 gig.

“The Cockroaches went on to become The Wiggles and make millions as one of Australia’s most successful bands ever,” he said.

“I got ‘em for 200 bucks before they made it big.”

Then there was Ron McDonald, another licensee of the Queensland Hotel of which The Patch was part.

“Ron used to play cards with the locals – if he lost he’d pay them money but if he won, he’d make them shave off an eyebrow,” Condon remembers with a chuckle.

“Half of the locals were walking around Coolangatta with one eyebrow.

“We also had a manager named Snow Collins who used to tell everyone at closing time: “You don’t have to go home but you can’t f…..n stay here.”

Condon says the arrival of Alan Bond on the Queensland hotel scene in the early-1980s – when the Perth entrepreneur bought XXXX brewer Castlemaine Tooheys for $1.2 billion – ‘changed the whole industry as we know it’.

“Bond wanted the breweries (Castlemaine Tooheys and WA’s Swan Brewery) as cash cows but there were all these hotels that came with the deal,” Condon said.

Mathieson, a rough-and-tumble former toolmaker raised in working class Port Melbourne who bought his first pub in 1975 with his wife Jill (they now live at Mermaid Beach), saw an opportunity and snapped up the 350-plus hotels as part of the Austotel consortium with Bond.

“All the Fourex pubs were on sweetheart deals but Bond’s consortium made them pay proper commercial rent, based on the property value,” Condon recalled.

Condon became licensee of one of Austotel’s flagship properties, the Currumbin Hotel, overlooking Currumbin Creek – a position that saw it dubbed ‘the pub with the million dollar view’.

“Beryl Carnell was one of my referees to get my first liquor licence and she lived next to the pub,” Condon said.

“She told me, “I’ll vouch for you as long as you keep the f …. n noise down. That was quite ironic because Beryl was always in strife with the council because of noise from the Playroom.’

During his decade running the landmark watering hole, Condon saw more seismic changes to the hotel industry, including the introduction of random breath testing in the late 1980s, and then poker machines.

“RBT changed things big-time,” he said.

“People started drinking more at home and bottle shops really came into play. That’s when Woolies and Coles started moving into the industry.

“But my wife Janelle and had 10 memorable years at the Currumbin Hotel, which was a real locals pub famous for its Sunday sessions. We also supported the live music industry in a big way.”

However, the much-loved pub was sold to a Surfers Paradise developer and demolished in 1996 to make way for a block of units. Hundreds packed the pub for a farewell concert featuring legendary Australian rocker Richard Clapton.

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“It was a sad day for the industry and especially for the locals when the bulldozers moved in,” Condon said.

Needing a new gig, the Condons broke new ground by building their own pub, the Up the Creek Tavern, in the Currumbin industrial estate.

It was a shrewd move, the two-level pub becoming a popular after-work watering hole for local tradies. It’s one on-site and three off-site Cellarbrations bottle shops did a roaring trade.

Condon sold the pub last year to Melbourne hoteliers, but retained a small interest.

“Janelle always jokes that I’ve been involved with five pubs and never poured a beer,” he said.

He has served as Gold Coast chairman and secretary-treasurer of the QHA since 1998 and remains close with Mathieson, for whom he has huge admiration.

“Bruce basically single-handedly changed the face of the whole industry,” he said.

“What he’s achieved from humble beginnings has been remarkable.”

Condon gets misty-eyed at the hotel industry’s good old days.

“You’d buy the patrons a drink and have one with them,” he said.

“If they got drunk, you’d take their car keys off them and give them back the next day. It’s all changed. Hotels these days are run by business managers.

“We reckon we had the best days.”