Gibson family bids a fond farewell to Cairns with sale of iconic Bungalow Hotel

It was an old and abandoned watering hole which 11 years ago was “probably one of the worst hotels in Cairns”. After more than a decade of hard work, the Gibson family is moving on to their next project.

ONE of Stewart Gibson’s earliest memories is of living upstairs in the Brunswick Hotel in Rockhampton, being babysat by one of the bar flies from the front bar when his parents had to duck off to deal with an issue.

Even then, somewhere in the back of his mind, he always knew he was going to become a publican, like his dad David before him and his grandfather Stewart before him.

And so when they arrived in Cairns after buying the Bungalow Hotel, his dad pulled him aside on their first day at what was then an old, run-down pub and said: “Are you sure you wanna do this? Because there’s no turning back after this”.

“That was 11 years ago,” Stewart said on Sunday, the family’s final day of ownership of what is now a modern, thriving hotel.

Making the move to Cairns from Brisbane more than a decade ago, Stewart recalled the pub being “in a pretty bad disrepair”.

“It was very ordinary when we took over. A lot of work had to be done but we could see it had a lot of potential,” he said.

“It would have been probably a 40 to 50-year-old hotel. When it was built it was probably the best hotel in Cairns and then over the years went to one of the worst hotels in Cairns.

“And we … slowly traded it back up, and spent quite a bit of and got it to where it is today.”

During their stewardship, the Gibsons have been heavily involved in sports and community fundraisers.

Whenever anyone came asking for help, the family was always ready to lend a hand.

But now, with the sale of the pub to the Irvin Hotel Group, it’s time to move on to a new project – the Walloon Hotel outside Ipswich.

The one thing Stewart won’t miss about Cairns is the heat, but moving on is always bittersweet.

“I think the hardest thing is just all your friends and people that have become like family that you’re moving away from. It’s always the hardest thing about what we do,” he said.

Originally published as Gibson family bids a fond farewell to Cairns with sale of iconic Bungalow Hotel