Bush Summit: Nandaly locals rally to buy and run Nandaly “Nanny” Community Hotel
When Nandaly’s pub unexpectedly closed, the tiny community rallied — and through quick thinking and a bold gamble, banded together to save their iconic hotel.
At last count the population of Nandaly in the Mallee region of Victoria was 16, two short of an AFL team.
If you’re travelling through this town-on-a-bend on the bypassed Nyarrin-Nandaly Road and you’re wanting to pick up supplies, or fuel, or post a letter you’d better plan to do it somewhere else as the general store, the servo, the post office and even the school are long gone.
If you’re in need of a beer, however, you’d be in luck because the Nandalay Community Hotel is still in operation – but only thanks to some quick thinking and a bold gamble made by the locals who saved this watering hole from extinction.
Nandaly (pronounced Nan-daily, as in ‘I watch my Nan daily chop the firewood’) first appeared as a small railway town when the line between Sea Lake and Kulwin opened in 1914.
With the release of Soldier-settler blocks after WWI, this crop and grain farming region opened up, the town flourishing with a Progress League, a footy club, a tennis club, two stores, two schools, three churches and a hotel.
But when the town was bypassed, Nandaly gradually fell into decline, and the last commercial operation left standing apart from the local mechanic was the Nandaly Hotel – the Nanny Pub as it’s known – the focal point for the dwindling number of locals who’d gather for a beer or a cold Chardonnay at the end of a long day.
The Nanny Pub had always been the place for the disparate rural community to connect – isolated farmers who’d spend hours alone driving tractors, exhausted bushfire fighters, families living on remote properties getting together, a place where the kids could meet up and play.
It was the beating heart of the town.
However, in 2018 Nandaly’s long-time publican Barry Kennedy unexpectedly died, the pub suddenly closed its doors and the town lost its meeting place.
For six months it lay idle. Every now and then the locals would gather a few beers at the old tennis sheds when the idea arose for the community to band together and buy the hotel.
“Barry would have been here about ten years I guess and he passed away,” remembers local farmer ‘Moo’ Brady, “and we had to deal with the estate and pretty much buy the pub as we only had a short time frame to do it. So we got to work and within two weeks we were the proud owners of the pub you see behind us.”
And so a co-operative was put together and the townsfolk became investors and share-owners of what became the Nandaly Community Hotel, where profits go back into the community.
“Actually it was always a dream of mine,” smiles Ash Roberts, another co-owner of the Nandaly Pub, “so I’m realising a dream which is great.”
“It’s everything to the locals,” says Nandaly Community Hotel manager Tina Phillips, who left Melbourne to take up the challenge in keeping the pub alive.
“To the farmers … it’s like a refuge whether they had a good day or a bad day, they all get together … Without this they wouldn’t be where they are today.”
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Originally published as Bush Summit: Nandaly locals rally to buy and run Nandaly “Nanny” Community Hotel
