North Sydney was a fun place to see in the New Year, as Henry Lawson describes in his famous poem
As some readers may still be able to remember New Year’s Eve just past, it is timely to revisit Henry Lawson’s real or imagined revelry on the last night of 1891 or 1892 as recounted in his very funny poem Dind’s Hotel.
The verse was written in 1921 while he was a patient in ward 20 of the Coast Hospital at Little Bay, renamed Prince Henry Hospital in 1934.
The hotel was located at the corner of Fitzroy and Alfred Streets, Milsons Point. It was one of the oldest on the North Shore, dating to as early as 1848 when it was called Dind’s Marine Hotel. Like many other pubs of that time, it was a sprawling single storey building; looking more like a bungalow than a public house.
Lawson began his poem with him in rented accommodation in nearby Campbell Street, waiting for the landlady to return with a leg of pork. At 8.30pm Fred Broomfield, a real-life friend of Lawson’s and another writer from The Bulletin, turned up: ‘… Fred was flush that New Year’s eve and things were more than well / We hurried out of Campbell Street, and round to Dind’s Hotel…’
Slightly inebriated, Lawson and Broomfield head over to Blues Point Road where they encounter two bushmen from the Hawkesbury River flats. The friends agree to look after their horses as the travellers need a beer. The two couples then buy their new-found friends round after round of drinks, taking turns to mind the horses while the other pair swing inside.
Lawson and Broomfield, now drunk, ‘somehow’ end up mounting the steeds: ‘I’d not been on a horse, since I first left my native scene / And to this day I don’t believe that Fred had ever been.’
Two other Hawkesbury horsemen arrive, tether their mounts and enter the hotel for beers. The first pair of riders discover that their horses have been stolen. Lawson and Broomfield take off with the Hawkesbury men in hot pursuit: ‘“Freelances to the front!” cried Fred. “The night has called for deeds! / The Hawkesbury is out for war on other captured steeds!’”
The writers are caught in Neutral Bay but avoid a fight after offering yet another round of beers. The four return to Dind’s Hotel where the other riders join them so that ‘Six horsemen drank the Old Year out and drank the New Year in’.
The poem ends with the hospitalised Lawson thinking back on that adventure and a lifetime of ‘sins’: ‘And if there’s truth in the doctor’s talk – and all the signs are plain – / Then neither Fred nor I shall walk, much less ride out again …’
A second Dind’s Hotel was built around 1900. The first pub that Lawson immortalised was demolished to make way for the Sydney Harbour Bridge around 1926. The poet was not alive to see that. He died of a cerebral haemorrhage in 1922, aged 55. Dind’s Hotel was published in The Bulletin in 1923.
The second hotel, which Lawson no doubt also knew, survived until the late 1930s – it was the last building to be knocked down on Alfred Street beside the new Bridge.
Historical Services, North Sydney Council.
