The Golden Pheasant Inn, Hackham

William Holly stepped off the Apolline at Port Adelaide in October 1840 knowing something of rough country: he came from Netherhampton in Wiltshire, a small village at the edge of Salisbury Plain, and had farmed there all his adult life. Within a year of his arrival he had purchased land in the Hundred of Noarlunga and raised a hotel on the Main South Road at Hackham — gum wood for the rafters, cedar for the fittings inside — that would stand for nearly a hundred and thirty years.

The Golden Pheasant was one of the earliest licensed houses in the district. The building was unpretentious but sound. A blacksmith's shop adjoined it on the south side. At the back, a wine press was kept busy through vintage: settlers from the surrounding farms brought their grapes down to Hackham in great baskets to be crushed and fermented on the premises. An old ledger belonging to one of the inn's keepers records beer and home-made wine sold at two shillings a gallon, farm labourers served with beer at lunch, and a gallon of wine issued to working men before they set out for home at night.

The inn's best trade in its early years came from the sea. Port Noarlunga, a few miles to the west, was the site of a bay whaling station, and the men who worked it made their way up the road when the day's labour was done. Residents later recalled that the merrymaking at the Golden Pheasant lasted far into the night:

The beer went round by the barrel and wine flowed like water, until even the hardened drinkers were forced to call a halt.

— Mail (Adelaide), 20 July 1929.

The Main South Road brought a different kind of custom as well: a coach service ran south from Adelaide through Morphett Vale and on to Willunga, and Hackham sat squarely on the route.

The inn served as the settlement's principal public gathering place. When R.B. Colley auctioned allotments in the new township of Hackham in January 1856, he held the sale at the Golden Pheasant, displayed the plans of the property on the premises, and put lunch on for prospective buyers. In 1866 the inn hosted a farewell gathering for Edmund Humphries in March and, in September, the annual dinner of the Hackham and Noarlunga District ploughing match, with forty or fifty gentlemen sitting down together. Inquests, too, were held at the Golden Pheasant when circumstances required. In January 1869 a jury convened there over the death of William Brady, a man found on the road at Castle Hill after falling from his horse in the early hours of a January night. One of the witnesses who discovered him had ridden Brady's horse down to the inn and knocked twice at the window to raise the alarm, but could get no answer; he tied the horse to a post and went home. Brady was found dead the following morning. The jury returned a verdict of accidental death, but added a rider criticising the two witnesses for being "lacking in humanity, and guilty of great neglect, in not attending to the deceased when in the state in which they found him."

Holly did not hold the licence without interruption. Through the 1850s the inn passed through several hands before Thomas Dungey took it on in 1858 and held it for three years, leaving in 1861 to take over the Horseshoe Inn at Noarlunga. Holly came back in 1862, but that same year a newspaper source reported the hotel had been forced to close — receipts for one quarter had fallen to only £20 — and the building let to George Yates, the former sea captain known around the district as Captain Yates. If the closure happened it was brief: licensing records show Holly back in possession almost immediately. The licence passed again to Michael Sheehan in 1865, and in 1868 to a Thomas Yates, whose application was adjourned after a court judgment left the house temporarily unable to trade. Holly returned for his final tenure in 1870 and was still behind the bar when, in January 1873, an inquest into the sudden death of John Ockleford — recently back from service with a Northern Territory telegraph party — was held at the inn. Holly gave evidence that the deceased had appeared sober in the days before his death.

In December 1873 Holly advertised the inn and the adjoining blacksmith's shop to let at a low rent, and put his remaining contents to auction the following January — the furniture, the stock, a buggy and a horse. He was making ready to return to England. He died in Southampton in 1884, having never come back.

A reporter writing in the Mail in July 1929 found the building still standing beside the South Road, and noted admiringly that the early workmanship had kept it sound for close to ninety years:

Typefying the thorough workmanship of the early pioneers, one of the first hotels to be erected in the country is still standing in the fast disappearing town of Hackham on the road to Victor Harbour.

— Mail (Adelaide), 20 July 1929.

The bar fittings had long since been removed to the nearby homestead of Edward Holly, a descendant of the builder. The inn itself was demolished around 1970. Two years later, when Len Moore established a Pioneer Village on South Road modelled on the pioneer structures of the 1860s and 1870s, a replica of the Golden Pheasant was among the buildings constructed there.

Sources

• David J. Towler, A Fortunate Locality: A History of Noarlunga and District (1986), pp. 86–88 — account of the Golden Pheasant's construction, trade, and closure, incorporating the Mail (Adelaide), 20 July 1929
• Max Cowell, The History of the Noarlunga District (1972), pp. 36–37 — full licensee register from government records, 1850–1873; pen-and-ink illustration of the inn
• Noarlunga Heritage Study (Lester Firth & Murton Pty Ltd for the City of Noarlunga, 1979) — description of the inn's location opposite Holly's Houses in Gates Road; note of demolition c.1970
• Noarlunga Heritage Study Review (City of Noarlunga, 1991), Item HA30 — William Holly as builder; licensee 1850–52
• Kelly Dyer, High on the Hill: The People of St Philip & St James Church, Old Noarlunga (City of Onkaparinga Libraries, 2019) — Holly family biography; land purchases, licence history, departure for England 1873–74
• South Australian Register, 28 January 1856 — auction of Hackham township allotments at the Golden Pheasant Inn Trove
• South Australian Weekly Chronicle, 24 March 1866 — Hackham correspondent; farewell gathering at the Golden Pheasant Trove
• Adelaide Observer, 8 September 1866 — Hackham ploughing match; dinner at the Golden Pheasant Trove
• South Australian Register, 26 January 1869 — inquest at the Golden Pheasant into the death of William Anthony Brady Trove
• South Australian Register, 16 January 1873 — inquest at the Golden Pheasant into the death of John Ockleford; Holly named as publican Trove
• Evening Journal (Adelaide), 27 December 1873 — Golden Pheasant Inn and blacksmith's shop to let Trove
• Annual licensing meeting reports, Adelaide Observer and South Australian Register, 1862–1873 — confirming successive licensees Trove