Image Credits: State Library of South Australia & Yunta SA
Picture this: you’re driving home to Adelaide from Broken Hill when you decide to pull off at Yunta, a small outback town roughly halfway between the two. You pull up a stool at the local, grab yourself a cold one, and find yourself chatting away with the person beside you. Before long, they’ve got a story to tell – one that starts in Peterborough and ends at a 127-year-old pub in the middle of the outback.
It’s a tale of two caravan park managers who swapped check-ins for bar service and headed down the road to take on one of the region’s most historic watering holes.
Jacki and Rob Williams spent six years running the caravan park in Peterborough, but when the Yunta Caravan Park came up for sale, they thought it was time for a bit of a sea change – or perhaps, more fittingly, a tree change.
“My husband’s always been wanting a hotel, and the opportunity to run a hotel of our own was there,” Jacki tells us.
“We just liked the Yunta Hotel and the community.”
“It’s not a big change, because Peterborough is a great community as well,” Jacki says. “We were a part of that community, and everyone helps everybody out in those sorts of communities. It’s just that country life.”
And any Australian would know that a local pub is truly the beating heart of these country communities. So when the Yunta pub briefly closed, the town felt it.
That’s why, when Jacki and Rob arrived to give the pub a bit of CPR and defibrillation, the locals, alongside those who know and love this little outback gem – were obviously, overjoyed.
“They were overwhelmed, and so were we, actually,” Jacki laughs. “Everybody was just glad to have their local back.”
But while the pub might be the beating heart, the community members are the lifeblood that keeps the love and country spirit circulating. And Jacki says they have felt that from the moment they stepped through the doors, with the locals taking them “under their wing.”
“The community here are amazing. We have had so much support. Anything that we need, they will help us with – all we have to do is ask.”
While the pair are relatively new to the community, they’re stepping into the shoes of an institution with more than enough history to make up for it. And while the Yunta Hotel has changed hands more than a few times, its latest custodians reckon they’re not planning on changing a whole lot.
Yunta’s history stretches back to the mid-1800s, when the area formed part of the Tattawppa and Yanta runs. The discovery of gold nearby in 1886 drew thousands of prospectors through the region, and with them came the town’s businesses, including the Yunta Hotel, believed to date back to 1888.
For more than a century, this pub has seen countless visitors and regulars pull up a chair, bringing a story or two with them. And Jacki wants more than anything, to keep those stories alive.
Because if the pub is the beating heart of a town, the regulars are its soul.
“We’ll write up their history and keep the characters alive,” Jacki says of the old characters she’s heard about who used to frequent the pub’s walls.
“We don’t want to change the history of the hotel, we want to embrace it.”
With a steady stream of Broken Hill-to-Adelaide traffic and plenty of travellers rolling through after the Mundi Mundi music festival, the first few weeks at the Yunta Hotel have been flat-out for Jacki and Rob.
But as we chatted with Jacki, it was clear that’s exactly how she likes it. Being run off her feet, welcoming travellers through the door and keeping a lively little watering hole ticking along So, next time you’re barrelling down the Barrier Highway between Adelaide and Broken Hill, do yourself a favour and pull into the historic Yunta Pub.
Yunta Hotel Reopens
Where: Railway Terrace, Yunta SA 5440
When: 11 am – 11:30 pm Monday – Sunday
For more information, click here.
