Welcome To Dandenong: Craft Beer Free Zone!

Few people would have ever heard of the Southern Aurora Hotel. It was demolished in early 1993.

It might have been the roughest pub in Greater Melbourne. It was located just next to Dandenong Railway Station.

I visited it one Friday evening in May 1992, when I happened to be working in Dandenong. I had been drinking with a colleague who was to quickly become my closest friend (still is) at the slightly less feral Nu Hotel (which was our regular watering hole), and we decided to have one more for the road.

He saw some bloke he knew and remarked that he hadn’t seen him around for a while.

“I’ve been in gaol,” was the casual reply.

There also was a young lady, either a barmaid or a dancer, wearing only a g-string, wandering around the floor. I don’t remember too many of the details, as it had been a really crappy day, and I really had needed quite a few drinks more than usual to close off the week.

So anyway, the only part of the Southern Aurora which did not get to meet the business end of a bulldozer was the bottle shop, which is still there today when I visited Dandenong in a misguided fit of nostalgia for my misspent youth. As it was in the same style of architecture as rest of the Southern Aurora, you can get a fair idea of what the Southern Aurora might have looked like from the photo I have placed above.

Needless to say, that whilst there are many demolished pubs around greater Melbourne whom we might lament (the Menzies Hotel in the city being a prime but not exclusive example), the Southern Aurora is not one of them.

What caused me to pause today and take the above photo was the signage on the bottle shop. The top of the pole features the Melbourne Bitter logo, with Melbourne Bitter, Victoria Bitter, Fosters Lager, and Fosters Light Ice all making up the rest of the beers on offer.

The only thing missing from the traditional CUB offerings is Carlton Draught.

And this signage has probably stood there atop the bottle shop for the past 30 years, like a time capsule of what sort of beer was popular in the early 1990s.

Of course, I did not stop to look inside, but I do suspect that these beers are still the ones which are the most popular sold in Dandenong. It does not really seem to me to be the sort of place where craft beer would easily get a toe hold.