Find tools and resources to help you research pubs and hotels in Victoria. Includes information on the history of Victorian liquor licensing laws.
Publicans, brewers and spirit merchants need to be granted a liquor licence before they can sell alcohol, so liquor licences are a great source of information for family historians.
Liquor licences have varied over the years. Common types you may encounter include:
Billiard Table - Licence to keep and maintain billiard or bagatelle tables
Brewers - Licence to sell beer, ale, port or wine
Club - Licence to serve liquor at the premises of a non-profit body of members
Colonial Wine - Licence to sell wine or cider produced by Australian grown fruit on premises
Grocers - Licence to sell liquor in bottles/cans for consumption elsewhere than on the premises
Packet - Licence to master of vessel to sell liquor during passage of ship
Railway Refreshment Room - Licence to sell liquor at railway refreshment rooms
Spirit Merchants - Licence to sell spirits
Temporary - Licence to sell liquor at irregular events and places of public amusement for a specified period of days. Only available to licensed victuallers
Victuallers - Licence to sell liquor on a specified premises
[Albert Street] Sebastopol, [1866]; H2969
There are a range of resources you can use to find out who held a liquor licence; where, and when, including newspapers, indexes, and licensing records at the Public Records Office of Victoria. Trade journals and local published histories can also be useful sources.
See the boxes below for more information.
Before separation was proclaimed in 1851, Victoria was known as the Port Phillip District of New South Wales. There are several NSW indexes for licences during this period, including:
Publicans' Licenses Index 1830-1861 (NSW State Archives)
The Publicans' Licenses Index 1830-1861 consists of around 20,000 entries for the period 1830-1861. You can search their online index by name, hotel, locality or year.
Note: some licenses are missing for the years 1849-1852, in which case NSW State Archives advise checking the Trove Newspapers database for details.
NSW, Australia, Certificates for Publicans' Licences, 1830-1849, 1853-1899
This index is available for searching via the Ancestry database, which is available to use onsite at the Library. It consists of a collection of liquor licences for public houses (ie pubs) in NSW between 1830 to 1899. The collection includes butts of licenses that stretch from 1830 to 1899 and original certificates from 1853 to 1860.
Licensing, 1841-1842
Sourced from the NSW State Archives, this collection of NSW publicans' licenses from the years 1841-1842 is available to browse on the FamilySearch database. To access the digitised licenses, click on the tiny camera icon under the 'Film/Digital Notes' field. There is a list of names and licence numbers at the beginning.
(Note: you will need to sign up as a free member of FamilySearch first).
The information in the indexes below was compiled by well-known brewer Robert K Cole and comes from various sources including post office directories and licensing court records along with newspaper and trade journal notices.
Derived from Robert K Cole's Index of Victorian hotels : manuscript, 1841-1949, the Cole-Tetlow Index was compiled by the State Library's Genealogy Team volunteer Eric Tetlow. contains over 21,000 names of hotel licencees or owners. In addition to the names of individuals, you may find the location of a hotel and dates when a licence was held.
This index covers the country volumes of Cole's original Index, Index of Victorian hotels : manuscript, 1841-1949, and was compiled by Australian Manuscripts Collection volunteers Dulcie Burns and Sally Hall.
View of Star Hotel Harrietville; H2016.406/3
You can search the contents of both of these indexes using the Australiana Index, which is a composite database made up numerous smaller indexes that were created over a long period of time by staff and volunteers at State Library Victoria.
1. Enter their name in the Search box along with the word cole eg Thomas Rennison cole. (Note: The word cole will search the both the Cole and Cole-Tetlow indexes)
2. Select Australiana Index from the dropdown menu to the right.
3. To see the details of an index entry, click on Check for access options
4. The information you are looking for is in the Summary field.
1. Enter name of the hotel in the Search box along with the word cole. If it is a hotel with a very common name eg Star Hotel, you may need to add in the name of the suburb. Eg star cole collingwood.
2. Select Australiana Index from the dropdown menu to the right.
To see details of a specific index entry, repeat steps 3 and 4 (above)
Sometimes the hard copy volumes of the indexes can contain additional information. If so, there will be a note in the Summary field advising that Supplementary information may be available. Ask a librarian to help you access this information.
You can sometimes find information about publicans in the Library's Biography Index.
This index contains references to entries in published sources, including archival Victorian newpapers, biographical books such as Cyclopedia of Victoria and Victoria and its Metropolis and a wide variety of other sources, including trade journals.
Emphasis is on biographical information about Victorians, prominent Australians and others who have relevance to Australian research. You can also sometimes find references to an illustration or portrait of a person.
You can search entries in the Biography Index up until 1996 on microfiche in the Newspapers and Family History Reading Rooms at call number: GMF 91/Box 1.
To search index entries from 1996 onwards, use the Australiana Index.
You can sometimes find the names of licensees as an adjunct to information about a hotel or pub in the library's Local History Index. This index was compiled by staff of the former La Trobe Library. It consists of 34,000 references to Victorian local history, including hotels and pubs.
You can find this index on microfiche in the Newspapers and Family History Reading Room at call number LTMF129.
The index is arranged alphabetically by place, then by reference type, and then alphabetically by name. So to find references to pubs and hotels, look up the suburb or town you are searching for and then look for 'Hotels', and then the name of the hotel.
To search index entries from 1993 onwards, use the Australiana Index.
Pubs & publicans index, 1840-1854 [microform]
The Pubs & publicans index, 1840-1854 [microform] index was created by Gisborne genealogist Marion Button. Index entries have been taken from the Port Phillip Herald for 1840-1846, and from The Argus for 1847 onwards. The index is in two parts, for surnames of publicans and for hotel names.
You can find it in the Newspapers & Family History Reading Room at call number: GMF 107 / BOX 1
CUB lease agreements between licencees throughout Victoria, 1920-1970 [manuscript]
The CUB lease agreements between licencees throughout Victoria, 1920-1970 is an index of lease agreements between Carlton United Breweries and various drinking establishments in Victoria. The index (housed in the Library's Manuscripts Collection) is hand-written and organised alphabetically.
Contact our Ask a Librarian service to view this index in the Heritage Collections Reading Room.
Sands & McDougall directories are a key resource for researchers. Originally known as the Sands & Kenny's directory (1857-59), these directories were indexed and divided into sections by location, name, trade and more.
From 1857 to 1897, you can find the name of Melbourne & metropolitan hotel licensees listed alongside the name of the hotel in the 'Hotels' section of the 'Trade & professional' section of the directories.
Sadly, from 1898 onwards, the directories ceased to list the names of licensees, except in rare instances.
Excerpt from 'Hotels - Trades' section of 1860 Sands & McDougall directory showing licensee names alongside hotel listings, p 327
A note on country pubs...
Sands & McDougall did not start including rural and regional areas of Victoria until 1902, so you won't find any listings for licensees from country hotels unfortunately.
Where to find the directories
You can find the complete set of Sands & McDougall directories in the Newspapers and Family History Reading Rooms on level 2A of the Library. The call number is: GMF 98. The Library has also digitised every fifth year of the directories so you can view them online.
The University of Melbourne has digitised every year of the directories from 1857 to 1880.
You can find Victorian liquor licensing records from 1851 onwards at the Public Records Office of Victoria (PROV). Records need to be ordered for viewing at PROV's reading room in North Melbourne.
The following records are available:
For additional information on Publicans, Brewers and researching occupations see Researching your Victorian ancestors.
The National Library of Australia's Trove database is a wonderful resource where you can keyword search hundreds of thousands of pages of historic (ie 1803-1954) digitised Australian newspapers online.
Try searching for the name of a person combined with the name of a hotel and/or town or suburb, and see what you can find!
Tip: Enclose the name of a person or hotel in inverted commas to search for an exact phrase. Eg "Florence Lord" Murtoa hotel
'A Murtoa Hotel', The Age, 30 September 1931, p 11
Newspaper databases
Our Library subscribes to a wide range of current and historic Australian and international newspapers databases. They are available in the Library and many can be accessed offsite by Victorian residents who are registered State Library members.
More information can be found in our Newspapers research guides.
Looking for a brewer, or someone who worked in a brewery?
See the Publicans and brewers tab in our guide on Researching your ancestors' occupations.
Ale & Stout Obtainable everywhere. Castlemaine Ale Brewery, Melbourne; H2008.94/84
