00:00:00
Speaker 1: Hi, everyone, Welcome to conversations today. Now Lock, my guest today has been dragged, kicking and screaming into the studio sat down in front of the microphone because he didn't want to do it. He's blaming his staff and his family because they feel and I feel that the story has to be told. It's fifty years of the Hurly Hotel group and the founder of that August institution which employs so many South Australians is Peter Hurley. Peter, welcome to the studio.
00:00:29
Speaker 2: It's lovely to be here. Graham, thank you. I did meet. I was reluctant why. I just felt, as I said to you some years ago, there's a lot of people with the more interesting story.
00:00:40
Speaker 1: When I would have thought promotion of your company would have been important for you as well.
00:00:47
Speaker 2: It is a good opportunity. I have to concede that.
00:00:50
Speaker 1: Are you a modest man?
00:00:52
Speaker 2: I think so.
00:00:57
Speaker 1: But I remember, for like fifty years of your started when a school teacher gets posted to Woodner. So how it all we go?
00:01:06
Speaker 2: A slight variation on that, a school teacher resigned from the Education department and bought the pub in Woodner and relocated to Woodner that was the sequence of events in July of seventy five, just the fifty weeks ago, a couple of fifty years ago, a couple of weeks ago.
00:01:24
Speaker 1: So we've got to start at the beginning and I find out what prompted that decision. You've grew up in Castaden, in Victoria.
00:01:31
Speaker 2: Born in Castenden, grew up in Castenden, thought it was the center of the universe.
00:01:37
Speaker 1: Well, I think it is when if you were raised there, maybe you know those western suburbs of the Western Country districts of Victoria. Great footy teams, great footy towns.
00:01:49
Speaker 2: Great characters, what fabulous scouting movement there, Just brilliant memories of being in the boys Scouts, having a lovely and strong family, a football team that won in the town, that won four on the trot. A great time to be a teenager in Castad And in the early sixties.
00:02:14
Speaker 1: What was your dad?
00:02:14
Speaker 2: What was your family doing there? We were working class people. Dad and his brother had a fuel distribution business and we were just battlers. But a lot of people were poor and we were poor, and we didn't notice any difference.
00:02:34
Speaker 1: So had your dad served was he had he served as a soldier.
00:02:38
Speaker 2: No that there's a lot of hurlies that did. My grandfather's three immediate older brothers all played these supreme sacrifice in World War One, and Dad's brothers served in World War Two, but he just missed. Serving in World War Two.
00:03:00
Speaker 1: Had a significant part of your family history.
00:03:05
Speaker 2: Well not really, because my grandfather didn't ever talk about it, and it's only in my adult life that I've studied their service record. Attended their perial sites on the Western Front, which is quite a moving thing to do. And in fact, when we in the Panorama Hotel down in the early next year, the main meeting room there has been called the Three Brothers Room, and they'll be a lovely fate of them in that room.
00:03:44
Speaker 1: So they're you're great great unc great uncles. You found their graves on the Western Front.
00:03:51
Speaker 2: Yes, it was an incredible day and it's so easy to do. It's close to Paris. We just went to the Triomph got it in a chauffet car or a group bus thing eight seater I think it was. The driver had encyclopedic knowledge of all the trenches and the war graves, and I just told him about my three great uncles. Oh, I know those sites the tavern we went to for lunch. Oh what day was your uncle killed? And they pulled out the thing They tell you what time of the day the battle was and exactly where his grave was. And if you go out of the town and turn right, that telephone pole is still there and the trenches ran along there, they tell you the time of day. It a very very moving and a rewarding day in a lot of ways.
00:04:51
Speaker 1: I'm currently reading about the Battle of Fromel and it's just such a terrible waste them an idiotic supreme command, wasn't it.
00:05:01
Speaker 2: Just it's sickening when you read the detail of it.
00:05:06
Speaker 1: But anyway, so you're growing up in Casterda, did you did you play footy.
00:05:11
Speaker 2: At a very ordinary level? Age grade footy? Very ordinary?
00:05:16
Speaker 1: So what happened after school? Did you? Did you move away from.
00:05:22
Speaker 2: I worked in the State Savings Bank of Victoria in Casterden for three years. Had a bit of a yearning for a tertiary education which we couldn't afford, and that plus a combination of that and chasing skirt at the time, I applied to go to teach at wattle Park Teachers College and so I did my teaching training in sixty eight to seventy at Wattle Park Teachers College, and then did either six or seven years teaching.
00:05:58
Speaker 1: So jump from Victoria that was it easier to get into.
00:06:03
Speaker 2: It was easier to get into. And I did also reference I was chasing skirt. Oh that was in Adelaide?
00:06:12
Speaker 1: Was that your wife?
00:06:14
Speaker 2: No, Jenny came into my life a bit when I was in Wood.
00:06:20
Speaker 1: Well, does Jenny know about the lady had chased into Adelaide?
00:06:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, she would know about that, but she was well gone by the time. Jenny, what happened to her? Did you ever find out what happened to her? No, I'm not seen for many years.
00:06:40
Speaker 1: So you have you graduate as a teacher, and you teach for a few years.
00:06:45
Speaker 2: Taught for one year at Hendon, which was fantastic, great people down there, a fantastic year five class there. Then I had a couple of years out at Parafield Gardens. Fifty four kids in my class in the third term, fifty four grade six kids in the class desks right up to the blackboard. I've gained a lot of really good kids, and of court, some pess and students from that era that still keep in touch with me. And then I had two and a half years at payn Them demonstration School.
00:07:31
Speaker 1: Well, it would have been a bit of challenging a demonstration school.
00:07:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's an additional responsibility because you've got visiting student teachers in your class nearly half the time.
00:07:46
Speaker 1: Why then, did you become disillusioned with teaching.
00:07:50
Speaker 2: There's a couple of angles to that point. One, I'd all my whole teachers college and teaching career. I've been moon lighter. I'd always had two jobs. I just didn't know any other ways. So I either worked in restaurants or in the latter years that would have been three or four nights a week at the Feathers Hotel at Burnside, and then as soon as the school holidays came, I'd be working five days a week in that case at the Feathers. And also an uncle of mine had done well in the hotel business in Victoria, in Eden Hope and in Melbourne, and I think he was a bit of a mentor and perhaps a motivator, and that increased my interest in the hospitality business.
00:08:42
Speaker 1: What was the stimulus for the work ethic, I mean, that's an enormous work ethic. Where did that.
00:08:47
Speaker 2: From Well, I was poor. I needed to do it some money and I think and because I wanted to save enough money to get myself into what was a hotel least.
00:09:01
Speaker 1: Well, it started quite modestly, but it's sort of exploded. We'll expand all of that and we'll explore all of that when we come back. Peter Hurley is my guest. Folks back shortly, Welcome back everybody. My guest on conversation today is Peter Hurley, the executive chair of the Hurly Hotel Group. It's a very fancy title, Peter. Can I just say boss the head on show or it was a bit more.
00:09:23
Speaker 2: Formal than that show, but governed by general managers, wives and two very strong daughters.
00:09:34
Speaker 1: Well, it started very modestly a young fellow growing up in Casterden. We didn't talk much about we were talking off air about the footy influence in Caston, so we might just visit that because there a couple of big stars out of there.
00:09:47
Speaker 2: Well, it was you just didn't want to be anywhere else, Graham. But Castenden in that era of your life and as a teenager, that's a very impressionable stage of your life as well. And Hastenden were doing pretty well, and they recruited a new captain coach, Don Witton, and he'd brother of Ted. He'd had a pretty good career with the Yarraville and the VFA came as a captain coach. Was a good football or a good coach. But the best part about it from a kid's point of view was that Castdan were making the finals and Footscray weren't. So every weekend you had missed a football himself, the great EJ. Ted Whitton in town. He'd take training on the Thursday night, be a sort of a side coach at the final on the Saturday. And that Don Witton took them to a Grand final. He moved on and the extraordinary legend member of the Essendon's Team of the century, Reg Burgess, came along. He captain coached them to three premierships, so four on the trot. It was a buzzy time to be a teenager in Castiden.
00:11:12
Speaker 1: What a guy Ted Whitten was. I don't know much about Reg Burgess, though Kevin Sheedy gives him a big rap.
00:11:19
Speaker 2: Sheedy Sheedy says publicly privately to anyone that will listen that Reg Burgess says the greatest player he's ever seen, and so Kevin grew up in Paran, but he was an Essendon supporter during Regge's incredible but short career there. He only played one hundred and twenty six games for Essendon, but he's a member of their Team of the Century. He retired from VFL football at twenty six, came back to the farm and if you want some sort of an idea of how he played, no one has reminded me of reg Burgess as much as Jordan Dawson. That's it so similar in the way they get the ball and the way they dispose of it, and the way they kick and the way they get out of tackles.
00:12:18
Speaker 1: I can see Castin has such an enormous influence on your early memories. Do you ever get back there?
00:12:25
Speaker 2: Well, Mom and dad passed away ten years or so ago, and I get back for funerals and things like that, so I haven't got the strong tie to it that I did have. But my brother in law has sort of missed the hospitality of Mount Gambia, and we've got lots of friends in Mount Gambia, so I catch up with Caston friends when we're in Mount Gambia.
00:12:50
Speaker 1: So we'll live. You come to Adelaida Teachers College, you do teach for a while at three different schools, but you have got an enormous work ethic. So you've got several jobs, you're working in hospitality, and you decide you want to buy a pub. How on earth does the wood in the pub come up?
00:13:09
Speaker 2: Well, it was probably the only one that I thought was a good business that I had had the money to buy. I bought a lease on the Wooden Pub in nineteen to seventy five for fifty five thousand dollars and two hundred and fifty dollars a week rent. Well, and it was a very it was damn hard work, but it was a very rewarding financial decision.
00:13:35
Speaker 1: Well as it turned out. But I can't imagine it's a big Fifty grand is still a fair bit of money in those days.
00:13:41
Speaker 2: Basically I had to borrow a reasonable So.
00:13:45
Speaker 1: So what happens when this person who's not a local comes into the town with advisor new pub? How hard is that to establish yourself?
00:13:55
Speaker 2: Not easy? But you know, you green as grass, you got still got chalk dust under your fingernails. The very the best part about it is you don't know what you don't know, Otherwise it'd be too damn scary.
00:14:10
Speaker 1: But you've got to immediately involve yourself in the community. I would have thought absolutely tell us about wouldn't it in nineteen seventy five.
00:14:18
Speaker 2: I can't think of anywhere that was more ideal. It had a pretty proud sporting history. In fact, I was only there about three or four weeks and the finals were a bit earlier in the La Hunt League. And I get a phone call from Sandy Virgo. I'm coming over to the Grand Final. I didn't know Sandy Virgo. He later became a good friend. The general manager down at Port Adelaide. You would have known him. And well, we'd be able to get a taxi. Sandy, there's no taxi, but I'll hear the plane go over. I'll pick you up. So I brought them back to the pabahe and another guy, and and got him a bit of breakfast, as I recall, and I said, now, how come you've come over to to the Grand Final? He said, well, Minnapa were playing kind cutter. He said, there's a school kid lining up at said a half back today for Minnapa and my ambition is to have his bloody signature on a bit of paper before I leave town, and I signed Greg Phillips.
00:15:27
Speaker 1: I was going to have a I'm going to ask for a guest, but you Greg Phillips.
00:15:31
Speaker 2: Greg Phillips played as a school kid in the grand final at Wooden Aer Oval in nineteen seventy five.
00:15:39
Speaker 1: What's the population would know? What would have been then?
00:15:42
Speaker 2: Oh twelve hundred or something like that, and a pretty strong farming community around it, a lot of good people, many of whom remain friends, many of whom wouldn't stay anywhere else when they come to Adelaide than at the Arkab. So those sort of that era in the country there, and Whaler has done me well.
00:16:08
Speaker 1: How does a foreigners, so to speak, coming from out of town, how does he integrate into the community, which you obviously.
00:16:16
Speaker 2: Did, Yes, I must have. I emphasized that I was green and would have made a lot of mistakes, but we formed friendships and you did get it. You had to be involved in the community and everything that happened there.
00:16:33
Speaker 1: How many pubs and wouldn't have they?
00:16:34
Speaker 2: Oh one?
00:16:35
Speaker 1: Just one? Yeah?
00:16:37
Speaker 2: And it had accommodation and not a stand alone bottle department. You know, you bought your bottles over the bar sort of set up. So I used to check the house guests out in the morning and close the public night and restock all the cold rooms, etc. On a Sunday because we didn't have Sunday trading in that era.
00:17:00
Speaker 1: Did you have that was the local policeman sympathetic to any out of hours training.
00:17:08
Speaker 2: One of them was his success It wasn't, but yes, when I first went there, there was a very because the police station was pretty close to the pub and there was a constant stream of traffic on a Sunday. But one of them didn't sort of look out that window on a Sunday, but his successor did, and that made life a little bit more difficult.
00:17:33
Speaker 1: So I woulden is where you meet Jenny.
00:17:36
Speaker 2: First Pengali came to town.
00:17:39
Speaker 1: So there the hospital was quite a good hospital. Okay, so tell us tell us about this the great love affair.
00:17:48
Speaker 2: Well, you've got to realize that being a single publican in a small country town where the average age of marriage for the women there was about eighteen, so it wasn't a rich field. You might say. Jenny had done her mid training in the UK. She's from Keith originally trained in Adelaide, went to the UK to do her midwifery, came back to Australia. She was offered a position at wouldn't shifted there. She's in the nursing home. There was a sort of a fry pan, a mic wave oven, so she used to come to she'd come to the pub for meals and I seduced her with free drinks.
00:18:44
Speaker 1: Was it love at first sight?
00:18:46
Speaker 2: I wouldn't have said so, but there was an interest by both parties, and I shifted to Wayala really only weeks after year because I bought the Spencer Hotel in way from the Matthews family and Jenny's term at employment at Woodener was a fixed term thing that finished. I think she had a month or so in Cadena and then got a position in Wyaler, which was convenient for the blossoming romance.
00:19:22
Speaker 1: Who at the big metropolis Wyaler Spencer Hotel. I know, well, so you just if you retained some of the share in the Woodnow hotel.
00:19:31
Speaker 2: Yeah, Brian and Robin bought a half share. My brother and his wife bought a half share in Wodner and so the next chapter of my life was in Wyala.
00:19:42
Speaker 1: The start of the expansion. Peter Hurley as my guest, the executive chair of the Hurly Hotel Group. Back shortly, folks, welcome back everybody. If you just tuned in conversations. My guest as Peter Hurley, who's the head honcho of the Hurly Hotel Group celebrating fifty years. We're going to have a race through because I just I'm interested in the early days but studies as a teacher resigns from an education department, buys a hotel, and wouldn't I then buys a hotel in Whaler. Tell us about Whaler and those those days years of seaky. I've got some having lived there when I was left school.
00:20:20
Speaker 2: But well, if you haven't lived in or had much exposure to a sort of a one company industrial town, it's an I I'd never lived in a town where there was a healthy lineup in the front bar of a Monday morning of twenty or thirty blocks, or with a six certificate in hand, and so you had a busy bar at ten o'clock of a Monday morning, which was new to me. But Wyaler was again a very rewarding experience and incredibly talented food and beverage staff. We had a great food operation at the Spencer, a very very good bar and white staff and cook cooking staff. Thirty two bedrooms upstairs that were well occupied. Yeah. I learned a lot in Whaler and a lot of good people there.
00:21:17
Speaker 1: Did you follow a footy team up there?
00:21:19
Speaker 2: Yeah? Whatever one was buying it, we supplied north and.
00:21:26
Speaker 1: South Okay.
00:21:30
Speaker 2: Sarry rose Warn befriended me there. That was where I first met Lorri Roseworn.
00:21:36
Speaker 1: What a great man. So obviously Whaler wasn't big enough for you either. Did you do Where did the inspiration for expansion come?
00:21:45
Speaker 2: I don't know, I just must have. I didn't think I was an ambitious person, but I suppose many people would have seen that as been an ambitious person. So Jenny and I married in mid seventy nine. We went away for a few weeks, and when we came back, the opportunity to buy the Royal at Torrensville, or the lease on the Royal at Torrensville came up, which we purchased in December of seventy nine and renovated it substantially last years.
00:22:16
Speaker 1: It's always intrigued me about hotels, and I've known lots of guys in it, but never quite understood it. You buy the lease, but you don't buy the property, and it seems to me the risk is all yours.
00:22:30
Speaker 2: The risk was I've had a bit of luck along the line and Lion Brewing from Lion Nathan from New Zealand bought South Australia Brewing Company in I'm going to say eighty four and ninety four correction there ninety four, and Sir Douglas Meyer, who was the chair of Lion Nathan, had undertaken to his shareholders and his bankers that he would sell one hundred and five pubs that SA Brewing owned in South Australia. We were by that time we were leasing i'd say six of them or something like that. And under Ian McLoughlin's the lady, i In McLaughlin the accountant, and Martin Bailey came up with this concept of giving every tenant the opportunity to buy the freehold of the pubs they were leasing, and that was the most That was the major transformation of the early family balance sheet. All of a sudden we were owned the pubs that we'd been leasing, and that was transformational for eighty nine South Australian families really moment.
00:23:54
Speaker 1: How do you afford to do that? I mean you have to have a certain adventurous spirit, to entrepreneurial spirit to make a commitment like that. Quite a few to wash.
00:24:06
Speaker 2: Your bank manager's car or PuTTY's lawns or whatever you've got to do. We were, Yeah, we managed to well, we sold everything but the kitchen, sink and the kids really to get into the to buy those properties. But we've done well in a couple of other properties by then, and we had a reasonable balance sheet probably, but we did have to We did have to borrow everything we could to buy those freeholds.
00:24:37
Speaker 1: And so that's a six hotels it, Yeah.
00:24:41
Speaker 2: That would have been. That would have been the Marrion, the Royal, the Torrens Arms were We were in partnership with some friends in one murray Bridge and I should be able to remember the others, but I can't.
00:25:02
Speaker 1: Did the debt keep you awake at that? No?
00:25:06
Speaker 2: I don't think so. But it makes sure that you get up in the morning and get to work. It gives you a reason to keep working.
00:25:15
Speaker 1: What happened when poking machines became came tell us about the lead up to them, because lots of discussions about whether they should have been in hotels or whether they should have been in the sporting clubs, like like in the state.
00:25:26
Speaker 2: I've heard you say that on air before, and it is something that you imagine more than reality.
00:25:35
Speaker 1: I don't have an argue with you.
00:25:39
Speaker 2: There's no state where they're only in clubs. Is certainly in Victoria, there's a more even distribution in clubs, but pubs have a higher share of the gaming market.
00:25:55
Speaker 1: It's more interested in the cultural shift and how you experience and how you wrote it and how you entered into that and what a difference it made to the hotel He is here in Adelaide.
00:26:08
Speaker 2: Well, it certainly encouraged a lot of investment and it did improve the viability of the hotel business without a doubt, but some people don't. It's a very low margin business, a bit like the bottle shops because it's very highly taxed, but a more highly taxed in South Australia than anywhere I know. So if someone loses a dollar today in one of our pubs, the first sixty five cents goes to the state government and ten cents goes in GST, so you pay all your wages, all your overheads and everything else out of the remaining twenty five cents.
00:26:52
Speaker 1: Was the most lobbying going on and leading up to Were you involved in it?
00:26:56
Speaker 2: Certainly was. Fred Bashier was the the chair of the at the time, and I was his deputy. The hotel industry was probably lucky you that we'd had the state bank crisis immediately at that time, and a crisis cabinet meeting of the Bannon government made up their mind that they needed to add the revenue from gaming in order to recover from the state bank crisis.
00:27:30
Speaker 1: It always intrigued me though when I see these there's something sad to me about somebody who sits in front of a poker machine so long.
00:27:39
Speaker 2: How do you rationalize that I wouldn't be able to spend an hour playing a poking machine. So I to some degree empathized with your view. To my surprise, it became My father was quite profoundly deaf, so therefore social interaction is more difficult. So although he didn't have you know, it wasn't a big gambler or anything, but he in his latter years he loved playing poker machines because he didn't have the added pressure of being able to hear what other people were saying to him and respond to it. And that's not to say that everybody that enjoys playing poking machines has some sort of physical impairment. That's definitely not the case. But it is a form of entertainment that appeals to a very broad range of people, including that it's a myth to think that only poor people play poker machines. The best poking machines are in the wealthier areas.
00:28:43
Speaker 1: So as your holdings are expanding, you're becoming a significant figure in terms of the hotel industry, but it expands into other areas. You find yourself increasingly involved in social issues and organizations. I mean, you head of the hotels, hotel station, you get invited onto the South Australian Tourist Commission, you join the board of the ABC. For heaven's sake, I mean, was there a big break? Was there? Was there a pivotal turning point where you became more than the hotel here but this significant person within our society, Well, I.
00:29:23
Speaker 2: Was invited to join the board of the South Australian Tourism Commission because the hotel business. You know, you need people that are industry advocates for hotels on any tourism organization. That led to an invitation to join the Board of Tourism Australia. And there were people in that were a bit dissatisfied with the direction the ABC was going in and we're more interested in having I wanted to see a broader range of interest and skills within the ABC board and I was invited to join that and it was an interesting time. It's damn hard work and you don't have much influence. It's essentially run by the staff.
00:30:18
Speaker 1: So many interesting questions from that, but we need to take a break. Peter Hurley's my guest. Folks back after the break. My guest on Conversations is Peter Hurley. He's the head of the Hurley Hotel Group, celebrating their fiftieth year of business and it's what a journey it's become. But Peter also has other social responsibilities and corporate responsibilities. Invitation he joins the board of the ABC. I can't imagine, how do you get this hotelier from South Australia goes in and joins the board of the Hope of the ABC, this August institution. How were you received?
00:30:58
Speaker 2: There's some level of skepticism, particularly by the staff. There were some very good friendships and rewarding friendships formed out of that five years that I was there. The chairman, Morris Newman, was an outstanding Australian. I made formed a close friendship with Janet Albertson, who was on the board at the time. So it was an interesting time, although it was damn hard work, and you did wonder how much influence you are.
00:31:32
Speaker 1: Did they listen to you.
00:31:34
Speaker 2: Sometimes and not always?
00:31:37
Speaker 1: What was your biggest concern or your biggest issue?
00:31:41
Speaker 2: Dealing dealing with the bias of the ABC staff was an issue.
00:31:47
Speaker 1: Then, as it is now regarded as an extremely leftist organization. Did you find it so? And I wouldn't imagine that was your politics.
00:31:57
Speaker 2: To me, it seemed fairly leftist. I befriended through industry advocacy Martin Ferguson, and by this time Martin Ferguson was the Minister for Tourism. I knew him well and he did volunteer to nominate me to do a second term, which could so I politely refused that and said, why don't you want to do another term, And I said, Martin, it's damn hard work and I really feel as if you don't have enough influence, the staff tend to do as they like, he said, And his response was, Oh, yes, when they were all on our side, I absolutely loved it. Now they're bloody greenies and I don't like it so much. Particular man Martinson.
00:32:48
Speaker 1: You have to come back to reality your empire, if I can call it that. Expanse, tell us about your relationship with Mark Rosudo and Simon Goodwin, because you're in business to particularly Thrue. How did that develop?
00:33:04
Speaker 2: One of Mark's close friends, Andrew Johnson, was managing the Royal Torrensville for us, and I guess that's the main way that I first got to know Rue. But unbeknown to me, he had a burning ambition to get involved with the in the hotel industry and he saw me as a conduit to achieving that ambition, and so we had partnerships in the Alma with he and Goody as you know, and then later at the Port Lincoln and more recently since we purchased the Barker in Mount Barker this year and the old Hurley Reshudo team is back together there. But he's a very good business partner and he's very smart businessman too.
00:34:01
Speaker 1: How hands on is he does he.
00:34:04
Speaker 2: He's got plenty of free time, as you know, he's only got six kids and six jobs and so he's got plenty of time to be pulling beers. But he makes a mark when he's on the premise. So I can assure you of that.
00:34:18
Speaker 1: I imagine you've got a new development at Panorawa coming up, have you not.
00:34:23
Speaker 2: We have, indeed the Tonsley Hotel, which might have been one that I forgot to mention before the government knocked on our door two or three years ago and said we're going to need you to move on because we need you for the Torrence to Darlington tunnel project. So we were compulsorily acquired to use that.
00:34:50
Speaker 1: Can I explore that because I was a friend of Rick Collins, who unfortunately passed away, and he had the Jarvis Toy to own a dealership right next door to the Tonsley. How on earth do you negotiate with the government when they obviously offer you a figure which would not be enough. How difficult are those negotiations when they want to compulsively acquire your premises.
00:35:16
Speaker 2: Well, I thought I knew all about compulsory acquisition because I'd watched the castle at least a dozen times, And little did I know. Again how little I knew. I suspect our mutual friend Rick might have negotiated better than I did, but he and I had a lot of phone calls over that period. We eventually both, after having gone through a bit of a financial arm wrestle with the government, settled on a figure and he had to find a new site, which, as you know, he found on Brighton Road. I rode every street and road and any proximity to the Tonsley and came back to our general manager and said, the only place I would want to build an alternative pub is the old tafe site on Goodwood Road, opposite Centennial Park. So we better see if we can buy enough land there to build a pub, which we're in the process of doing.
00:36:17
Speaker 1: Were they going to figures? How big a percentage difference was the initial offer that they made to offer you settled on, will you're able to negotiate up?
00:36:30
Speaker 2: Well, there was a few million difference, and the arm wrestle went on for long enough that the initial valuation lapsed because in the affluction of time, so we insisted upon another valuation which squeezed a little bit more juice out of the lemon.
00:36:52
Speaker 1: So you're moving the ton seat of Panorama. What's happening and what can we expect? What can we expect to see out there?
00:36:58
Speaker 2: Well, naturally you don't. The hotel that you build in twenty twenty five is not the same design as the brewery built in nineteen sixty five. And we're very heavily focused on accommodate the accommodation industry. Accommodation is extremely successful for us in Port Lincoln and Marion, where we built an extra fifty rooms a few years ago, and the Arkabar where we more than double the size of the accommodation offer there. We could only build five or six levels whatever it is at the Panorama, so we've only got seventy seven rooms. I would have liked to build more.
00:37:41
Speaker 1: But such more accommodation than hospitality, is it? Yeah?
00:37:45
Speaker 2: Well, there's two levels of there's two levels of conventional accommodat there's ground floor pub and there's a top floor rooftop bar and rooftop function rooms and three levels of accommodation in between.
00:38:02
Speaker 1: You and Jenny have both been recognized, both being decorated with civilian awards. How did that hit you?
00:38:10
Speaker 2: Initially? Extremely surprised when you are the envelope arrives in the mail and you're told that you've been nominated for an Officer of the Order of Australia or whatever it's called. It's humbling and it's gratifying and humbling. And I wear the badge with pride. Whenever I wear a jacket. It's just not that often.
00:38:35
Speaker 1: We've got one now, and so you should wear a lot of people Peter, you know when it gets to you know, a later years, sort of wind back and smell the roses, travel a bit. Well, are you are you winding back?
00:38:51
Speaker 2: Well, my daughters and son in law would like me to, but now I still like to go to work at every day, and even when we were essentially closed down over COVID, I went to work every day.
00:39:06
Speaker 1: How hard was that?
00:39:08
Speaker 2: I was a very trying, very difficult, trying period. We were fortunate in that our retail, of our drive throughs were able to trade, so I didn't have to be constrained by the travel constrictions because wherever I was going, I was somewhere between a couple of pubs, and so it gave me an excuse to really go wherever I liked. So and because we had staff, notwithstanding we'd had to lay off five hundred or so people, but we had staff working in our drive ins every day, and where we had accommodation, we had these big empty buildings with the two or three staff. So we used to have a only allowed to have ten people in anywhere at a time, So at least once or twice a week we'd invite some eight other friends for dinner who always said yes because they had nothing else to do. And that provided a bit of company for the cook that had to be in the kitchen and for the reception staff, et cetera. And these began the hotels a terrifying time in a commercial sense. Let alone worried about whether you're going to get the COVID on it.
00:40:30
Speaker 1: Do you get a chance to relax in this?
00:40:33
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, we've been I think we've managed our life pretty well. Before we had kids, we bought a i'd go a shack which has gradually become a home at near White Sands, so our kids spent and every weekend a nim just downstream from murray Bridge, Okay, on the river, on the river, on the waterfront.
00:41:02
Speaker 1: So there's amazing milestone fifty years moment, it's amazing, how could be How many people do you employ now?
00:41:09
Speaker 2: About seven hundred?
00:41:11
Speaker 1: Would you be able to another.
00:41:13
Speaker 2: One hundred and fifty or so? When we finished the opening at.
00:41:18
Speaker 1: Pana have you looked beyond panorama?
00:41:21
Speaker 2: We're always alive to that. You know, we're not on a rampant expansion phase or anything, but there are certain things that have certain opportunities happened. Possibly the interesting.
00:41:33
Speaker 1: How important is a footy involvement to you?
00:41:36
Speaker 2: We've had massive fun out of our involvement with the Adelaide Football Club and I was on the board for fourteen years and a lot of very good people come into your life through an involvement with football clubs, and that was certainly my experience in out of our involvement right from nineteen ninety one with the Adelaid Footy Club.
00:42:05
Speaker 1: So that's footy clubs, isn't it?
00:42:07
Speaker 2: Sure is?
00:42:09
Speaker 1: So you're fifty years, you're celebrated. Tell us how you're celebrated. It was at the big dinner that Justin and I didn't get invited, but.
00:42:17
Speaker 2: No, there was. It was limited to three hundred of our closest friends. You yeah, it's certainly other than being told that I had five minutes to speak, which I took fifteen. It was taken over by others, you know, when daughters and son and so on months they our son MC the event. It was a celebration to thank those. Really it became about us, but it was meant to be about the people that had helped us along the fifty year journey to where our company is now.
00:43:02
Speaker 1: It's an amazing journey. Peter a great South Australian born in Victoria but become a great South Australian. The group is omnipresent. You can't miss it. Your reach is extensive within our community. So I'm glad your people were able to convince you to come in and have a chat. Peter. It wasn't that bad, was it.
00:43:25
Speaker 2: No, it's been most enjoyable. You managed it well.
00:43:29
Speaker 1: Bitter Hurley, the executive chairman of the Hurly Hotel Group, celebrating their fiftieth year this year, was my guest. Folks, thank you for joining us.
Speaker 1: Hi, everyone, Welcome to conversations today. Now Lock, my guest today has been dragged, kicking and screaming into the studio sat down in front of the microphone because he didn't want to do it. He's blaming his staff and his family because they feel and I feel that the story has to be told. It's fifty years of the Hurly Hotel group and the founder of that August institution which employs so many South Australians is Peter Hurley. Peter, welcome to the studio.
00:00:29
Speaker 2: It's lovely to be here. Graham, thank you. I did meet. I was reluctant why. I just felt, as I said to you some years ago, there's a lot of people with the more interesting story.
00:00:40
Speaker 1: When I would have thought promotion of your company would have been important for you as well.
00:00:47
Speaker 2: It is a good opportunity. I have to concede that.
00:00:50
Speaker 1: Are you a modest man?
00:00:52
Speaker 2: I think so.
00:00:57
Speaker 1: But I remember, for like fifty years of your started when a school teacher gets posted to Woodner. So how it all we go?
00:01:06
Speaker 2: A slight variation on that, a school teacher resigned from the Education department and bought the pub in Woodner and relocated to Woodner that was the sequence of events in July of seventy five, just the fifty weeks ago, a couple of fifty years ago, a couple of weeks ago.
00:01:24
Speaker 1: So we've got to start at the beginning and I find out what prompted that decision. You've grew up in Castaden, in Victoria.
00:01:31
Speaker 2: Born in Castenden, grew up in Castenden, thought it was the center of the universe.
00:01:37
Speaker 1: Well, I think it is when if you were raised there, maybe you know those western suburbs of the Western Country districts of Victoria. Great footy teams, great footy towns.
00:01:49
Speaker 2: Great characters, what fabulous scouting movement there, Just brilliant memories of being in the boys Scouts, having a lovely and strong family, a football team that won in the town, that won four on the trot. A great time to be a teenager in Castad And in the early sixties.
00:02:14
Speaker 1: What was your dad?
00:02:14
Speaker 2: What was your family doing there? We were working class people. Dad and his brother had a fuel distribution business and we were just battlers. But a lot of people were poor and we were poor, and we didn't notice any difference.
00:02:34
Speaker 1: So had your dad served was he had he served as a soldier.
00:02:38
Speaker 2: No that there's a lot of hurlies that did. My grandfather's three immediate older brothers all played these supreme sacrifice in World War One, and Dad's brothers served in World War Two, but he just missed. Serving in World War Two.
00:03:00
Speaker 1: Had a significant part of your family history.
00:03:05
Speaker 2: Well not really, because my grandfather didn't ever talk about it, and it's only in my adult life that I've studied their service record. Attended their perial sites on the Western Front, which is quite a moving thing to do. And in fact, when we in the Panorama Hotel down in the early next year, the main meeting room there has been called the Three Brothers Room, and they'll be a lovely fate of them in that room.
00:03:44
Speaker 1: So they're you're great great unc great uncles. You found their graves on the Western Front.
00:03:51
Speaker 2: Yes, it was an incredible day and it's so easy to do. It's close to Paris. We just went to the Triomph got it in a chauffet car or a group bus thing eight seater I think it was. The driver had encyclopedic knowledge of all the trenches and the war graves, and I just told him about my three great uncles. Oh, I know those sites the tavern we went to for lunch. Oh what day was your uncle killed? And they pulled out the thing They tell you what time of the day the battle was and exactly where his grave was. And if you go out of the town and turn right, that telephone pole is still there and the trenches ran along there, they tell you the time of day. It a very very moving and a rewarding day in a lot of ways.
00:04:51
Speaker 1: I'm currently reading about the Battle of Fromel and it's just such a terrible waste them an idiotic supreme command, wasn't it.
00:05:01
Speaker 2: Just it's sickening when you read the detail of it.
00:05:06
Speaker 1: But anyway, so you're growing up in Casterda, did you did you play footy.
00:05:11
Speaker 2: At a very ordinary level? Age grade footy? Very ordinary?
00:05:16
Speaker 1: So what happened after school? Did you? Did you move away from.
00:05:22
Speaker 2: I worked in the State Savings Bank of Victoria in Casterden for three years. Had a bit of a yearning for a tertiary education which we couldn't afford, and that plus a combination of that and chasing skirt at the time, I applied to go to teach at wattle Park Teachers College and so I did my teaching training in sixty eight to seventy at Wattle Park Teachers College, and then did either six or seven years teaching.
00:05:58
Speaker 1: So jump from Victoria that was it easier to get into.
00:06:03
Speaker 2: It was easier to get into. And I did also reference I was chasing skirt. Oh that was in Adelaide?
00:06:12
Speaker 1: Was that your wife?
00:06:14
Speaker 2: No, Jenny came into my life a bit when I was in Wood.
00:06:20
Speaker 1: Well, does Jenny know about the lady had chased into Adelaide?
00:06:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, she would know about that, but she was well gone by the time. Jenny, what happened to her? Did you ever find out what happened to her? No, I'm not seen for many years.
00:06:40
Speaker 1: So you have you graduate as a teacher, and you teach for a few years.
00:06:45
Speaker 2: Taught for one year at Hendon, which was fantastic, great people down there, a fantastic year five class there. Then I had a couple of years out at Parafield Gardens. Fifty four kids in my class in the third term, fifty four grade six kids in the class desks right up to the blackboard. I've gained a lot of really good kids, and of court, some pess and students from that era that still keep in touch with me. And then I had two and a half years at payn Them demonstration School.
00:07:31
Speaker 1: Well, it would have been a bit of challenging a demonstration school.
00:07:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's an additional responsibility because you've got visiting student teachers in your class nearly half the time.
00:07:46
Speaker 1: Why then, did you become disillusioned with teaching.
00:07:50
Speaker 2: There's a couple of angles to that point. One, I'd all my whole teachers college and teaching career. I've been moon lighter. I'd always had two jobs. I just didn't know any other ways. So I either worked in restaurants or in the latter years that would have been three or four nights a week at the Feathers Hotel at Burnside, and then as soon as the school holidays came, I'd be working five days a week in that case at the Feathers. And also an uncle of mine had done well in the hotel business in Victoria, in Eden Hope and in Melbourne, and I think he was a bit of a mentor and perhaps a motivator, and that increased my interest in the hospitality business.
00:08:42
Speaker 1: What was the stimulus for the work ethic, I mean, that's an enormous work ethic. Where did that.
00:08:47
Speaker 2: From Well, I was poor. I needed to do it some money and I think and because I wanted to save enough money to get myself into what was a hotel least.
00:09:01
Speaker 1: Well, it started quite modestly, but it's sort of exploded. We'll expand all of that and we'll explore all of that when we come back. Peter Hurley is my guest. Folks back shortly, Welcome back everybody. My guest on conversation today is Peter Hurley, the executive chair of the Hurly Hotel Group. It's a very fancy title, Peter. Can I just say boss the head on show or it was a bit more.
00:09:23
Speaker 2: Formal than that show, but governed by general managers, wives and two very strong daughters.
00:09:34
Speaker 1: Well, it started very modestly a young fellow growing up in Casterden. We didn't talk much about we were talking off air about the footy influence in Caston, so we might just visit that because there a couple of big stars out of there.
00:09:47
Speaker 2: Well, it was you just didn't want to be anywhere else, Graham. But Castenden in that era of your life and as a teenager, that's a very impressionable stage of your life as well. And Hastenden were doing pretty well, and they recruited a new captain coach, Don Witton, and he'd brother of Ted. He'd had a pretty good career with the Yarraville and the VFA came as a captain coach. Was a good football or a good coach. But the best part about it from a kid's point of view was that Castdan were making the finals and Footscray weren't. So every weekend you had missed a football himself, the great EJ. Ted Whitton in town. He'd take training on the Thursday night, be a sort of a side coach at the final on the Saturday. And that Don Witton took them to a Grand final. He moved on and the extraordinary legend member of the Essendon's Team of the century, Reg Burgess, came along. He captain coached them to three premierships, so four on the trot. It was a buzzy time to be a teenager in Castiden.
00:11:12
Speaker 1: What a guy Ted Whitten was. I don't know much about Reg Burgess, though Kevin Sheedy gives him a big rap.
00:11:19
Speaker 2: Sheedy Sheedy says publicly privately to anyone that will listen that Reg Burgess says the greatest player he's ever seen, and so Kevin grew up in Paran, but he was an Essendon supporter during Regge's incredible but short career there. He only played one hundred and twenty six games for Essendon, but he's a member of their Team of the Century. He retired from VFL football at twenty six, came back to the farm and if you want some sort of an idea of how he played, no one has reminded me of reg Burgess as much as Jordan Dawson. That's it so similar in the way they get the ball and the way they dispose of it, and the way they kick and the way they get out of tackles.
00:12:18
Speaker 1: I can see Castin has such an enormous influence on your early memories. Do you ever get back there?
00:12:25
Speaker 2: Well, Mom and dad passed away ten years or so ago, and I get back for funerals and things like that, so I haven't got the strong tie to it that I did have. But my brother in law has sort of missed the hospitality of Mount Gambia, and we've got lots of friends in Mount Gambia, so I catch up with Caston friends when we're in Mount Gambia.
00:12:50
Speaker 1: So we'll live. You come to Adelaida Teachers College, you do teach for a while at three different schools, but you have got an enormous work ethic. So you've got several jobs, you're working in hospitality, and you decide you want to buy a pub. How on earth does the wood in the pub come up?
00:13:09
Speaker 2: Well, it was probably the only one that I thought was a good business that I had had the money to buy. I bought a lease on the Wooden Pub in nineteen to seventy five for fifty five thousand dollars and two hundred and fifty dollars a week rent. Well, and it was a very it was damn hard work, but it was a very rewarding financial decision.
00:13:35
Speaker 1: Well as it turned out. But I can't imagine it's a big Fifty grand is still a fair bit of money in those days.
00:13:41
Speaker 2: Basically I had to borrow a reasonable So.
00:13:45
Speaker 1: So what happens when this person who's not a local comes into the town with advisor new pub? How hard is that to establish yourself?
00:13:55
Speaker 2: Not easy? But you know, you green as grass, you got still got chalk dust under your fingernails. The very the best part about it is you don't know what you don't know, Otherwise it'd be too damn scary.
00:14:10
Speaker 1: But you've got to immediately involve yourself in the community. I would have thought absolutely tell us about wouldn't it in nineteen seventy five.
00:14:18
Speaker 2: I can't think of anywhere that was more ideal. It had a pretty proud sporting history. In fact, I was only there about three or four weeks and the finals were a bit earlier in the La Hunt League. And I get a phone call from Sandy Virgo. I'm coming over to the Grand Final. I didn't know Sandy Virgo. He later became a good friend. The general manager down at Port Adelaide. You would have known him. And well, we'd be able to get a taxi. Sandy, there's no taxi, but I'll hear the plane go over. I'll pick you up. So I brought them back to the pabahe and another guy, and and got him a bit of breakfast, as I recall, and I said, now, how come you've come over to to the Grand Final? He said, well, Minnapa were playing kind cutter. He said, there's a school kid lining up at said a half back today for Minnapa and my ambition is to have his bloody signature on a bit of paper before I leave town, and I signed Greg Phillips.
00:15:27
Speaker 1: I was going to have a I'm going to ask for a guest, but you Greg Phillips.
00:15:31
Speaker 2: Greg Phillips played as a school kid in the grand final at Wooden Aer Oval in nineteen seventy five.
00:15:39
Speaker 1: What's the population would know? What would have been then?
00:15:42
Speaker 2: Oh twelve hundred or something like that, and a pretty strong farming community around it, a lot of good people, many of whom remain friends, many of whom wouldn't stay anywhere else when they come to Adelaide than at the Arkab. So those sort of that era in the country there, and Whaler has done me well.
00:16:08
Speaker 1: How does a foreigners, so to speak, coming from out of town, how does he integrate into the community, which you obviously.
00:16:16
Speaker 2: Did, Yes, I must have. I emphasized that I was green and would have made a lot of mistakes, but we formed friendships and you did get it. You had to be involved in the community and everything that happened there.
00:16:33
Speaker 1: How many pubs and wouldn't have they?
00:16:34
Speaker 2: Oh one?
00:16:35
Speaker 1: Just one? Yeah?
00:16:37
Speaker 2: And it had accommodation and not a stand alone bottle department. You know, you bought your bottles over the bar sort of set up. So I used to check the house guests out in the morning and close the public night and restock all the cold rooms, etc. On a Sunday because we didn't have Sunday trading in that era.
00:17:00
Speaker 1: Did you have that was the local policeman sympathetic to any out of hours training.
00:17:08
Speaker 2: One of them was his success It wasn't, but yes, when I first went there, there was a very because the police station was pretty close to the pub and there was a constant stream of traffic on a Sunday. But one of them didn't sort of look out that window on a Sunday, but his successor did, and that made life a little bit more difficult.
00:17:33
Speaker 1: So I woulden is where you meet Jenny.
00:17:36
Speaker 2: First Pengali came to town.
00:17:39
Speaker 1: So there the hospital was quite a good hospital. Okay, so tell us tell us about this the great love affair.
00:17:48
Speaker 2: Well, you've got to realize that being a single publican in a small country town where the average age of marriage for the women there was about eighteen, so it wasn't a rich field. You might say. Jenny had done her mid training in the UK. She's from Keith originally trained in Adelaide, went to the UK to do her midwifery, came back to Australia. She was offered a position at wouldn't shifted there. She's in the nursing home. There was a sort of a fry pan, a mic wave oven, so she used to come to she'd come to the pub for meals and I seduced her with free drinks.
00:18:44
Speaker 1: Was it love at first sight?
00:18:46
Speaker 2: I wouldn't have said so, but there was an interest by both parties, and I shifted to Wayala really only weeks after year because I bought the Spencer Hotel in way from the Matthews family and Jenny's term at employment at Woodener was a fixed term thing that finished. I think she had a month or so in Cadena and then got a position in Wyaler, which was convenient for the blossoming romance.
00:19:22
Speaker 1: Who at the big metropolis Wyaler Spencer Hotel. I know, well, so you just if you retained some of the share in the Woodnow hotel.
00:19:31
Speaker 2: Yeah, Brian and Robin bought a half share. My brother and his wife bought a half share in Wodner and so the next chapter of my life was in Wyala.
00:19:42
Speaker 1: The start of the expansion. Peter Hurley as my guest, the executive chair of the Hurly Hotel Group. Back shortly, folks, welcome back everybody. If you just tuned in conversations. My guest as Peter Hurley, who's the head honcho of the Hurly Hotel Group celebrating fifty years. We're going to have a race through because I just I'm interested in the early days but studies as a teacher resigns from an education department, buys a hotel, and wouldn't I then buys a hotel in Whaler. Tell us about Whaler and those those days years of seaky. I've got some having lived there when I was left school.
00:20:20
Speaker 2: But well, if you haven't lived in or had much exposure to a sort of a one company industrial town, it's an I I'd never lived in a town where there was a healthy lineup in the front bar of a Monday morning of twenty or thirty blocks, or with a six certificate in hand, and so you had a busy bar at ten o'clock of a Monday morning, which was new to me. But Wyaler was again a very rewarding experience and incredibly talented food and beverage staff. We had a great food operation at the Spencer, a very very good bar and white staff and cook cooking staff. Thirty two bedrooms upstairs that were well occupied. Yeah. I learned a lot in Whaler and a lot of good people there.
00:21:17
Speaker 1: Did you follow a footy team up there?
00:21:19
Speaker 2: Yeah? Whatever one was buying it, we supplied north and.
00:21:26
Speaker 1: South Okay.
00:21:30
Speaker 2: Sarry rose Warn befriended me there. That was where I first met Lorri Roseworn.
00:21:36
Speaker 1: What a great man. So obviously Whaler wasn't big enough for you either. Did you do Where did the inspiration for expansion come?
00:21:45
Speaker 2: I don't know, I just must have. I didn't think I was an ambitious person, but I suppose many people would have seen that as been an ambitious person. So Jenny and I married in mid seventy nine. We went away for a few weeks, and when we came back, the opportunity to buy the Royal at Torrensville, or the lease on the Royal at Torrensville came up, which we purchased in December of seventy nine and renovated it substantially last years.
00:22:16
Speaker 1: It's always intrigued me about hotels, and I've known lots of guys in it, but never quite understood it. You buy the lease, but you don't buy the property, and it seems to me the risk is all yours.
00:22:30
Speaker 2: The risk was I've had a bit of luck along the line and Lion Brewing from Lion Nathan from New Zealand bought South Australia Brewing Company in I'm going to say eighty four and ninety four correction there ninety four, and Sir Douglas Meyer, who was the chair of Lion Nathan, had undertaken to his shareholders and his bankers that he would sell one hundred and five pubs that SA Brewing owned in South Australia. We were by that time we were leasing i'd say six of them or something like that. And under Ian McLoughlin's the lady, i In McLaughlin the accountant, and Martin Bailey came up with this concept of giving every tenant the opportunity to buy the freehold of the pubs they were leasing, and that was the most That was the major transformation of the early family balance sheet. All of a sudden we were owned the pubs that we'd been leasing, and that was transformational for eighty nine South Australian families really moment.
00:23:54
Speaker 1: How do you afford to do that? I mean you have to have a certain adventurous spirit, to entrepreneurial spirit to make a commitment like that. Quite a few to wash.
00:24:06
Speaker 2: Your bank manager's car or PuTTY's lawns or whatever you've got to do. We were, Yeah, we managed to well, we sold everything but the kitchen, sink and the kids really to get into the to buy those properties. But we've done well in a couple of other properties by then, and we had a reasonable balance sheet probably, but we did have to We did have to borrow everything we could to buy those freeholds.
00:24:37
Speaker 1: And so that's a six hotels it, Yeah.
00:24:41
Speaker 2: That would have been. That would have been the Marrion, the Royal, the Torrens Arms were We were in partnership with some friends in one murray Bridge and I should be able to remember the others, but I can't.
00:25:02
Speaker 1: Did the debt keep you awake at that? No?
00:25:06
Speaker 2: I don't think so. But it makes sure that you get up in the morning and get to work. It gives you a reason to keep working.
00:25:15
Speaker 1: What happened when poking machines became came tell us about the lead up to them, because lots of discussions about whether they should have been in hotels or whether they should have been in the sporting clubs, like like in the state.
00:25:26
Speaker 2: I've heard you say that on air before, and it is something that you imagine more than reality.
00:25:35
Speaker 1: I don't have an argue with you.
00:25:39
Speaker 2: There's no state where they're only in clubs. Is certainly in Victoria, there's a more even distribution in clubs, but pubs have a higher share of the gaming market.
00:25:55
Speaker 1: It's more interested in the cultural shift and how you experience and how you wrote it and how you entered into that and what a difference it made to the hotel He is here in Adelaide.
00:26:08
Speaker 2: Well, it certainly encouraged a lot of investment and it did improve the viability of the hotel business without a doubt, but some people don't. It's a very low margin business, a bit like the bottle shops because it's very highly taxed, but a more highly taxed in South Australia than anywhere I know. So if someone loses a dollar today in one of our pubs, the first sixty five cents goes to the state government and ten cents goes in GST, so you pay all your wages, all your overheads and everything else out of the remaining twenty five cents.
00:26:52
Speaker 1: Was the most lobbying going on and leading up to Were you involved in it?
00:26:56
Speaker 2: Certainly was. Fred Bashier was the the chair of the at the time, and I was his deputy. The hotel industry was probably lucky you that we'd had the state bank crisis immediately at that time, and a crisis cabinet meeting of the Bannon government made up their mind that they needed to add the revenue from gaming in order to recover from the state bank crisis.
00:27:30
Speaker 1: It always intrigued me though when I see these there's something sad to me about somebody who sits in front of a poker machine so long.
00:27:39
Speaker 2: How do you rationalize that I wouldn't be able to spend an hour playing a poking machine. So I to some degree empathized with your view. To my surprise, it became My father was quite profoundly deaf, so therefore social interaction is more difficult. So although he didn't have you know, it wasn't a big gambler or anything, but he in his latter years he loved playing poker machines because he didn't have the added pressure of being able to hear what other people were saying to him and respond to it. And that's not to say that everybody that enjoys playing poking machines has some sort of physical impairment. That's definitely not the case. But it is a form of entertainment that appeals to a very broad range of people, including that it's a myth to think that only poor people play poker machines. The best poking machines are in the wealthier areas.
00:28:43
Speaker 1: So as your holdings are expanding, you're becoming a significant figure in terms of the hotel industry, but it expands into other areas. You find yourself increasingly involved in social issues and organizations. I mean, you head of the hotels, hotel station, you get invited onto the South Australian Tourist Commission, you join the board of the ABC. For heaven's sake, I mean, was there a big break? Was there? Was there a pivotal turning point where you became more than the hotel here but this significant person within our society, Well, I.
00:29:23
Speaker 2: Was invited to join the board of the South Australian Tourism Commission because the hotel business. You know, you need people that are industry advocates for hotels on any tourism organization. That led to an invitation to join the Board of Tourism Australia. And there were people in that were a bit dissatisfied with the direction the ABC was going in and we're more interested in having I wanted to see a broader range of interest and skills within the ABC board and I was invited to join that and it was an interesting time. It's damn hard work and you don't have much influence. It's essentially run by the staff.
00:30:18
Speaker 1: So many interesting questions from that, but we need to take a break. Peter Hurley's my guest. Folks back after the break. My guest on Conversations is Peter Hurley. He's the head of the Hurley Hotel Group, celebrating their fiftieth year of business and it's what a journey it's become. But Peter also has other social responsibilities and corporate responsibilities. Invitation he joins the board of the ABC. I can't imagine, how do you get this hotelier from South Australia goes in and joins the board of the Hope of the ABC, this August institution. How were you received?
00:30:58
Speaker 2: There's some level of skepticism, particularly by the staff. There were some very good friendships and rewarding friendships formed out of that five years that I was there. The chairman, Morris Newman, was an outstanding Australian. I made formed a close friendship with Janet Albertson, who was on the board at the time. So it was an interesting time, although it was damn hard work, and you did wonder how much influence you are.
00:31:32
Speaker 1: Did they listen to you.
00:31:34
Speaker 2: Sometimes and not always?
00:31:37
Speaker 1: What was your biggest concern or your biggest issue?
00:31:41
Speaker 2: Dealing dealing with the bias of the ABC staff was an issue.
00:31:47
Speaker 1: Then, as it is now regarded as an extremely leftist organization. Did you find it so? And I wouldn't imagine that was your politics.
00:31:57
Speaker 2: To me, it seemed fairly leftist. I befriended through industry advocacy Martin Ferguson, and by this time Martin Ferguson was the Minister for Tourism. I knew him well and he did volunteer to nominate me to do a second term, which could so I politely refused that and said, why don't you want to do another term, And I said, Martin, it's damn hard work and I really feel as if you don't have enough influence, the staff tend to do as they like, he said, And his response was, Oh, yes, when they were all on our side, I absolutely loved it. Now they're bloody greenies and I don't like it so much. Particular man Martinson.
00:32:48
Speaker 1: You have to come back to reality your empire, if I can call it that. Expanse, tell us about your relationship with Mark Rosudo and Simon Goodwin, because you're in business to particularly Thrue. How did that develop?
00:33:04
Speaker 2: One of Mark's close friends, Andrew Johnson, was managing the Royal Torrensville for us, and I guess that's the main way that I first got to know Rue. But unbeknown to me, he had a burning ambition to get involved with the in the hotel industry and he saw me as a conduit to achieving that ambition, and so we had partnerships in the Alma with he and Goody as you know, and then later at the Port Lincoln and more recently since we purchased the Barker in Mount Barker this year and the old Hurley Reshudo team is back together there. But he's a very good business partner and he's very smart businessman too.
00:34:01
Speaker 1: How hands on is he does he.
00:34:04
Speaker 2: He's got plenty of free time, as you know, he's only got six kids and six jobs and so he's got plenty of time to be pulling beers. But he makes a mark when he's on the premise. So I can assure you of that.
00:34:18
Speaker 1: I imagine you've got a new development at Panorawa coming up, have you not.
00:34:23
Speaker 2: We have, indeed the Tonsley Hotel, which might have been one that I forgot to mention before the government knocked on our door two or three years ago and said we're going to need you to move on because we need you for the Torrence to Darlington tunnel project. So we were compulsorily acquired to use that.
00:34:50
Speaker 1: Can I explore that because I was a friend of Rick Collins, who unfortunately passed away, and he had the Jarvis Toy to own a dealership right next door to the Tonsley. How on earth do you negotiate with the government when they obviously offer you a figure which would not be enough. How difficult are those negotiations when they want to compulsively acquire your premises.
00:35:16
Speaker 2: Well, I thought I knew all about compulsory acquisition because I'd watched the castle at least a dozen times, And little did I know. Again how little I knew. I suspect our mutual friend Rick might have negotiated better than I did, but he and I had a lot of phone calls over that period. We eventually both, after having gone through a bit of a financial arm wrestle with the government, settled on a figure and he had to find a new site, which, as you know, he found on Brighton Road. I rode every street and road and any proximity to the Tonsley and came back to our general manager and said, the only place I would want to build an alternative pub is the old tafe site on Goodwood Road, opposite Centennial Park. So we better see if we can buy enough land there to build a pub, which we're in the process of doing.
00:36:17
Speaker 1: Were they going to figures? How big a percentage difference was the initial offer that they made to offer you settled on, will you're able to negotiate up?
00:36:30
Speaker 2: Well, there was a few million difference, and the arm wrestle went on for long enough that the initial valuation lapsed because in the affluction of time, so we insisted upon another valuation which squeezed a little bit more juice out of the lemon.
00:36:52
Speaker 1: So you're moving the ton seat of Panorama. What's happening and what can we expect? What can we expect to see out there?
00:36:58
Speaker 2: Well, naturally you don't. The hotel that you build in twenty twenty five is not the same design as the brewery built in nineteen sixty five. And we're very heavily focused on accommodate the accommodation industry. Accommodation is extremely successful for us in Port Lincoln and Marion, where we built an extra fifty rooms a few years ago, and the Arkabar where we more than double the size of the accommodation offer there. We could only build five or six levels whatever it is at the Panorama, so we've only got seventy seven rooms. I would have liked to build more.
00:37:41
Speaker 1: But such more accommodation than hospitality, is it? Yeah?
00:37:45
Speaker 2: Well, there's two levels of there's two levels of conventional accommodat there's ground floor pub and there's a top floor rooftop bar and rooftop function rooms and three levels of accommodation in between.
00:38:02
Speaker 1: You and Jenny have both been recognized, both being decorated with civilian awards. How did that hit you?
00:38:10
Speaker 2: Initially? Extremely surprised when you are the envelope arrives in the mail and you're told that you've been nominated for an Officer of the Order of Australia or whatever it's called. It's humbling and it's gratifying and humbling. And I wear the badge with pride. Whenever I wear a jacket. It's just not that often.
00:38:35
Speaker 1: We've got one now, and so you should wear a lot of people Peter, you know when it gets to you know, a later years, sort of wind back and smell the roses, travel a bit. Well, are you are you winding back?
00:38:51
Speaker 2: Well, my daughters and son in law would like me to, but now I still like to go to work at every day, and even when we were essentially closed down over COVID, I went to work every day.
00:39:06
Speaker 1: How hard was that?
00:39:08
Speaker 2: I was a very trying, very difficult, trying period. We were fortunate in that our retail, of our drive throughs were able to trade, so I didn't have to be constrained by the travel constrictions because wherever I was going, I was somewhere between a couple of pubs, and so it gave me an excuse to really go wherever I liked. So and because we had staff, notwithstanding we'd had to lay off five hundred or so people, but we had staff working in our drive ins every day, and where we had accommodation, we had these big empty buildings with the two or three staff. So we used to have a only allowed to have ten people in anywhere at a time, So at least once or twice a week we'd invite some eight other friends for dinner who always said yes because they had nothing else to do. And that provided a bit of company for the cook that had to be in the kitchen and for the reception staff, et cetera. And these began the hotels a terrifying time in a commercial sense. Let alone worried about whether you're going to get the COVID on it.
00:40:30
Speaker 1: Do you get a chance to relax in this?
00:40:33
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, we've been I think we've managed our life pretty well. Before we had kids, we bought a i'd go a shack which has gradually become a home at near White Sands, so our kids spent and every weekend a nim just downstream from murray Bridge, Okay, on the river, on the river, on the waterfront.
00:41:02
Speaker 1: So there's amazing milestone fifty years moment, it's amazing, how could be How many people do you employ now?
00:41:09
Speaker 2: About seven hundred?
00:41:11
Speaker 1: Would you be able to another.
00:41:13
Speaker 2: One hundred and fifty or so? When we finished the opening at.
00:41:18
Speaker 1: Pana have you looked beyond panorama?
00:41:21
Speaker 2: We're always alive to that. You know, we're not on a rampant expansion phase or anything, but there are certain things that have certain opportunities happened. Possibly the interesting.
00:41:33
Speaker 1: How important is a footy involvement to you?
00:41:36
Speaker 2: We've had massive fun out of our involvement with the Adelaide Football Club and I was on the board for fourteen years and a lot of very good people come into your life through an involvement with football clubs, and that was certainly my experience in out of our involvement right from nineteen ninety one with the Adelaid Footy Club.
00:42:05
Speaker 1: So that's footy clubs, isn't it?
00:42:07
Speaker 2: Sure is?
00:42:09
Speaker 1: So you're fifty years, you're celebrated. Tell us how you're celebrated. It was at the big dinner that Justin and I didn't get invited, but.
00:42:17
Speaker 2: No, there was. It was limited to three hundred of our closest friends. You yeah, it's certainly other than being told that I had five minutes to speak, which I took fifteen. It was taken over by others, you know, when daughters and son and so on months they our son MC the event. It was a celebration to thank those. Really it became about us, but it was meant to be about the people that had helped us along the fifty year journey to where our company is now.
00:43:02
Speaker 1: It's an amazing journey. Peter a great South Australian born in Victoria but become a great South Australian. The group is omnipresent. You can't miss it. Your reach is extensive within our community. So I'm glad your people were able to convince you to come in and have a chat. Peter. It wasn't that bad, was it.
00:43:25
Speaker 2: No, it's been most enjoyable. You managed it well.
00:43:29
Speaker 1: Bitter Hurley, the executive chairman of the Hurly Hotel Group, celebrating their fiftieth year this year, was my guest. Folks, thank you for joining us.
