The second storey balcony no longer exists, the beer garden is now a quarter of its original size, replaced by a parking lot, and the drive-through bottle shop is gone. Yet the Leopold Hotel still holds some of its original charm.

The building’s original black and white tile flooring and fireplace remain, the battle-scarred band stage which hosted acts such as Jimmy Barnes and Daryl Braithwaite still occupies the same spot and the iconic bar, now painted a vibrant red, stands to attention centre stage.

The wooden tables still preserve the scratches, knicks and watermarks of previous inhabitants, tattoos of the past, and the air is damp with the sharp smell of alcohol and the lingering scent of cigarette smoke that has seeped into the rendered brick walls.

Tony and Phil Buhagiar probably could tell you about some of those nicks – the pub was the family home for 28 years. The brothers have returned to the Leopold, sinking into a beaten leather couch that seems too low to the ground for any semblance of comfort, to reminisce before the doors shut indefinitely. 

The pair’s father John was the licensee of the hotel in the early 1970s with the family living upstairs. Tony eventually became the owner when the lease came up in 1989 and was in charge until he leased the building to Coles in 2005.

“It was a really good community hotel always full of regulars, and we used to sponsor a lot of sporting clubs, it was very much a community type hotel full of locals,” says Tony. “The public bar was always full on a Friday where you couldn’t move, whereas now it’s just not the same but there were great memories.”

The brothers have rarely been back to the bar since getting out of the business but the return visit stirs some fond memories. “A lot of people grew up here in the old days; we’ve got friends who would stay out in their car as kids while their dad came in and had a few beers, he’d bring them out a squash and they’d sit for hours playing in the beer garden,” says Phil. “It was part of the fabric of the community, the pub, that’s not the case now.”

The Leopold Hotel closed indefinitely in October, when the current management’s lease expired, though there are plans to re-lease the building. The pub’s furniture remains, at least for now.

Flaming start

Opened in 1907, the Leopold was one of the first buildings constructed along the Canning Highway strip, even before the road was sealed. According to Kimberley Scenes, the hotel’s original owner was a man named Leopold Hirsohn, who was part of the Halls Creek Gold rush during 1886 and was a storekeeper for more than 20 years before starting the hotel.

Things didn’t get off to a great start. The hotel almost burned down in its first year when the heated bricks caught fire. According to an August edition of The Empire newspaper, the floor of the sitting room became embroiled in flames, resulting in £20 worth of damage.

One of the more colourful stories in a century of tales tall and (mostly) true involved a drunk (unsurprisingly) and a swordfish. According to a June 1908 edition of The Daily News, a patron was struck with a swordfish during a dispute at the bar.

Hotel licensee Richard Phillippi refused to serve James M’Donald after he entered the pub intoxicated. But he was handed a beer by another patron, which soon led to a confrontation. M’Donald was accused of using abusive language and throwing a bottle, while Phillippi reportedly used a swordfish to strike M’Donald on the head, stating in his police interview “I struck one man with the flat side of it”. M’Donald was fined 10 shillings for using obscene language and Phillippi fined £1 for assaulting M’Donald.

By the mid 1910s, the pub had become a popular meeting place for people waiting for the tram to Point Walter. The Fremantle tramline ran along Canning Highway from 1905 before closing in 1952 due to frequent maintenance issues and increasing operating costs.

A decade later, the then licensee JJ Fitzgerald was spruiking the area’s charms as a holiday spot, offering “first-class” accommodation. During this time, the hotel had a large outdoor space with an orchard where visiting circuses could be seen camping.

The Leopold was back in the headlines in 1934 when vandals stole three dozen bottles of beer, and again in 1954 when a steel safe containing £4000 was stolen. The perpetrators climbed a ladder to the upstairs bedroom of the hotel’s licensee, removing the safe and dropping it 15 feet to the ground before carting it away in a vehicle.

Perhaps the hotel’s most famous patron, Bon Scott was a Leopold regular in the 1970s. The AC/DC frontman even based one of the band’s hits, Highway to Hell, on Canning Highway. The strip earned the unflattering nickname “Death Valley” due to drunken patrons staggering across the road looking for a bite to eat at the deli and occasionally being clipped by oncoming traffic.

Bringing back the buzz

When Tony Buhagiar took over the reins from owner Harry Cohney in 1989, he placed a heavy emphasis on food and functions, with weekly quiz nights, darts tournaments and karaoke drawing patrons in from all over Perth. The Leopold was thriving once more.

The pub featured a drive-through bottle shop, one of the first of its kind, which Tony says was one of the busiest in WA. Live jazz kept patrons entertained in the beer garden on a Sunday afternoon until a neighbour across the road complained about the noise. The council shut it down.

“I really enjoyed being in the pub, it was good fun, and it was always a challenge because you had to come up with different ideas,” he says. “We changed the themes of it a lot over the time we were here because you’ve got to sort of move on and as an old hotel you had to come up with new ideas.”

The pub was a community centre where people came to socialise and network.  “Pubs have changed a lot in the last 30 years, the younger generation don’t drink anywhere near as much as there’s no pressure to have to drink, whereas in our younger days it was,” he says. “The pressure was on you, everyone drank.”

Kathy Grant, who worked as a bartender at the Leopold from 1989 to 1991, has similar memories. 

“At that time, smoking was not frowned upon, so it was everywhere. They were smoking at the bar and all over the place and then we’d go home smelling of it,” she says. “We were sweeping up their butts off the floor, and the customer service was not so much towards the responsible service of alcohol, it was more to encourage them to stay.”

Grant believes the pub also offered many patrons much-needed company.

“It’s where they got to talk to people and hear about what was going on and feel connected to the community,” she says.

With the recent announcement that Fremantle’s Bar Orient will also close at the end of the year, Grant is sad to see these historic establishments go.

“When you take that away from those people that do live alone, that then makes them become more isolated because it’s like, ‘where am I going to go’,” she says. “They know where their chair is, where their spot is and I suppose maybe they feel like they’ve lost their spot in their community.”

Making memories

Kate Hoskins has been coming back to the Leopold since she was a kid, albeit not to drink. “Every time my mum went through the drive through to buy alcohol for her and my dad the staff there used to give us little rolls of lollies, so we used to always want to tag along,” she says.

Hoskins grew up in Bicton and remembers driving past it from a very young age. She worked at Stammers Supermarket just up the street during the late 80s and lived in a block of flats adjacent to the pub after moving out of home.

“It always struck me as one of those working-class, no-nonsense sorts of places but you could still have a good time, and it didn’t feel rough,” she says. “A lot of the pubs in Fremantle at the time were a little rough around the edges; the Leo never felt like that, it always felt like a happy and safe place.”

While she will be sad if the hotel closes permanently, Grant is grateful for the time she spent there.  “Look at the memories it’s brought back to me, it still makes me laugh, still makes me smile, and that’s what memories are about,” she says.