Have you heard the one about the man who walked into a bar looking for a guitar and ended up buying the pub?

It might sound like the set-up for an old joke, but that’s just what happened to musician John Matthews when he visited Boyup Brook, 270 kilometres south of Perth, last year.

“I was searching for this particular type of instrument called a parlour guitar,” he said.

“I rang this fellow and he said, ‘Come over to Boyup Brook’, which I had heard of but hadn’t been to.

“This guy wearing a cowboy hat was sort of peering out at me and I was peering out at him and I thought … that must be the guy.”

It turned out the man in the cowboy hat wasn’t who he was expecting to meet.

The man was a country realtor selling the town’s derelict hotel, not the guitar.

“I came over and [he] started showing me around the hotel and I was fascinated by it, architecturally it’s unique,” Matthews said.

The guitar seller didn’t show up that day and Matthews says the instrument is still for sale.

‘I just shook the guy’s hand’

While his hospitality experience was limited to a stint as a 19-year-old student at a Melbourne pub, a handshake deal was struck with the country realtor, and Matthews took ownership of the hotel.

The next call was to his partner back in Perth, to inform her of his purchase

“I said: ‘I just made an offer on a hotel. Are you in? Because I just shook the guy’s hand’, and she said, ‘where is it?’

“I told her Boyup Brook and after a big pause, she said, ‘That’s not a bad little town actually, that’d be OK.'”

The hotel has changed hands half a dozen times since it was built in 1907 and has undergone various renovations including three major additions.

By last year it had fallen into a serious state of disrepair.

Matthews and other volunteers went to painstaking lengths to repair the damage while maintaining its rural heritage.

“There was a huge hole in the floor and a quite dangerous 3-metre [fall] into the cellar,” he said. 

“The floor you’re on now is from a house in Katanning and that floor over there is from a shearing shed from a local pastoralist.”

More than just a hotel 

Matthews said the work paid off, and except for a few punters looking to play pool — there is no longer a pool table in the pub — the community support had been “overwhelming”.

“The hotel was much more prominent in the town psyche as a place of community, as opposed to what I actually had in mind,” he said.

“In a town that hasn’t had a hotel for approaching 15 to 18 months, having a place where people can come, commune, eat and bring their families, that has been a bit of an eye-opener for me.”

Renovations are still underway, with about 16 rooms needing to be upgraded before the hotel can fully reopen, but Matthews is confident in the undertaking despite the work ahead.

“Everybody here wants the hotel open because when people come on the weekends, they’ve got somewhere to stay,” he said.

“That means they go to the local museum, they go to the local park, and that’s really lifting their local community.”

At 69, Matthews hopes the hotel will once again become a significant part of the community, even as he eyes retirement in his new home.

“I’ll probably be here forever, but I don’t want to do the actual governance part of it … it’s exhausting,” he said.

“And … I don’t actually drink.”