Kangaroo Inn Ruins

A pub for drovers and troopers

On the road between Beachport and Penola stand the limestone walls of the Kangaroo Inn, a wayside pub whose first licence was gazetted to publican John McDonald in January 1861. The inn sat on the busy track from Guichen Bay (Robe) to Mount Gambier, and its rooms, fireplaces and ovens served drovers, bullockies, surveyors, station hands and the mounted constables who escorted prisoners to court sessions in Mount Gambier.

This was the same road walked in the late 1850s by thousands of Chinese migrants who landed at Robe and set out overland for the Victorian goldfields — a story told in our piece on Robe and the Chinese goldfields. An inn at a day's interval on such a route was as much infrastructure as business.

The ruins were entered on the South Australian State Heritage Register in 1988 and carefully stabilised in the early 2000s. They stand on private land beside the road, so admire them from the roadside. For another monument to South East determination, the hand-dug Woakwine Cutting is a short drive towards the coast.