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The Female Publican Breathing New Life Into An Old Pub
The Stanley has spent 172 years as a pub. Sally Wright is turning it back into a meeting place.
On a crisp August afternoon in Stanley, the fire is going and the first glass of Gosset arrives with an oyster.
Soon, Richard Cornish and Max Allen are taking us backwards through time: Champagne, gold, appetite, the native oyster reefs that once fringed Victoria and the enormous hunger that followed the gold rush. We eat, drink, listen. At the end of the afternoon, bagpipes strike up and we follow them into the garden, carrying empty oyster shells on paper plates. One by one, we tip them into a waiting pit. Behind a pub that has stood since 1854, we bury them.
The gesture stayed with me. Not because a few shells returned to the earth can repair what was lost from Victoria’s coastline long ago, but because, for several hours, The Stanley made us pay attention: to what we were eating and drinking, where it came from, what happened here before us, the people beside us, the patch of country beneath our feet.
Stanley is good at holding its ghosts. More than 5,000 people crowded onto this High Country plateau during the gold rush; today, 371 live here. Old diggings remain in the forest. Orchards of chestnut, apple and walnut took root after the fever subsided. The pub survived it all.
I grew up in north-east Victoria, so Stanley has never felt like somewhere waiting to be discovered. Everyone within about 30 kilometres seems to know this pub, or has a story about it, or loves someone who does. Places like this settle into you long before anybody thinks to call them a destination. They belong to roads you know by instinct, cold afternoons, fruit trees, old buildings and that deep, almost bodily familiarity of a landscape that has been mapping itself onto your life for years.
Its publican, Sally Wright, understands that instinctively. Alongside her is business partner and front-of-house manager Annabel McKay, dry, funny and deeply at home in the room, helping give The Stanley its distinctly female-led energy without ever needing to announce it.
Between them, Sally and Annabel have renewed The Stanley without stripping away what made it worth loving in the first place. From the road it remains the old yellow-ochre pub beneath corrugated iron, wisteria working its way along the verandah. Inside, teal walls hold elaborate old mirrors, timber tables, mismatched chairs, rugs, plants and an apple-box bar crowded with bottles from nearby. One room is darker, almost bohemian; the sunroom changes the mood again with daylight. Much of the building has been deliberately left alone, including what Sally calls its “clunky” floor plan, the separate rooms, alcoves and extensions accumulated over generations. Nothing has been smoothed into tasteful regional beige, and for that we say thank you.
Outside, the property keeps going: garden, picnic tables, festoon lights, courtyard, terrace, then a tree-lined paddock beyond. Before pub life, Wright worked backstage at festivals including Big Day Out and Splendour in the Grass, and sees bringing musicians into Stanley as her small part in keeping live music alive in regional communities.
The Audreys played here in August; days later, Richard Cornish and Max Allen filled the place with Champagne and oysters. The pub has also hosted Adam Shand and Daniel Saunders for a live recording of Real Crime, drawing an audience from Wodonga, Melbourne, Ocean Grove and Adelaide. In a town this small, that much coming and going should feel improbable. The Stanley makes a tiny town feel bigger without making it feel any less like home.
Sally and Annabel’s fingerprints are all over the place. Sally has put edamame on the menu as “ed-a-mam-ay”; the website tells guests with serious allergies to bring their EpiPen and a “self preservation plan”. The house sense of humour is dry and slightly sideways. The care underneath it is not.
In the kitchen, chef Shauna Stockwell brings an upbringing in Fiji and Thailand, years spent in Australian kitchens and time under David Thompson in Bangkok. Stanley met her halfway. When she first arrived, locals came to the back door carrying containers of morels, walnuts and whatever else the season had produced, sometimes swapping their haul for a bottle of wine.
Here, dinner lands and the room narrows to the table. The red duck curry is magnificent, deep and fragrant, its sauce made for spooning over more rice than you intended to eat. Fried mushrooms arrive hot and craggy with chilli and lime leaf. Pumpkin seedy crunch bites disappear almost immediately, dragged through yellowbean satay sauce and coriander until the plate is clean.
This is the part of The Stanley I almost resent having to describe. The food is so good that elaborating on it starts to feel like getting in the way. It doesn’t need a thesis; it needs more rice. This is food for reaching across the table: half of someone else’s mushroom, another spoonful of curry, the final bite everybody has privately decided belongs to them. By then nobody is discussing technique or provenance. You’re too busy eating.
And dinner is only one part of the day here. Next door, the cafe and store start earlier, with coffee moving across tables, sandwiches leaving in paper bags and homemade sweets disappearing from the cabinet. It’s cramped and bustling, all elbows, chatter and warmth. I ate a baklava cheesecake here that I have thought about with unreasonable frequency since: honey, nuts, cream cheese, salt and crunch.
Then there are the fridges, laden with food from the pub kitchen: curries, pies, soups, whole dinners waiting to be taken home. On our visit there was a Tuscan white bean soup that I devoured back home. The selection shifts with whatever Sally and the kitchen are cooking, craving or have found in a cookbook and fallen for.
Sally’s version of the publican might feel entirely her own, but she has more historical company than the mythology of the Australian pub would have us believe. Women ran Victorian hotels in remarkable numbers; by 1906, they accounted for 55 per cent of Melbourne hotel licensees. Somewhere along the way, we simply became better at remembering the bloke behind the bar. Which, rude.
Wright belongs to that lineage without needing to inherit the old script along with the keys. Her version of the job is practical and generous: keep people fed, keep the fire lit, make room for music, pull up another chair. Then get on with the night. It is, in its own way, how a pub survives 172 years without becoming a museum piece. She has taken what was already here, the bar, the old rooms, the town’s habit of gathering around them, and made space for the next generation to leave its mark. The history remains, but it is still being added to.
In a tiny High Country town, The Stanley is the light left on.
FAQs About The Stanley Pub
Stanley is a tiny High Country town around 10 kilometres south of Beechworth, surrounded by chestnut, cherry and apple orchards. The 2021 Census counted just 371 residents, though weekends at the pub can make the place feel considerably busier.
A 172-year-old country pub with a decidedly Sally Wright spin: excellent Asian-influenced cooking, regional wine and beer, a cafe-store loaded with house-made cakes and heat-at-home meals, fires in winter and one of those sprawling gardens that makes another drink feel inevitable. The pub dates to 1854.
Very much so. The garden, pub, store and back paddock are all used for events, from weddings and dinners to gigs and one-off talks. The Audreys brought their Between Last Night and Us 20th-anniversary tour here in August 2026, while recent programming has also included Richard Cornish and Max Allen’s Champagne-and-oyster afternoon and a live Real Crime recording.
Start with the pub’s Experiences page, which is where special events are listed; at the moment it says to “check back soon”, so there are no future experiences formally posted there yet. I’d also keep an eye on @stanleypub_vic on Instagram, where the team shares gigs, one-offs, specials and the more spontaneous things happening around the pub.
For the full Stanley effect, make it a long Saturday: coffee and cake or an incredible chicken-pesto toasted sandwich at the cafe, a wander around town, lunch or dinner at the pub and whatever happens to be unfolding in the garden. The cafe currently opens Thursday to Monday, while the pub trades Wednesday evening through Sunday. Always check current hours before making the drive.
If The Stanley Pub has you plotting a High Country escape, spend a little longer in the neighbourhood. Our guide to Beechworth covers the restaurants, wine bars, shops and stays worth building a weekend around, while our edit of the best country pubs in Victoria has plenty more fireside tables, excellent kitchens and regional locals worth taking the long way for.
