The criteria
Anyone can list pubs. What makes a trail worth driving is that every stop had to clear a stated standard first — and that you can read the standard and hold us to it.
This is version 1.0, and it is frozen. Edge cases are logged rather than quietly resolved, so the rules cannot drift to fit an inconvenient pub.
In, if all four hold
- Licensed premises built before 1940.
- Building substantially original — verandah, facade and public bar layout still legible.
- Still trading and open to the public.
- You can walk into the front bar and order a beer without booking.
Automatically in, regardless
- Listed on a state heritage register.
- Continuously licensed 100+ years, even if the building was rebuilt.
Out
- Gutted interiors where only the facade survives.
- Now purely a restaurant or function venue.
- New builds in heritage style.
- Closed pubs — these go to the Last Drinks register instead, not the canon.
Gaming rooms: included, and labelled
Pokies are not an exclusion. They are a data field and a filter. We record the count of operating machines — not entitlements, which overstate what you actually walk into — and show it with its source and date.
Where a gaming room has changed a pub's character we say so architecturally, never morally: the gaming lounge occupies what was the dining room. You can also filter them out entirely.
How the rules get applied
- Answers are binary. The value of this is that you can trust it without footnotes.
- Every record stores why it was included or excluded, and by which rule.
- Pubs that just miss out stay in the database marked excluded. Deleting the near-misses would hide our working.
A stop on a published trail must be an included pub. There are no exceptions granted because a route was otherwise convenient — if a trail needs a stop that fails these rules, the trail is wrong.