The Robin Hood Hotel, dating back to 1877, is one of the district’s most recognisable old buildings, with a rich and interesting history.
These are my memories of our family’s time there during the 1960s and 1970s.
It was late in 1964 when we left our nice farm on Dore Road, on the outskirts of Pakenham. My mother, father, my three siblings and I moved to the old Robin Hood.
Our family car was a 1955 Vauxhall ute. Betty was the lucky one, sitting up front with Mum and Dad, while us three boys—Con, Frank and I—had to sit in the back under a tarp!
You can see our old Vauxhall ute parked out the front of the Robin Hood in the photograph.
What a place it was.
It was run-down and deserted, except for perhaps the ghosts and rats. There were broken windows, doors had been removed, tanks had rusted and there was no power. There were no floor coverings and no proper cooking facilities.
And then there was the outhouse—the toilet, complete with its resident redback spiders!
This was our new challenge.
My father was 62 years old and looking for a new life for himself and his family when he bought the old Cob and Co coach stop at the junction of the Old Sale Road and Princes Highway at Drouin West Victoria Australia
The building had previously been used as a guest house, but by the late 1950s it had become derelict. Over the years, anything easily removed had disappeared—doors, mantelpieces, pieces of copper pipe and other fittings.
The first jobs were obvious: get the water and power connected and make the place liveable.
My father was a painter and decorator. He had experience working on buildings hundreds of years old in Holland, so he certainly knew about old buildings. But restoring the Robin Hood required money.
He painted many buildings, including the Bunyip Shelley Memorial Hospital and Neerim South Hospital.
In 1965 Mum started a milk bar there. In old photographs you can see the Peters Ice Cream sign on the verandah. She sold ice creams, milkshakes, lemonade, lollies and smokes.
We attended school in Drouin while work continued on the Robin Hood. Dad also continued working as a painter to earn the money needed to restore the old building.
The property itself was originally like a jungle, with tea-tree and bush growing from one corner to the other.
A huge dirt pile, dug out from the Robin Hood’s cellars, made a nice home for the rats.
Later, accommodation units were built—first four on the Drouin side and then another six on the Melbourne side.
Running a motel was hard work for all the family. There were dishes to wash and meals to prepare.
We all had jobs to do. There were briquettes to keep up to the hot-water service and lawns to mow. Life at the Robin Hood was certainly a family affair.
In 1969, I met a man at the Robin Hood Reserve who was touring from Queensland. He told me his name was Smith and that his father had owned the Robin Hood during the 1930s. He also spoke about the Noojee Hotel and the years following the devastating 1939 bushfires.
Timber camps had been established throughout the hills as workers retrieved the mountain ash. The timber workers were a rugged and thirsty lot.
At that time, the Noojee pub did not have a full licence and alcohol could only be served with a meal. Mr Smith told me that the licence was transferred from the Robin Hood to the Noojee Hotel, and the Robin Hood then became a guest house.
There were reminders of the Robin Hood’s much earlier days everywhere.
I was forever digging up old horseshoes.
There weren’t rubbish tips in those early days either. Bottles had simply been smashed and buried across the road, leaving another reminder of the people who had lived, travelled and stopped there long before us.
The old building itself held plenty of history. Douglas fir was used in its construction, and the handmade bricks came from a quarry on the north side of Picnic Point Hill, which can still be seen today. Heavy-gauge roofing iron came from Edinburgh, Scotland.
The original Princes Highway once went around the front of the Robin Hood. When the highway was changed to where it runs today, a land swap took place and the old roadway became part of what we see there today.
Our family remained at the Robin Hood until 1978.
A year later, my father died.
Then, in 1991, life brought me back to the Robin Hood once more. When renovations were being carried out for it to become a hotel again, I was called in to do the painting.
After all those years, I found myself painting the same old building my father had worked so hard to restore.
It seems like yesterday.
Ray Veenstra2026#rex#lovealwayshenry♥️#rayveenstra#familyhistory