Michael Doohan, an early mail contractor and a former storekeeper of Tankarooka, had opened a store at Weelong in 1873. In January 1874 he obtained a hotel licence and called his new establishment there the “Telegraph”. The licence is reported in the N.S.W. Government Gazette to still be in his name in 1875, but this is obviously a delay in bureaucracy as he had died on 26 October 1874.
Michael’s widow, Margaret, took ownership of the hotel after her husband’s death and it appears she leased the business to a number of different licensees, taking on the licences herself when required.
Christopher Dexter was the first of these. He had the Telegraph for two years before leaving in 1878 to start the short-lived Prince Albert hotel at East Toorale.
In April 1894, a journalist reporting on his travels on a Darling river paddle steamer for the Sydney Mail and New South Wales Advertiser gives a vivid description of the hotel, which was then being run by Ellen Hinds.
“We next pass a hotel, known as the Weelong Hotel. We make a halt here for the purpose of landing a quantity of sawn timber. This hotel has the appearance of a very comfortable one. It is kept by Mrs. Hinds. She has a great collection of native birds, magpies, plovers, and blue bonnets, a lovely little bird, a native of this district, grey, with blue and scarlet tail; the wings are also grey, tipped with scarlet; parrots of all descriptions, cockatoos, aquarians, and numerous other varieties, which I have not seen elsewhere.”
David Greeves obtained the licence for the Telegraph Hotel, Weelong, in October 1896 and held it for the next five years. He later moved up river to run the Travellers Rest at Compadore.
The Telegraph Hotel, Weelong, closed in 1908.