“The only drink for man or beast for 100 miles in 1862 journeying downwards,” recalled one early settler of his travels in a dry season.
The only known license for a hotel at the Travellers Rest was granted to Frederick Heron in 1868 and it expired the following year. But John Colless was most certainly operating a public house or grog shanty at the waterhole for at least some month’s prior.
On Boxing Day in 1867, a man named Charles Gardener, described as a “would-be bushranger” stuck up Mooculta Station, the home of Russell Barton, stealing a horse, gun and ammunition. Barton’s wife Jane told how the desperate Gardener, knife in hand, had threatened to burn the place down if she failed to deliver him firearms, caps, powder and bullets.
Emboldened, that evening Gardener tried his luck again.
“On the evening of the same day, Gardener stuck-up the inmates of Mr. John Colless’s public-house, situated at the Model Huts, on the Bogan River. Here he found his match in a man named Richard Jones, who took the horse, gun, &c., from him. By some means Gardener managed to escape; but, thanks to the vigilance of Senior-constable James Burns, he was speedily arrested.”
Soon after this, we find John Colless living in Bourke where his brother had taken ownership of William Sly’s Bourke Hotel, now renamed Tattersall’s.
It was John Colless who opened up the road between Bourke and Cobar copper fields and in 1975 he pioneered a coach service from Bourke to Hillston on the Lachlan River some 300 miles away
But in September the following year, Colless lost his life in an accident while driving a coach into Cobar. He was thrown from his seat and fell under the horse. He received a kick to the temple from one of the horses and died from his injuries. One of his coach passengers was also killed after being thrown from the vehicle.