Stats and facts on Australian pubs

In 1943 Dan Sheahan wrote the poem 'A Pub Without Beer' at the Day Dawn Hotel in Ingham, Queensland, after visiting American servicemen drank the place dry.

Slim Dusty's 1957 recording of 'A Pub With No Beer' became the first gold record by an Australian artist and hit No. 1 in Australia in 1958. Songwriter Gordon Parsons said his lyrics were about the Cosmopolitan Hotel at Taylors Arm, NSW, now renamed The Pub With No Beer.

From 1916, pubs in SA, NSW, Victoria and Tasmania had to shut at 6pm, sparking a daily rush between knock-off time and closing known as the six o'clock swill. Tasmania dropped it in 1937, NSW in 1955, Victoria in 1966 and SA last of all in 1967.

Order a 285 ml beer and it's a middy in Sydney and Perth, a pot in Melbourne and Brisbane, a handle in Darwin, a ten in Hobart and a schooner in Adelaide. A schooner nearly everywhere else is 425 ml, which Adelaide calls a pint.

The Kelly Gang's last stand took place at Ann Jones' Glenrowan Inn in Victoria on 27 and 28 June 1880, where the gang held more than 60 hostages before police set the inn alight.

On 17 October 1854, angry miners burned down James Bentley's Eureka Hotel in Ballarat, one of the events that led to the Eureka Stockade that December.

You can't miss Normanton's National Hotel, better known as the Purple Pub. It was first painted mauve in 1968 and has worn its current bold purple since 1979. Local legend says the paint was held up by floods and arrived a shade bolder than ordered.

The Norman Hotel, a Woolloongabba pub since 1889, has long billed itself as 'Brisbane's Worst Vegetarian Restaurant', which tells you how seriously it takes its steak.

Out the back of the Royal Melbourne Hotel on Bourke Street grows an old pear tree, a survivor of the colonial Government Storehouse garden, moved to the hotel's courtyard in 1987. It's on the National Trust's tree register, and believed to be the only pear tree in Melbourne's CBD.

Coober Pedy's Desert Cave Hotel bills itself as the only international underground hotel. Since 1988, guests have been sleeping, and drinking, in rooms dug out of the sandstone.

Our test for a truly beachfront pub: you can walk from the bar to the sand without crossing a road or anyone else's land. Only a handful pass, like the Cabarita Beach Hotel in northern NSW, the Portsea Hotel, which backs onto Port Phillip Bay, and the Endeavour Tavern at Lancelin, WA.

Broadway's Agincourt Hotel, a grand corner pub from 1897, says it became Australia's first carbon-neutral, 'greenhouse friendly' pub back in 2007.

Marrickville's Bob Hawke Beer & Leisure Centre honours the prime minister who, as an Oxford student in the mid-1950s, sculled two and a half pints of beer in about 11 seconds and made the Guinness Book of Records. It's usually called a yard of ale, though he drank it from a college sconce pot.