Community & Business
5 March, 2026
Publican turned author visits Oakey Library
Former Charleville identity Frances Harding visited Oakey Library on Monday afternoon to give a talk about her book The Accidental Publican.
Frances told the story of how she had arrived in Charleville in 1984 as a nurse who had just given birth to her eighth child.
Chasing a dream, her husband Gordon had bought the lease to The Sportsman Hotel, and told Frances she would be running the pub, while he worked as a chemist at the Charleville Hospital.
One of Frances’ first regular customers was Sylvia Ferguson, a woman who had moved to Charleville after being released from a 10-year stint in prison for conspiring to murder her husband Roy at their mansion at Hamilton, Brisbane in 1953.
After a while, Gordon, “always looking at the horizon not the ground”, decided to buy Charleville’s flagship institution across the street, the Hotel Corones.
Gordon quit his job to run the pub, where Fran’s small group of regulars, who had come in to make fun of her as new publican, now migrated across the road to the Corones to make fun of their next target, Gordon.
The Corones had been founded in the 1920s by a Greek immigrant Harry “Poppa” Corones and his nephew Jim.
The huge building, which takes up almost the length of a whole block has played host to visiting royalty twice, and also welcomed noted pilots Amy Johnson and Charles Kingsford-Smith in its heyday.
By 1985 when the Hardings took over, the Corones was run down and looking shabby.
Leaving the Sportsman to work with Gordon, Frances took it upon herself to go about restoring the pub to its former glory.
She began running history tours, which were a big hit.
In 2001, she sold the pub and has since written two books in her retirement, The Accidental Australians about the Corones family, and The Accidental Publican, which looks at her experiences running the hotel.
