Hotel Corones is a heritage-listed hotel at 33 Wills Street, Charleville, Shire of Murweh, Queensland, Australia. It was designed by William Hodgen junior and built from 1924 to 1929 by day labour. It is also known as Corones Hotel Norman. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 1 July 1997.
History
The town of Charleville was surveyed in 1867 following the surveying of a number of pastoral runs in the district in 1863. Sited on the banks of the Warrego River along a natural stock route from New South Wales to Western Queensland, the town was to develop as the major service centre for the surrounding pastoral industry. Bullock teams passed through the town, Cobb & Co established stables (as well as a factory for the construction of mail coaches and buggies and an associated sawmill) and in 1888 Charleville's position as a strategic transport node for the south west was confirmed when it became the terminus for the Western railway line (extended south to Cunnamulla in 1898 and west to Quilpie in 1917).
The first half of the 1920s was a time of economic prosperity in Queensland unrivalled for three decades. The boom was sustained longer in the building sector than in others; and in Brisbane the transformation of the city's central business district was a tangible legacy of the boom. In Charleville the main streets gave an air of solid prosperity to this centre of one of the richest areas of western Queensland:... it has fine hotels, stores, offices of the leading pastoral firms, and a full complement of general business concerns. There is a most attractive School of Arts, Town Hall, [and] three churches ... There is a most excellent club, the "Warrego" ... The fledgling Qantas commenced their first commercial services from the town in 1922 ("replacing" the last Cobb & Co coach which ran in 1920); in 1924 the town turned on electric lights; and in 1926 a new Town Hall was completed. However a severe drought in 1926 described by the Charleville Chamber of Commerce as the worst season known by black or white man with losses of sheep to the enormous extent of eleven millions was to bring the state's pastoral and agricultural sectors to collapse and many rural towns entered a slow decline into the worldwide depression of the 1930s.
On the cusp of the boom/bust, Harry Corones was to commence building his grand vision of hospitality for the west to rival the capital's best hotels. Born on the Greek island of Kythera, Harry "Poppa" Corones arrived in Australia in the early 1900s coming to Charleville by 1909 when he was recorded in the Post Office Directories as a "fruiterer". Reputedly on the encouragement of a brewing company representative, Corones became in 1912 the licensee of the Hotel Charleville, which he operated until 1924.
In 1926 Corones became the registered owner of the Hotel Norman, a single storeyed hotel established located a block south of the Hotel Charleville on the corner of Wills and Galatea Street. In an advertisement in Pugh's Almanac for 1905, proprietor DC McDonald claimed the hotel as:the leading hotel of the southern western line ... the home of the pastoralist, agriculturalist and tourist with lofty cool bedrooms, hot and cold baths, and good paddocking ...Such claims would be later repeated and amplified by Corones regarding his own hotel.