Lorraine Robertson's 50 years in the hospitality industry have taken her all over Australia, but Wagga will always be her favourite town.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
She celebrated her 68th birthday on May 12, exactly five decades to the day from her very first shift at the Commercial Hotel in Junee.
Lorraine, who was born and raised in the Riverina town, now lives on the coast, where she is known for her friendly face and warm welcome as the front desk supervisor at The St Georges Country Club.
Known as Lori, she has had many different jobs in the industry in places right across the country, travelling as far north as Darwin.
Her first stint in Wagga in the 1970s saw her work at venues including Romano's and the iconic former Carmody's Royal, which was demolished to make way for the Sturt Mall.
"It was wonderful. You never knew what to expect. It was around the time when discotheques started in Wagga," she said.
Lorraine moved back to Wagga in 1990 as a single mother-of-four and worked at the Kooringal and Victoria hotels and at an Italian restaurant on Johnston Street.
She also worked at famous footballer Arthur Summons' Tolland Hotel and at Hotel Gracelands in Parkes, which was owned by Bob and Anne Steele, founders of the iconic Elvis festival.
She even cooked at a truck stop in Cobar, where roo shooting was the norm.
"My husband at the time was a licensed shooter and I was as good a shot as he was," she said.
She said one of the most noticeable changes was these days there were a lot fewer fights in pubs that needed to be broken up.
"I remember when I was managing the pub in Wagga, I got in bad fights there because I never took a backward step from bullies," she said.
When Lorraine joined the industry, many pubs still segregated women and children from men.
"Now they have huge beer gardens to get the families in. Even the way they serve meals now has totally changed. You'd go to a pub and have a pub meal and it was always good. But it was like you'd have at home," she said.
A self-described empath, she cherishes her time in hospitality because she is a people person who couldn't work in any other industry.
"I loved being around people and I couldn't be stuck away in an office which I had been a few times before I was 18," she said.
She thanked her current husband Clive Robertson for being her stalwart, a person she wished she had met decades before she did.
And she wanted to thank The Country Club for supporting her recovery after a bad fall 12 years ago.
