Red Lion Hotel 52/17/2

Red Lion Hotel 52/17/2, a photo by Boroondara Libraries on Flickr.

This photo is part of the City of Boroondara's contribution to the Flickr Friday Photos 2012 challenge under the theme of Wildlife.

The early settlers of Hawthorn (and Boroondara more generally) found lots of unfamiliar wildlife around them. But we don't find any hotels called The Wallaby or The Opossum. Instead they named their hotels as they had done in their places of origin, in this case the Red Lion, an entirely other kind of wildlife.

This 1936 photo of the then delicensed Red Lion in Church Street Hawthorn gives us an idea of the now demolished hotel which was of great local significance as a site for early political and social gatherings fron 1852.