Identification
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Local Hotel Dig

We had been looking for a Hotel Site on a particular creek for some time know, it is listed in some of my reference material and we have searched for a while in the area it is listed at but with no luck. We decided that maybe the surveyor that made the reference note in the 1860's had made an error and was not where he thought he was, in fact he was at an area that is very similar to the referenced listing down river. After many weeks of searching the river for this hotel site we finally found it, it is very similar geographically to the listed reference just the wrong spot. Our first trip there the water was still quite deep as we are just coming out of our winter season, the base of the river was literally covered with broken glass, we found hundreds of broken ring seal beers, black glass bottles, Cognacs and china and teapots etc. On our first day we did not find any good whole bottles, mostly plain bottles.


We came back a few days later and it was still pretty deep, Toby found a Gaelic Whisky bottle and a Brooks Lemon Squash with the rings around the neck this is the early version of the Brook's Lemnos bottle and is quite rare. Also Toby found a Blue Castor Oil and a Whirly Salad Oil. I found a Wilcox Bros Codd bottle with the large W.B trade mark again this is a very rare bottle with only a few complete ones known.

    

We tried our luck a few weeks later knowing that the water level had dropped considerably in that time and had much better luck as we could get right down into the bottom of the river. Toby found the first good bottle a Jas Dixon Lamont Patent, we had also found a few broken Warner's Safe Cures as well so it was getting exciting, we were pulling out heaps of plain bottles and we had found a few broken sandblasted beers so we were paying close attention to all the ring seal beers because it is hard to see the sandblasted trade marks when the bottles are wet. I had the next find which was a very light Honey Amber Warner's Safe Cure four Cities.
We were finding lots good broken bottles and as there was an orchard just up on the hill above us there were also a lot of broken fruit jars including a few Clipper Jars and Pomona Jars. The people who ran the hotel also used to make there own fruit jars by ringing the bottles, heating a loop of wire up to red hot and cutting the bottle off at the neck, and there were some good bottles that had been ringed including a Blogg Bros Cordial and a heap of Larger Bier and Foster Bros Beer bottles. They always seemed to ring the good bottles and through the plain ones into the river whole?

    

The next bottle found was mine and what a beauty it was, a Hoile Mackey & Co Russian Stomach Bitters, this is a Melbourne Bottle from 1879 extremely rare. I have a habit of holding the bottles under the water to see if I can identify them by feel before I bring them to the surface, with this one I said "it's a Bitters" and Toby was about to hit me with his probe because I held it under the surface for so long. After another hour or so many more plain bottles had been recovered, then I found a G.H. Bennett Dark Green Wrap Top Beer a very good Aussie beer bottle, after much rejoicing, we called it a day.

On another day Toby and I went to the same spot and Toby found J.P. Hill Torpedo and I found another Warner's Safe Cure four cities not quite as light as the first one but still a nice honey amber one. There were heaps more run of the mill bottle found like Mitchell’s Whisky bottles and Gilby Gin Bottles, Rosella Bottles etc. We have been back a few times now and have not found much so it must be time to move onto the next site me thinks!