Every day is a fresh event at Cunnamulla’s Club Boutique Hotel, thanks to Peieta Mills’ creative overdrive.
Story Kirsty McKenzie Photos Ken Brass
Like the white queen in Alice in Wonderland, Cunnamulla publican Peieta Mills often imagines 6 impossible things before breakfast. One occurred in 2004 when she was home on holiday from her marketing job for Landmark AWB and she identified abundant untapped opportunities for attracting tourists to south-western Queensland. She started a tour company, Out the Back Australia Tours, bringing guests to the bush and showing them a mix of station life, Indigenous experiences, immersion in the Great Artesian Basin hot springs, opal mining and dinosaur tracking, along with birdwatching, and boat and kayak explorations in the Channel Country.
That prompted Peieta to return to live in her hometown, population 1,200-odd, where she identified another gap, this time in Cunnamulla’s accommodation offerings, catering for visitors who want slightly more creature comforts than regular outback visitors. In 2011, she bought the very down-at-heel Club Boutique Hotel and promptly closed it for a renovation that ended up taking 5 years.
These days, the club is a destination in its own right, a classic country pub with a lot of refinements – an above-average pub menu, specially brewed beers named for local characters, and guest rooms with ensuites, antiques, crisp linen and Persian rugs.
This story excerpt is from Issue #160
Outback Magazine: April/May 2025
