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Mick Vodanovich
Mick Vodanovich was a musician and a publican, or, as Ron Davidson calls him, 'a pubkeeper and a showman'. Ron writes about him as the licensee of His Majesty's Hotel and the Federal Hotel, but I remember him also running Cleo's, the Cleopatra Hotel, as I remember having a drink with him in his bar there. My Dad was a muso (he played bass) and I'm pretty sure he had a gig or two with Mick. He was a good person.
Goodbye to a Fremantle Legend
Davidson:
Mick Vodanovich’s funeral on 8 February was Fremantle writ large. The service was conducted by Father Ted Miller; there were priests and jockeys, many of them called Miller; and Mick’s first violin teacher. And the Mayor of Fremantle was there looking very young. There were also accordion players and violinists, and music everywhere. Father Ted’s father trained Jack Vodanovich’s horses; Jack was Mick’s father. Mick died after a short illness. He was an entertainer and a pubkeeper and a showman. They used to call him Fremantle’s Mick Edgeley although it was thought he gave himself the name. He took over His Majesty’s Hotel which he called His Lordship’s Larder after the original building on the site. He wanted this tough pub to be a place where judges, workers, priests, nuns, sex workers, actors, acrobats and architects could be comfortable with one another. There must be no swearing. Mick served some of the best meals in town but was really the victim of his own success. His rates went up, so he moved to the Federal. He invented green beer for St Patrick’s Day. And the same thing happened. When I last talked with Mick he thought he was getting close to returning from Spearwood to Fremantle even though he had his doubts about the ‘new’ Fremantle. He said it was a foreign country. He never made it.
Ron Davidson, Newsletter, Fremantle History Society, Spring 2010: 6-7
References and Links
Davidson, Ron 2007, Fremantle Impressions, FACP: 278, 281.
Image from the FHS Newsletter, from The Herald.
This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally created on 16 July, 2016 and hosted at freotopia.org/people/vodanovich.html (it was last updated on 16 March, 2024), and has been edited since it was imported here (see page history). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.