There is a chapter of Australian hospitality history that has been largely overlooked. It is not about famous hotels or celebrity chefs or men with grand ambitions. It is about women. Dozens of them. Working on a single street in a small mountain town, running businesses that defined an era.
Between the early 1900s and the Second World War, Katoomba's Lurline Street was lined with guesthouses. Most of them were owned, leased, or managed by women. Many of these women were widows. Some were unmarried. Almost all of them built their businesses out of necessity, ran them with extraordinary competence, and left behind a legacy that shaped the town, the street, and the very idea of a Blue Mountains holiday.
Their names are mostly forgotten. Their story deserves to be told.
The World That Made Them
To understand the guesthouse women of Katoomba, you need to understand the world they inhabited. In the early 1900s, options for women who needed to earn a living were severely limited. Teaching, nursing, domestic service, and factory work were the main choices. Running a business was difficult. Married women faced legal barriers to property ownership and financial independence. Widows were left to fend for themselves and their children with whatever assets remained.
But there was one kind of business that society considered acceptable for a woman to run: a boarding house or guesthouse. It was, after all, just an extension of the domestic sphere. Cooking, cleaning, making beds, welcoming guests. Women's work, or so the thinking went.
What this framing overlooked was the sheer commercial skill required to operate a guesthouse successfully. These women were managing properties, handling finances, employing staff, marketing their establishments, negotiating with suppliers, and competing with dozens of rivals. They were businesswomen in everything but name.
And Katoomba, in the early twentieth century, was the perfect place for them.
Why Katoomba?
By 1900, the railway had been running from Sydney to the Blue Mountains for over thirty years. The grand hotels, like the Carrington, had established Katoomba as the premier mountain resort. But the Carrington charged premier prices. As the Australian middle class grew more prosperous and more mobile, a gap opened in the market: visitors who wanted a mountain holiday but could not afford a grand hotel.
Guesthouses filled that gap perfectly. They were smaller, more affordable, and more intimate than hotels. They offered full board: breakfast, lunch, and dinner included in the tariff. Guests stayed for a week, a fortnight, sometimes a month. They were treated almost as members of the household.
The economics worked particularly well on Lurline Street. The northern end of the street was close to the railway station, where every guest arrived. The southern end led to Echo Point and the Three Sisters, the main attraction. Properties along the street were within easy reach of both. And as the guesthouse culture grew, Lurline Street developed a critical mass. Having multiple guesthouses on one street was not a disadvantage. It was a draw. Visitors knew that Lurline Street was where you stayed.
The properties themselves were often modest. A large weatherboard house, perhaps originally built as a private residence, could be converted into a guesthouse with relatively little modification. Add a few extra bedrooms, extend the dining room, and you were in business. The capital requirements were low. The barriers to entry, for a woman with determination and a house, were manageable.
May Hudson and Wadi Shaifa
One of the most remarkable stories on Lurline Street belongs to May Hudson. In 1916, with her husband Ernest serving overseas with the Australian Light Horse in the First World War, May commissioned the construction of a three-storey Mediterranean-style house at 2 Lurline Street. She named it Wadi Shaifa, after an Egyptian watercourse, a nod to where Ernest was serving.
The house was completed in 1917, and May did not wait for Ernest to come home before putting it to work. By 1921, she had converted Wadi Shaifa into holiday-let apartments, one of the earliest such operations on Lurline Street. She also donated land adjacent to the property for what would become Kingsford Smith Memorial Park.
May Hudson was not a widow driven by desperation. She was a woman of means making a business decision while her husband was at war. The house she built still stands at the top of Lurline Street, a three-storey testament to her ambition and her independence.
Emily Gearin and The Eldon
Emily Gearin's story is different in the details but similar in its essence. In 1924, Emily purchased two cottages on Lurline Street and set about creating a boarding house. She engaged a Mrs Webb to manage the establishment, which became known as The Eldon.
The decision to purchase two properties and combine them into one business shows a commercial mind at work. Emily was not simply taking in lodgers in a spare room. She was acquiring assets, planning a conversion, hiring a manager, and creating a new enterprise. The Eldon at its peak was a functioning business with multiple staff and a steady flow of guests.
Mrs Webb, the manager, is another figure worth noting. She was a professional hospitality manager at a time when such a role was not recognised as a career for women. How many Mrs Webbs were there across Katoomba's guesthouses? Dozens, probably. Women who ran the day-to-day operations while the official records listed someone else as proprietor.
The Eldon still stands on Lurline Street today, though it is now vacant and derelict. Its empty windows are a reminder of how quickly a thriving business can be forgotten.
Fanny Allibone and Kapsalie
Further south on Lurline Street, at number 148, stands a Federation Bungalow that was built in 1915 by Mrs Fanny Allibone. She named it Cheltenham. It is a gracious house, carefully designed, and it speaks to a woman who had both taste and resources.
Around 1940, the property was acquired by the Varipatis family, Greek migrants who renamed it Kapsalie after their hometown in Greece. The house is now heritage-listed. Its history traces the arc of Katoomba itself: from the Anglo-Australian guesthouse culture of the early 1900s through the waves of European migration that enriched the town's character after the war.
But it begins with Fanny Allibone. A woman who built a house, gave it a name, and made it a place where people could stay.
The Pattern
Across Lurline Street and throughout Katoomba, the pattern repeats. A woman, often widowed, sometimes married to a man who was away or unable to work, takes control of a property and turns it into a guesthouse. She does the cooking, or she hires a cook. She makes the beds, or she employs a maid. She greets the guests at the station, or she sends a cabby. She manages the accounts, negotiates with suppliers, advertises in the Sydney papers, and competes for custom.
The Cecil at 25 Lurline Street, originally the Mount View, opened in 1912. The Clarendon opened in 1921. Villers Bret opened the same year. The Majestic. Felton Woods Manor. Sans Souci. Astor House. The Palais Royale. Each one had a story. Each one, more often than not, had a woman at its centre.
By the 1920s, Katoomba had over 60 guesthouses operating simultaneously. The town's population was small, perhaps a few thousand permanent residents. The number of women running accommodation businesses, relative to the total population, was extraordinary. It may have been the highest concentration of female-run hospitality businesses in Australia.
What a Guesthouse Holiday Looked Like
To appreciate what these women were providing, picture a typical guesthouse stay in the 1920s or 1930s.
You arrived at Katoomba station by train from Sydney. On the platform, a row of cabbies waited, the most famous being Harry Peckman, who knew every guesthouse in town. Your cabby loaded your trunk and drove you to your guesthouse, where you were met at the door by the proprietress or her manager.
Your room was simple but comfortable. A bed, a washstand, a wardrobe. Perhaps a view of the mountains from the window. The house was heated by fireplaces, later by wood stoves, and the mountain chill was part of the experience. You dressed for dinner.
Meals were communal. You sat at a long table with the other guests, and the food came from the kitchen in courses. Breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner. The cooking was done on a wood-fired range, and the menus were hearty: roast meats, vegetables, puddings, scones, jam, cream. The labour involved in feeding a houseful of guests three times a day, seven days a week, was immense.
After dinner, the guesthouse came alive. Some had their own entertainment: a piano in the parlour, a card room, a dance floor. Others sent their guests out to the town's dance halls, roller-skating rinks, and cinemas. The evenings were social. You made friends. Romances began. It was a holiday in the truest sense: a different life, for a week or two.
All of this was organised, managed, and maintained by the women who ran the guesthouses. They were hostess, chef, housekeeper, accountant, and entertainer, all at once.
The Decline
After the Second World War, the guesthouse culture began to fade. The reasons were multiple. Coastal holidays became more popular. Cheap overseas air travel opened up new destinations. The motor car meant that visitors could drive to the Mountains for a day trip rather than staying for a week. Motels offered the modern convenience that guesthouses could not match.
One by one, the guesthouses of Lurline Street closed or changed. Some were demolished. Some were converted to nursing homes or hostels. The Clarendon survived and is now under heritage protection following an Interim Heritage Order in 2024. Others, like the Eldon, stand empty.
The Carrington Hotel itself closed in 1985, its decline mirroring the broader fading of Katoomba's tourist economy. When the town's grandest establishment could not sustain itself, the smaller guesthouses had little chance.
The Revival
But the story does not end with decline. From the 1980s onward, a new generation discovered the Blue Mountains. The arts community arrived. The bushwalkers and climbers had never left. The Winter Magic Festival launched in 1994 and grew from 2,000 attendees to 50,000. The Blue Mountains Music Festival began in 1996, initially staged in the Clarendon on Lurline Street. The Carrington was restored and reopened in 1998. In 2000, the Greater Blue Mountains Area was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
And the accommodation tradition revived. Bed and breakfasts opened in restored Federation homes. Boutique hotels appeared. Holiday rental cottages, the natural descendant of the old guesthouses, became a growing part of Katoomba's accommodation landscape.
The women who run accommodation businesses in Katoomba today are inheritors of a tradition that stretches back over a century. The platforms have changed: online booking systems instead of newspaper advertisements, guest reviews instead of word of mouth. But the essential work is the same. Welcome people. Give them a comfortable place to stay. Feed them well. Send them out to see the mountains. Make them want to come back.
Why It Matters
The guesthouse women of Katoomba were not unusual in their abilities. They were unusual in their numbers and their visibility. On Lurline Street, in the space of a few blocks, you could find a dozen women running their own businesses at a time when female entrepreneurship was barely recognised as a concept.
They did not think of themselves as pioneers. They were doing what needed to be done. But the cumulative effect of their work was profound. They built an industry. They sustained a town. They created a culture of hospitality that persists to this day.
Next time you walk down Lurline Street, look at the old guesthouses. Some are restored. Some are crumbling. Some are gone entirely, replaced by newer buildings. But the women who ran them were here, on this street, doing remarkable work in unremarkable times.
They deserve to be remembered.
The tradition of hospitality on Lurline Street is alive and well. Our two weatherboard cottages continue the story that the guesthouse women started over a century ago.
