THE MALT HOUSE
Olsen Produce (photograph Judith Anderson, November 2021)
In 125 years, this historical building in Lyons St has served not only as a malt house, but as a skating rink, a produce market, a centre for boxing and even sale yards for pigs.
Olsen’s Produce has been trading on the site since 1947 and is one of Warwick’s oldest businesses, but the story of the building began half a century earlier in 1897 with Joseph Griffiths Sims.
Born near Chichester in the south of England in 1823, Sims enlisted in the British army at the age of just 17 and fought in the Maori Wars in New Zealand. Injured, he returned to England but on discharge returned to the southern hemisphere in 1848 and became a pioneer pastoralist in South Australia’s Flinders Ranges.
Facing insolvency due to losses from severe drought, Sims moved to Queensland in 1869 and was granted selections near Oakey. By 1871, he was still farming but also working as a maltster for Perkins’ Brewery in Toowoomba. When the brewery closed in 1878, Sims became an auctioneer and stock and station agent but in 1892 he leased and restored the abandoned maltings and opened his own establishment.
The malting industry had been greatly boosted in Queensland in 1888 when the government imposed a tariff on malt and barley imports from the other Australian colonies as a means of encouraging Darling Downs farmers to grow malting barley and so develop a domestic malting industry. Buoyed by the success of his Toowoomba enterprise, Sims sold the business in 1896 and, in February 1897, although aged by then in his mid-70s and in poor health, leased an acre of land in Warwick in Lyons St, opposite the Railway Station, with the intention of establishing the town’s first malt house. Tenders were called for the supply of 60,000 bricks; stonemasons, bricklayers and labourers were engaged; and construction began on the two-storey brick building, 150ft x 38ft (c. 46m x 12m).
Photographs 1910 by Christopher Roggenkamp in Queensland State Library collection
Labourers unloading grain. (Photographs 1910 by Christopher Roggenkamp in Queensland State Library collection)
Photographs 1910 by Christopher Roggenkamp in Queensland State Library collection
However, on 13 May that year, J.G. Sims died suddenly. As his executor, his son E.F. (Ernest Fairfield) Sims took over supervision of the project and formation of a limited liability company, the Warwick Malting Company, was planned. Construction was completed by September 1897, and in October, E.F. Sims was able to invite a group of dignitaries to inspect the malt house, see the plant in operation, and enjoy refreshments in the second-floor malt room.
Grave of J.G. Sims, Drayton cemetery (Photograph Neil Sims)
The future looked rosy but, while a meeting was called to establish the company, insufficient capital was raised and by December 1898, negotiations were in train for sale of the Malt House. The enterprise limped on, even becoming the Malt House Yards for Denham Bros pig sales in the early 1900s, but by 1904, the prominent English firm of maltsters, William Jones & Son, had acquired both the Warwick Malt House and another, larger facility in Toowoomba.
By 1909, the Warwick premises were no longer even mentioned in the firm’s advertisements, and by March 1921, both Toowoomba and Warwick premises were put up for auction. In June 1922, Warwick’s Malt House was sold to a new produce business, McLeod & Co. Ltd, who added “commodious butchering premises” to the site as well as an awning over the footpath.
By 1927, advertisements began to appear for hire of the building. Sometimes used for auctions, it could also be hired for “storage of any quantity of grain or furniture” and, in April 1933, became the Glide Away Skating Rink with music by the town band, skates for hire, and the promise: “We teach you to skate”. By 1934, even the Warwick Broadcasting Company considered acquiring the building, hoping to hold dances there as well as running their broadcasting operations, but this idea, too, was short-lived and in April 1941, the Malt House, the butcher’s shop and all other buildings and machinery on site were put up for auction.
Advertisement in Warwick Daily News, 12 April 1933.
Even after the sale, skating continued from time to time and community groups such as the Rugby League Club and the Warwick Amateur Boxing Club used the premises, but finally, Adolf Emanuel Olsen established A.E. Olsen & Sons in 1947. The firm became Olsen Bros when the two youngest of his five sons, Lawrence Anthony ('Pup') and Albert Lyndon, took over the business, and today, while it is no longer owned by the Olsen family, the business still retains the connection in its trading name, Olsen Produce.
The building has had a long, hard and varied life but evidence of its original purpose can still be seen in its turreted roof, and a tribute to its part in Warwick’s history now stands at 42 Wood St – The Malthouse pub, named in honour of the town’s first and only malt house. (See below.)
Details of Sims family history generously supplied by Neil Sims, great-grandson of J.G. Sims.