A picture stolen from one of Hobart’s oldest pubs has finally made its way home, after the man who pinched it 25 years ago decided he could no longer live with the guilt.
The Derwent Valley man recently returned the artwork to the New Sydney Hotel after a dinner at the pub prompted him to finally right a decades-old wrong.
New Sydney Hotel owner Ashan Rodrigo took the confession in good humour, shouting the man a beer instead.
The New Sydney, on Bathurst Street, is one of Hobart’s oldest continuously operating pubs.
“Every old pub has a few stories… ours has one that’s taken 25 years to finish,” Rodrigo said.
“We reckon that deserves a laugh, not a lecture.”
The man, who asked not to be named, said returning the picture was “a relief”.
“Every time I had that picture up at home, I’d look at it … and as much as you’d have a laugh about it, there was always this bit of a guilty conscience in the back of your mind that, you know, I shouldn’t have taken it because it wasn’t mine,” he told Pulse.
He said he made the snatch in 2001 after a mate admired the picture hanging on the pub wall and suggested it would look good in his home bar.
“I said, ‘Right, I’m gonna get it,'” he said.
He picked it up, walked out the front door and took it home.
After returning to the pub for dinner recently, he told everyone at his table he was going to bring the picture back.
“My word is my bond,” he said.
Rodrigo, who has owned the pub for the past five years, said as soon as he saw the picture, he knew where it belonged.
He plans to hang it back as part of a set of three near the pub’s entrance.
Rodrigo declared “the statute of limitations expires after one schooner.”
“No hard feelings,” he said.
“Just one picture coming home and one beer going the other way.”
Rodrigo also issued an open invitation to anyone else who may have walked off with something from the New Sydney Hotel over the years, saying now was their chance to bring it back.
