Our story
A butcher shop with a story.
There are two histories on this street, and they only became one story recently. One belongs to a building. The other belongs to a butcher shop.
The building
74 Main Street
The premises Alstonville Quality Meats trades from today has been a butcher shop for most of its life, under other names.
- 1930s
H. K. Gough builds the original butcher shop, the first on Alstonville’s Main Street, as the town’s commercial centre grows around it.
- After Gough
The Morrow brothers take it on and keep it serving the same street.
- Then
Geoff Spearing becomes the third butcher to work from the premises. For many years it is known throughout Alstonville simply as Spearing’s.
- 2007
The building is converted to a bakery, ending a chapter that had run for about seventy years.
The shop
Alstonville Quality Meats
The business is younger than the building, and it started up the road.
- 1969
George Sutherland establishes Alstonville Quality Meats at 82 Main Street, Alstonville.
- 1992
George sells the butchery to Danny Slattery.
- 2012
Ashley and Tina Thomson buy the business. Ash had been butchering for twenty-four years by then, most recently running his own shop in Brisbane.
- October 2018
Alstonville Quality Meats moves to 74 Main Street, the building Gough put up in the 1930s. The butcher’s story comes back to the premises.
“Alstonville people have been coming to their local butcher for generations.”
The shop has changed hands, the town has grown, and the building has been a butcher’s, a bakery, and a butcher’s again. What has not changed is the reason anybody walks in. We are proud to be part of that story, and prouder to keep it going for the next generation.
Visit the shopWhere the record
comes from
Ash had been butchering for twenty-four years when he and Tina took the shop on, and he had been entering Sausage King since his years in Mackay. Since 2012 the shop has entered almost every year it could.
See the full award record