The handsome and historic Renmark Hotel, in South Australia’s Murray River region, is the oldest co-operatively owned hotel in the British Commonwealth. Since 1897 it has provided hospitality and fine local produce to the local farming community that owns it. Its manager, Michael Schuetze, says that when the small town of Renmark needed its first hotel, the community decided that “they didn’’t want private ownership.” For more than a century they have owned and run the hotel through an elected board whose members are required to be local residents.