Haralambos Corones was born in 1883 on Kythera, a rocky island off the southern tip of Greece that has sent generations of its sons abroad to make their fortunes. He reached Australia in the early 1900s and, by 1909, had made his way to Charleville, where the directories record him plainly as a fruiterer. It was a typical start. Across Queensland, Greek migrants of that era opened cafes and greengrocers, the small shops that knitted them into country towns. But Harry Corones had larger plans. In 1912 he took on the licence of the existing Hotel Charleville and ran it for more than a decade, learning the trade and the town, until he was ready to build something entirely his own.

Riding the economic boom of the 1920s, Corones commissioned the Toowoomba architect William Hodgen junior, a London-trained designer at the height of his powers, and between 1924 and 1929 the hotel rose along Wills Street. It cost around £50,000, an enormous sum, and it stretched across nearly a full block. Hodgen gave it a long two-storey verandah over the footpath and a high parapet crowned with shaped gables, the name HOTEL CORONES cast in relief and the dates 1924 and 1929 marking its slow, deliberate completion. The interiors were a revelation in the bush: silky oak panelling, leadlight windows, decorated plaster ceilings, a sweeping silky oak staircase, and an enormous ballroom. This was the building that came to be regarded as the highlight of Hodgen's entire career.

Everyone simply called him Poppa, and the hotel became Poppa's Place. It was an oasis of pleasant living in a hard land, an address with a statewide reputation where graziers, wool-buyers, and travelling salesmen came to be comfortable. Corones courted the famous and the fashionable, and they came: alongside Amy Johnson there was the singer and film star Gracie Fields, and the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester. To name a hotel after its proprietor broke sharply with the English tradition of grand, generic hotel names, and to do it as a Greek immigrant in a town steeped in British custom was bolder still. The man and the building became inseparable in the western imagination, a rare immigrant hero in a country mythology that seldom made room for one.

Harry Corones died on 22 March 1972, and a long procession followed his coffin through the streets of the town he had helped define. His son Peter and Peter's wife Mary carried on the hotel they had already been running. In 1997 the building was added to the Queensland Heritage Register, recognised not only for Hodgen's architecture but for what it represented: the prosperity and the shifting fortunes of the pastoral south-west, and the singular story of the man who built it. Much of the original detailing survives, including a substantially intact bar, a rarity among hotels of its age. Stand beneath the verandah today and the white facade still commands the street, exactly as a young fruiterer from Kythera intended it to.