UNLIKE NSW, where barmaids were more plentiful than barmen in hotel public bars, women were as scarce as hens’ teeth in the pubs of South Australia and Victoria for many decades during last century. From 1908 until 1967 no woman… Read More ›
Barmaids
Beer bottle ear-rings for barmaids
A new fashion in ear-rings is worn by barmaids at a Newcastle suburban hotel. Carol Munday is pictured fitting a beer bottle top ear-ring for Lili Skafe. – The Newcastle Sun 17 November 1954
The last of the barmaids
And it was enacted that there be no new barmaids in the land of Victoria; but those already registered only, to continue in their calling. So it shall come to pass in the end that one alone shall be left,… Read More ›
Flinders Street Angel Retires
By Malcolm Salmon MRS Gladys Ramsay retired on February 24 after 32 years behind the bar at the Great Britain Hotel at the waterfront end of Flinders Street, Melbourne. And a crowd of her wharfie regulars (above) turned up to… Read More ›
Where beer was thicker than blood
By Henry McCarthy THE licensee of the Amos Hotel in Newcastle employed his sister as a barmaid and, because he believed that blood was thicker than beer, refused to put her in the union. He told the other barmaids who… Read More ›
Belmore Hotel, Circular Quay Sydney
A Snake in the bar A COUPLE of blokes who enjoyed a morning tipple at their ‘early opener’ down by Circular Quay, got a good laugh out of a frightened barmaid one Autumn day in 1937. When a four-foot snake… Read More ›
Road Trip: South-west Sydney’s Belfield Hotel
HANDS cupped, peering into the tinted windows of the Belfield Hotel, for a while I thought we had lost another of Sydney’s old pubs. The bar was empty, deserted, with chairs upturned on tables, there was no sign of life…. Read More ›
How Sydney Drinks: Amateur barmaid reporter goes behind the bar for hotel story
The above image was captured by Sydney photographer, Phil Ward at the Hotel Bondi in 1951. Although at first glance it would seem the photo was taken before closing, during the old “six o’clock swill”, it was in fact taken… Read More ›
Belfield Hotel’s singing barmaid
Frederick William Rose received a new license to open the Belfield Hotel at the corner of Burwood and Punchbowl Roads in Sydney’s inner-west on March 14 1932. When Clive Fairweather was publican in 1950 the pub was losing glasses… Read More ›