By MICK ROBERTS © LONG before the Sydney Push met in pubs around the harbour city, a group of “theatrical types, well primed with soda and a dash” paved the way for artists by reciting poetry and “warbling” songs in… Read More ›
Illawarra Hotels
War time pub drinking: A glass by candlelight and beer shortages
Limits were placed on beer production by the Australian Government in March 1942, requiring breweries to reduce their output to two-thirds of previous levels. The resulting beer shortages led to widespread profiteering and black-marketing in some parts of Australia, including… Read More ›
Illawarra’s first clubs: ‘The bar room had a plank nailed to the wall for seating’… and beds ‘for drunken miners to sleep off their liquor’
BY MICK ROBERTS© REGISTERED clubs, with their assortment of restaurants, bars and cafes, gymnasiums, and ‘mini-casinos’, have come along way from the timber cottages, offering dominoes and newspaper and magazine libraries, that began to appear throughout colonial New South Wales… Read More ›
Flash light greeted Mrs Riley’s drinkers after hours
By MICK ROBERTS © DURING the days of the ‘six o’clock swill’, after last drinks were called at Thirroul’s Ryan’s Hotel – at the time, the town’s only pub – swathes of men would stagger down the road to continue… Read More ›
The Floyds: Illawarra’s beef & beer barons
By MICK ROBERTS © FOR over a century beef and beer were synonymous with the Floyd family name. Four generations of Floyds were successful butchers and hoteliers in the northern region of the Illawarra, south of Sydney, leaving a legacy… Read More ›
Donkey Jack’s 30 year drinking spree
By MICK ROBERTS © COMPARED by one 19th century scribe to Shakespeare’s Caliban from the Tempest, the legendary Donkey Jack was Wollongong’s best known drunk. Of all the drunken characters who frequented the Illawarra – and there were many –… Read More ›
Corrimal pub’s most celebrated barmaid
By MICK ROBERTS © ABOUT the same time as the Corrimal Hotel opened for business on the NSW South Coast almost 120 years ago, quite a lot of excitement was being created by “a small coterie of feminine busybodies” to… Read More ›
Unlucky pub roustabout was killed by a train while on his way to collect a £30,000 inheritance
By MICK ROBERTS © A drifter, William Price did most odd jobs around the pubs where he worked in return for boarding and lodgings. He did jobs like tapping beer kegs or barrels, to collecting glasses, cleaning toilets, and emptying… Read More ›
The rise and fall of billiard saloons and their notorious ‘sports clubs’
By MICK ROBERTS © RELIGIOUSLY, during most of the first half of last century, a steady stream of men could be seen crossing the road, backwards and forwards, from Bulli’s Family Hotel to the billiard and hairdressing saloon, on Saturdays…. Read More ›
The wild men of the 22 mile camp: ‘Here the visitor must either shout or fight’
By MICK ROBERTS © AMERICA’S Wild West could be considered tame compared to the wilderness separating what is today Sydney’s southern suburbs from the Illawarra region, during the mid to late 1880s. Notorious shantytowns sprang up in the bushland to… Read More ›