By Syd Fairs* DURING the mid 1960s when middies of beer were nine cents and schooners a few cents more, customers generally left their copper change on the bars of local pubs where licensees usually donated this money to charity…. Read More ›
Bulli Family Hotel
The sticky coin craze: How customers’ tips were stuck to bar-room walls
By MICK ROBERTS © WHILE my wife ran a few errands, I waited over a schooner of Resch’s at the White Horse Hotel on Crown Street, Surry Hills, Sydney. Pulling-up a bar stool, I noticed sitting beside my beer, a tip… Read More ›
‘Terrible place, a pub with no beer’… The ‘schooner war’ and beer rationing
By MICK ROBERTS © “THERE’S nothin’ so lonesome, morbid or drear, than to stand in the bar of a pub with no beer”; so goes the lyrics made famous by legendary country music entertainer, the late, great Slim Dusty. Slim Dusty’s… Read More ›
Need glasses? See an Optician!
DURING the 1940s, publicans were experiencing unprecedented theft of beer glasses from their pubs. One newspaper reported more than 700,000 glasses had disappeared from Sydney’s 600 metropolitan hotels in 1944, “In an amazing wave of petty thieving”. Hotels lost an average of 60 glasses… Read More ›
Memories of Bulli Family Hotel
DURING the 1920s and 30s, a pub on the NSW South Coast became the centre of social life for coal miners in the little town of Bulli. The Bulli Family Hotel, now trading as the Heritage Hotel, opened for business… Read More ›
Old Ted: The ghost of Bulli pub
By MICK ROBERTS © MISSING trays of glassware and boxes of spirits, mysteriously turning-up later, cutlery re-arranged in the dining room, locked doors found wide open, eerie taps on the shoulder, and weird sounds throughout the middle of the night,… Read More ›