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Australia's alcohol history - Sunday trading and the 6 'o'clock swill
Damon Cronshaw
Nowadays if you’re in the mood for a drink, a grog shop is never far away.
But back in the day, it wasn’t so straightforward – especially if you wanted a drink on a Sunday.
We were having a yarn with Mount Hutton’s John Ure, who shared his memories of those days.
“Before we had Sunday trading, you couldn’t go to a pub unless it was, I think, 10 miles from town,” John said.
You had to be a “bona fide traveller”.
“Minmi Hotel was a favourite haunt. Of course, this was before RBT,” John, a former detective, said.
“You’d come in and sign the book [in the pub] as a bona fide traveller.” (How’s that for a strange form of government-sanctioned drink driving.)
Other pubs that were packed on Sundays in those days included the Traveller’s Rest at Hexham (now a McDonald’s, John believes) and Catho Pub at Catherine Hill Bay.
“They were the main three pubs on a Sunday around Newcastle,” John said.
Mind you, some pubs found a way around the laws.
When Sunday trading was eventually allowed, John recalled asking the publican at Argenton what difference it would make.
“He said it just meant all the customers can park out the front, instead of having to park out the back,” John said.
“At a lot of pubs, you could sneak in the back door on a Sunday.”
But the law said you couldn’t.
“It was a church thing. Sunday was a day of rest, the day you went to church. Pubs simply didn’t trade on a Sunday. They only traded Monday to Saturday,” John said.
And you couldn’t just nip down to the bottlo, either.
“In those days, the bottle shop was attached to the pub. If you wanted takeaway grog you went to the pub,” John said.
The Australian Hotels Association says Sunday trading wasn’t introduced until 1979.
And who could forget the six o’clock swill. Most pubs had to shut at 6pm, while most workers knocked off at 5pm. This liquor law lasted until 1954 in NSW.
The punters would pile into the nearest local, before partaking in a bit of old-fashioned Aussie binge drinking. Australian artist John Brack captured this culture in his painting The Bar in 1954. The painting sold for $3.17 million in 2006.
https://www.newcastleherald.com.au/stor ... n-sundays/
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My recollection of this era was going with my brother in law to a local pub on a Sunday and sneaking in the back door to have a few beers,
Anyway after a while two coppers came in from the back,
Oops I thought we are going to get busted,
Not to worry the coppers went to a back room and presently the barman took a couple of beers on a tray out there.
