Was the legal drinking age 21 back then?Originally Posted by dave.king1
Gday Waz,
I'll turn 67 just before the fat bloke in the funny red suit arrives
Hope you have a Happy Birthday, Xmas, New Year, and Happy Anniversary too whilst I'm at it just in case I forget and miss any ha ha.
Cheers Waz,
By then it was down to 18 and the 6 o'clock swill was but a memory.
For those far to young to remember the pubs stopped serving drinks for 1 hour at 6pm, the theory that the men would go home to their families for dinner but the reality was that every drinker would line up enough to satisfy a fearsome thirst during the enforced drought.
The pubs also segregated women away from the front bar to the lounge bar where they could sip their shandies or sherry in polite company, there were strict dress rules for men who may wish to join the fairer sex for a beverage or two.
A lot of the pubs had live music in the lounge or beer garden back then, the money in the pubs wasn't as good as the licensed clubs but if you got a few nights a week it was good money.
Another golden anomaly in NSW back then was that to have a drink on a Sunday you had to be out of area in a rural pub, so driving 30+km to get plastered and then drive home all with with the family on board was somehow legal.
Last edited by dave.king1; 14-12-2015 at 03:10 AM.
Hi Dave, sadly I am old enough to remember every bit of what you said here. I grew up in Canberra with 3 older sisters and remember the craziness of a couple them going for a drive to Collector with their boyfriends which was about halfway to Goulbourn and some 30 miles north of Canberra just to get around these licencing rules. Drink driving back then seemed to be a national sport, or at least in NSW, and they served full strength beer too! Low alcohol stuff didn't arrive until mid '80s to help curb drink driving, tasted crap and only after dropping to 0.05 did we start to see the 'Precision Drink Driving Team' membership begin to dwindle.
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