Great Australian Beer Yarns

by Peter Lalor

  The spectators by now had moved a couple of metres away onto a driveway. This bloke with the blazing VB looked at the bottle, looked at me and looked back at the bottle. His eyes went wide and he lobbed the bottle up into the air, and bang, straight onto the driveway in the middle of the onlookers.

  The driveway went up in flames while people went diving for cover. (No one was burnt, thank the Lord.)

  Meanwhile, I was sitting in the driver’s seat watching my engine bay go up in flames.

  Quick as a flash, the other bloke ripped the twist top off his unopened longneck and proceeded to shake it vigorously. He then sprayed the golden drop into the engine bay and put the fire out. I couldn’t believe it.

  I know that if we’d had a video camera we would have won ‘Australia’s Funniest Home Videos’ with this effort. One thing is for sure — I don’t think I will ever again hear three pastors and a group of Christians declaring the virtues of VB so enthusiastically!!

  SCHOONER GRIP

  Garry Phipps

  A mate of mine once did a favour for a friend. When the job was finished the friend asked, ‘How much do I owe you?’

  ‘Don’t worry about it; buy me a beer next time you’re in the pub,’ my mate replied.

  A couple of weeks later the friend walked into the local, saw my mate and ordered an extra beer. He walked over to him and said, ‘Here’s that beer I owe you,’ and handed it to him.

  It promptly fell through my mate’s outstretched hand and smashed on the pub floor.

  ‘Why did you drop that beer?’ the bloke asked.

  ‘Because,’ my mate replied patiently, ‘this is a Schooner Grip not a Middy Grip.’

  Needless to say he was bought schooners from then on and they fitted perfectly.

  SINKING A BEER

  Norm Woodcock

  This story goes back to the year 1935 when I was prospecting at a place called Southern Cross in the Western Australian goldfields.

  Two old prospectors sank a shaft in the main street of the town, opposite the hotel, and spent as much time in the pub as working in the mine.

  As the shaft got deeper the bloke operating the windlass would pop into the pub, come out with two foaming pots of beer and call out to his mate at the bottom of the shaft that ‘a beer was coming down’. He would put a pot on top of the bucket attached to the cable of the windlass and ever so carefully lower the beer to his mate.

  This procedure was repeated many times throughout the day.

  I had the privilege of sharing a couple of beers with them on a few occasions and learned a lot from their experiences as prospectors and Drinkers of Beer.

  THAT COCKY’S DEAD

  Norm Woodcock

  During the 1930s I met up with a couple of old prospectors in a pub at a place called Marvel Loch on the goldfields of Western Australia. After a few beers they told me they were about to have a few tons of gold-bearing quartz transported to the Government Battery for crushing.

  To save them a few bob I offered to cart the ore in my T Model Ford (converted to a utility truck) to the Battery. The crushing yielded about 20oz of nugget gold worth about 100 quid.

  These two old boys were very thankful for my help and insisted on repaying me, so off we went to a place called Southern Cross and booked into a boarding house for the night.

  Next stop: the local pub for a ‘few’ beers.

  Like all prospectors, these two guys could put away the beer. After a while I left them to it, went to the boarding house and had a feed, then went upstairs to an open verandah which contained three beds, one cage and one cockatoo.

  My two friends returned several hours after, their arms laden with bottles of beer. They were up and down all night, drinking and urinating in the cocky’s cage. The poor cocky would splutter and squawk every time they went to the cage, which was quite understandable.

  And so it went on, until suddenly there was a squawk and an eerie silence.

  I managed a little sleep but was up at dawn to see my two companions dead to the world. I looked in the cage and saw the poor bloody bird — stone dead on the bottom of the cage.

  I still don’t know to this day whether the cocky died of poisoning, drowning or a screwed neck — probably all three, I fancy.

  I had those two blokes out of bed and into Tin Lizzie and off to Marvel Loch before they were awake.

  I took sympathy on the old prospectors and dropped into a pub on the way back. Needless to say, I gave that boarding house a wide berth whenever in Southern Cross.

  I met many prospectors on the goldfields and they were a great bunch of fellows. These two were no exception and I guess they are still prospecting up in the Great Beyond. I hope Saint Peter shouts them a beer now and then — and doesn’t let them anywhere near the cockies.

  THE LOST BEERS

  Paulene Lowe

  Many years ago my husband was organising a barbecue during the war years. He and his mates would buy schooners of beer and fill quart bottles, as take-away beer was as rare as hen’s teeth.

  They were going to Sans Souci near Mick Moylan’s Hotel to have a barbecue on the beach.

  My husband said he would keep the beer cold by burying it in the sand near the surf. After a while everything was ready so he went to get the beer, but couldn’t find it as the tide had come in.

  He had to outrun all his mates and hitch home.

  THERE IS A GOD

  Mark Bressington

  This is a true story. I went to a Catholic high school in the Manly Warringah area (St Augustine’s College in Brookvale). When I was in Year Twelve, I had an Irish priest, Father Ward, a teacher of Religious Education.

  As we were in our final year of school the class was fairly relaxed and Father Ward treated us with the respect that young adults deserve. I remember that during one of the classes someone asked Father Ward if he really believed in God and miracles.

  We were fortunate enough to have the following story told to us as his way of replying to the question.

  It was the middle of summer on a Sunday, one of those days when the temperature rose over forty degrees early in the afternoon. Father Ward had performed a Mass earlier that day and was trying to enjoy the rest of his Sunday as God had intended — putting his feet up and watching the cricket on the TV.

  The heat was becoming unbearable and as the majority of ads on the TV between overs were beer commercials, he started to long for an ice cold beer. As a priest, he was on a weekly allowance of about $7 a week and as a smoker, he had already blown his allowance and did not have the money to nip down the road to the pub to buy a beer.

  He looked to the heavens and prayed for a beer. A little while later there was a knock on the door. Father Ward arose from a heat-induced coma to see who it was. When he opened the door there was no one to be seen.

  He looked down, and there sitting on the step was a six-pack of ice cold beer with a note attached.

  He bent down and picked up the beer and read the note.

  It was from a parishioner who had been in Mass that morning. The parishioner wanted to thank Father Ward for his moving sermon which had been a comfort to him and, it being such a hot day, he felt a cold beer was the best way of doing so.

  Now, the priest’s not sure if God had heard his plea for a beer, or if God had told the parishioner to deliver the beer, or if it was God who had inspired his sermon in Mass that morning. One thing he was sure of — he was thankful to God for the ice cold beer.

  THIS ONE LOOKS ARMLESS

  Peter Lalor

  Like most Australian blokes Gordon L was prepared to go the extra yard for the institutions he held dearest. Now we’re not talking surf clubs, scout groups or even local government. Gordon, like many of us, loved his local and would do anything for the boys and their home away from home.

  After one heavy session Gordon and a mate were driving along a road about 100 kilometres south of Darwin when they saw a snake. It was clearly too early to have the DTs so the lads knew this crawling
creepy was the real thing.

  Remembering that the boys back at the pub dearly wanted a python for the fish tank — don’t even ask what happened to the fish — Gordon decided to take matters in hand.

  He stumbled out onto the road and with his best beer goggles on attempted to grab what was clearly a harmless boa constrictor.

  Course it ish!

  Well, almost harmless and almost a python; unfortunately, Gordon had set his muddled sights on a 2.8-metre deadly king brown snake with a head the size of a fist.

  ‘I made the mistake of grabbing it with my left hand because I was holding a beer in my right,’ he said later.

  You can see from our intrepid bushman’s comments that he was perhaps a little more devoted to his beer than his health and things were clearly going to get a little sticky.

  ‘I had its head in my hand, but it got loose and grabbed the web of my left hand. Its fangs were that big it ripped my hand open,’ Gordon said.

  Still gripping the beer, he wrestled the snake into a sack, never spilling a drop in the process.

  Gordon, like most of us who’ve woken with a hangover only to go back and fight the good fight next Friday night, was not a man who was once bitten twice shy. Angry, confused, and perhaps not thinking as clearly as he should have, he stuck his hand back in the bag.

  Maybe he was making sure it really was a biting snake.

  ‘I stuck my hand back in the bag and it must have smelled blood,’ Gordon said. ‘It bit me another eight times.’

  Upset by the snake’s hostility, Gordon withdrew and started to lose consciousness, but luckily for him he had a friend who cared.

  ‘My mate was trying to keep me awake by whacking me in the head and pouring beer on me,’ Gordon recalls.

  His good friend decided to drive him to Darwin, but only got as far as the Noonamah Hotel, about fifty kilometres from the city, where the bar manager called an ambulance.

  Sensible bloke that.

  Gordon was in a coma for six weeks and had continuous blood transfusions because the venom prevented clotting and caused internal bleeding.

  Up at the Darwin hospital they don’t muck around and they decided to lop off the poor bloke’s arm. His heart stopped three times during the amputation — probably shocked that it would be going through life with one less drinking apparatus.

  The doctors said that Gordon was the sickest man ever to survive a snake bite, although you probably didn’t need a medical degree to figure that out.

  ‘I still can’t believe my arm’s been chopped off,’ Gordon said later.

  Gordon’s sister reckoned her brother was accident-prone.

  ‘He’s like a cat, but this time he has used up his ninth life,’ she said.

  Gordon once spent three months in hospital after his car hit a buffalo and was crushed when a truck reversed and pinned him to a pile of bricks.

  ‘I still have my life and I guess that’s the most important thing,’ Gordon said later.

  Yeah, pal, but what about the bloody boys at the pub? What about the fish tank? Talk about self-centred!

  WATER CLOSET

  Peter Lalor

  Back where I came from, a particular local businessman and his family were held in pretty high esteem. They were a nice enough family, but some of the older boys didn’t quite live up to the high standards set by their mother and father.

  One night the lads played up when the olds were out and got a little carried away. When the parents got home they noticed nothing wrong until they got out of the car and heard groaning from the garden bed by the driveway.

  Dad got the torch and steering lock and approached the noise with some caution. Moving the torch around the ferns and what have you he couldn’t help but notice a smell and then, to his horror, he found a near-naked man semi-conscious among the plants.

  After some further investigation it was established that this rather drunk and bruised person was the number two son who had fallen from the balcony above while taking a leak.

  Worse was in store.

  The mother opened the door of the house to hear terrible cries from the bedroom of number three son, the youngest. Running in, she was passed by son number one who appeared to be sleepwalking in his underpants.

  Inside number three’s room was a terrible scene.

  The sobbing little fella told Mum how his big brother had come barging in and without a word had opened the wardrobe, pulled out the sock drawer, urinated in it, pushed the drawer back in, closed the door and then left.

  It seems the eldest had turned left instead of right and in his rather inebriated state had mistaken the kid’s closet for a water closet.

  Apparently this isn’t an unusual thing, as I knew a bloke who mistook his turntable (remember them?) for the urinal. He’d wandered into the lounge room, lifted the lid and closed it again when finished — clearly a bloke under the thumb.

  WATER POLICE, WARM FEET AND A BEER SHOWER

  R T Noble

  Back in the late 1950s I used to drink in a pub in Penshurst Street, Chatswood, called Ryans. Pretty tough pub too; bloodhouse they used to call it.

  In this pub drank a bloke called Old Sepp — great old bloke sober, but after three pints he thought he was superman.

  Anyway, poor Old Sepp was always getting turfed out, usually spending the night in the local lockup.

  This particular night he saw the police coming and took off out the door and jumped into the old horse trough that was still there and yelled, ‘You can’t touch me. This is a job for the water police.’

  In those days — late 1950s, early 1960s — you could not get a drink on a Sunday unless you went to Windsor or Penrith (bonafide traveller, it was called).

  Anyway, we used to have barbecues nearly every Saturday night ending late Sunday. One night all thirty of us flaked out round the large fire we had.

  Next morning a mate called Monty woke up groaning, ‘Geez, my feet.’ He went to stand up and fell over. We rushed over to help him and when we removed his boots the bottoms of his feet fell off. It seems his feet had cooked through his boots as he was too near the fire. The poor bugger was in hospital for weeks and off work for months.

  When we asked him what woke him up, he said, ‘I got cold.’

  Monty, the same bloke, was always tinkering with home-brew. The only trouble was, he could not stick to his recipe.

  I remember one brew he put down; some clown told him to add raisins to it to give it a kick. He invited a half dozen of his mates to try it out. Bloody hell! Talk about dynamite! Bloody bottles blew up everywhere. Blokes had cut hands, cut faces — beer all over us.

  When we finally got a few poured it tasted like Purple Para (the cheap plonk of the day) with a head on it. The bloody stuff was so dangerous we had to throw a blanket over the remaining bottles and were not game to go near it. I think Monty ended up throwing rocks at them to smash the damn things.

  WATERING DOWN THE BEER

  Hillary Greenup

  It was Christmas day 2000 in Ballina and we were very much anticipating the scrumptious lunch ahead of us. The day was hot and humid and what better way to start out than to have a nice cold drink? For my mum and myself it was a glass of champers, for the boys a cold beer — Cane Toad beer, in fact! It came as part of a Christmas food hamper sent by my brother. From memory, the Cane Toad beer packed a punch at 7 per cent alcohol content.

  In view of this fact, my dad, not being too much of a seasoned drinker, like my husband, Steve, decided to make his into a shandy. Steve had made a special trip down to the local shop to grab a bottle of lemonade. So Dad proceeded to dilute his Cane Toad beer with the lemonade.

  Each time he took a swig he couldn’t believe just ‘how strong this bloody Cane Toad beer is’, so much so that he went back to the fridge to get that bottle of lemonade about three times! What he really couldn’t understand was why the beer wasn’t getting a nice head — the more lemonade he added, the flatter it went. He thought that the strength of the alcohol
must be causing the lemonade to go instantly flat!

  It wasn’t until Steve noticed that the bottle of lemonade he had bought hadn’t yet been opened, that the ‘penny dropped’. Dad had been using the bottle of cold water (incidentally, in a lemonade bottle) to ‘water’ his beer down! In the end a glass of champagne was in order while Steve enjoyed his full strength Cane Toad beer! On our return to Sydney, my brother asked how Dad had enjoyed the beer … Well, um …

  WATERING THE GARDEN

  Mary Smith

  After a long night of good friends, good food and good beer, hubby, after saying his farewells as they drove away, ‘took short’. As the little house was already occupied, he decided to water the flowers beneath the small rail-less balcony. He took one step too many, breaking his leg on the concrete surround.

  On arrival, the ambulance officers asked how he fell. He promptly told them he had been pushed.

  ‘Pushed by whom?’ they asked.

  ‘Hahn,’ was the reply.

  ‘Hahn who?’ asked the ambulance officer.

  ‘Hahn Ice,’ he replied.

  After a pin and plate inserted and six weeks in plaster I guess he’ll watch where he waters next time (or how much he drinks).

  WRONG NUMBER

  June Benson

  It was a much more innocent time. Christmas Eve, about 5 p.m., temperature hovering around 100 degrees. My mother, a devout and unquestioning Catholic, sat fanning herself on the front verandah.

  The sound of our phone intruded on the heavy atmosphere.

  ‘It’s yerself, Mrs Shepherd?’

  My mother recognised Father O’Dougherty’s voice.

  ‘Would yer be so good as ter send me around a half dozen of the usual cold ones as soon as yer can?’