Event 1: the (fairly respectable) social history of Kiama hotels

Published by Kiama Historical Society, Tony’s new book tells the thrilling tale of hotels in Kiama, Jamberoo and Gerringong. The book will be available to purchase in March 2025 for $29.90 - all profits to the Historical Society.

The book will be officially launched by the Honorable Gareth Ward, MP for Kiama.

From the first local hotels licenced Kiama and Jamberoo in 1837 to the present day, drinking venues have shaped local social life and character. Where were the hotels, and why did we lose 20 of them? Was it commercial failure, council stubbornness or unreasonable community expectations?

Tony will give insights on the puritanical attitudes of some locals - wowsers - who were horrified that women had to enter a Gerringong pub to post a letter. Despite these attitudes, Kiama’s temperance movement was a failure - several leading supporters were partial to a drink.

Although seen as a male dominated business, women played a vital role running local hotels. Not content to be confined to ‘Ladies lounges’, the Daily Telegraph was shocked in 1943 to find Kiama women sitting alongside men at the bar. Later in the century no-nonsense landladies kept the men in control with a whip of a tea towel or the threat of telling their mothers about bad behaviour.

Saturday 22 March 2024 at 2.00pm: Kiama Library Auditorium. $3 Members of Kiama Historical Society / $5 Non-Members. Includes a refined afternoon tea and cakes

Event 2: rascally tales of local hotels

Join Tony for a beer or wine as he tells stories of wild and wacky antics in our towns’ drinking haunts. Kiama was once a place of ‘besotted and shameless drunkards’, Bombo hosted an illegal ‘sly grog’ shop and Kiama’s 1899 great fire led to mass bingeing on stolen alcohol.

There are many examples of ‘men behaving badly’. However, in Kiama’s 1889 ‘sensational divorce case’ it was a publican’s wife charged with double adultery. To make matters worse, one of the men involved was the town’s leading brewer.

Hear stories of the exotic zoo at the Brighton Hotel boasting a world-record (stuffed) fish, and George Tory’s ways to deal with the Salvation Army and pedantic police officers. Normally respectable Gerringong was horrified in 1874 when a new hotel fuelled ‘drunkenness and rowdyism of the most disgraceful kind’. Jamberoo was even less restrained, with too many drinking haunts. One hotel had a reputation for horses in the bar, customers arriving on lawn mowers and meetings of the Pissed Poets Society.

Will Kiama’s beer strike of 1920 ever be repeated? Hopefully not during this second event!

Saturday 22 March 2024 at 5.00pm: upstairs bar at the Kiama Inn (Tory’s Hotel). Free event with guests invited to buy a drink or two to celebrate the book’s theme - purely for research purposes of course