The brother of Vic Hotel Mine Host , Richard Fong Lim , Alexander "Alec "Fong Lim , who served in the pub , was also a bookie and is shown here fielding at Fannie Bay Racecourse at a Melbourne Cup meeting circa 1974. Educated at Scotch College, Adelaide , he sired six daughters, became the first Australian Chinese Lord Mayor, in Darwin. Lake Alexander , man-made , and the drive into it were named after him . A daughter, Katrina , born 1961, is currently Lord Mayor of Darwin .
Darwin was a thirsty town in the 60s - in
fact locals boasted that the two biggest secondary industries - hell, the only
secondary industries- were the Vic and Swan breweries. These were the
days before Darwin lost its decrepit charm and, in a way, its innocence. Few
citizens locked their doors at night. and most parked cars had the key
dangling in the ignition, their owners secure in the knowledge would still be
there, provided they could remember where it was parked - not a given after
a roistering night in the pub of which there were only a handful serving
a perennially parched population of around 15,000 . In the city proper were The
Vic, the Don and Hotel Darwin. Out of town were
the Parap, Fannie Bay and Nightcliff hotels and a year or so later the Rapid
Creek hotel.
One of the great pubs of my drinking life
was The Vic in Smith Street- overseen benignly but firmly by its
Chinese-Australian owners, the Lim family. Richard Fong Lim ruled proceedings,
and routinely barred badly behaved drinkers, including larrikin members of the
Northern Territory News staff, for periods of up to three weeks and made sure beer garden
patrons didn’t overstep his mark—such as the occasion I took a racehorse into The
Vic after a two day drive from Mount Isa where we had unsuccessfully tried to
win a race during the mining town’s annual Melbourne Cup meeting . Richard eyed
old Gallant Wit and observed mildly: ”Just tie the bloody thing out the back. I
don’t want it shitting in the beer garden.”
 |
| Odd Vic drinker |
All Darwin
pubs then closed at 10 pm – except each was allotted one late night a week when stumps were pulled at
midnight. Late night at The Vic was Thursday, as it was at the Don, then
regarded as a bloodhouse and thronged with stockmen and ringers in from the cattle stations and looking to get
drunk, have a fight and get laid – and given there were then three
men to every
single woman in town very little feminine company was available to sweaty,
half-crazed stockmen and ringers and thus, this overflow of testosterone had no
other outlet than drinking and fighting
of which there was very much. Drinkers wanting to dodge the biff gave the
Don a swerve on late nights.
Not that late night at The Vic was
a garden party, but Richard Fong Lim kept a firm rein on more extreme behavior, and
while loud drunken singing and shouting and even jug-drinking competitions were
OK, spewers and fighters were banished swiftly and all remaining hands pretty
much had a good time getting pissed and lying to each other. Friday night was
late night at the Parap and Nightcliff pubs, with the Parap hands down the most
popular because of its large beer garden and the fact it was not a tied house
and served both Vic and Swan beer and as hard-core Vic drinkers were want to opine - nobody
will drink Swan unless he is in thumbscrews or it is free.
Saturday was late night at the Hotel Darwin and the Fannie
Bay Hotel, both of which attracted a better class of drinker if you didn’t
count the thirst-crazed journos from the NT News. The lounge at the Hotel Darwin on the Esplanade
was straight out of Somerset Maugham – a large stone-flagged area innocent
of air conditioning and open to lush
gardens with overhead fans swishing the tropical air over languid patrons
knocking back icy colds of their choice. It was the perfect setting for a
relaxed and low-key evening on the piss.
On the Mitchell Street side of the pub was a horse of a different
color – the famous Hot 'n' Cold bar, scene of unlikely Saturday morning
roistering and believe it or not – a rock ‘n’ roll dance which raged from around 9 am until 1 pm when
everybody left to crash before the serious evening's drinking or weaved off to the footy or the
Fannie Bay Races.
This bar was one of the classic watering places of
my time and scene of many a mighty tipple by the ragamuffin crew from the NT
News. The bar was in its true hot
and cold mode at that time - freezing when the air conditioning was working
and a tropical sweat hole when the Stokes Hill powerhouse buckled under the
strain and half the town blacked out. I must say it encouraged consumption,
because when it was hot your beer got the same way unless smartly drunk, and
when it was cold you wanted to make sure you got it down before the bar steamed
up again.
Overlooking the thirsty throng was a bar-long mural
by famous cartoonist and newspaper satirist Paul Rigby of how Darwin
comically imagined itself. Scattered through the mural were tiny drawings of
a little figure he included in almost every drawing he did. This prompted
a standing challenge at the Hot 'n' Cold any drinker who could locate all the tiny
figures in five minutes won a jug of beer. Seeing as most patrons were
feeling no pain when they attempted this task - the numbers of jugs the bar
had to ante up was buckleys and none. Alas, this wonderful piece of Australiana
did not survive re-modelling at the Hot 'n' Cold and has been lost to
posterity.
[ Edit :From memory, this mural showed a Pommie businessman in a bowler hat arriving in Darwin from a plane with a slinky blonde in black on his arm . Thereafter, she was shown in various misadventures being ogled by local blokes in singlets and shorts. In one scene , bikini clad , she was water skiing , pulled along by a stingray. The unhappy looking Pommie , on his own , was last seen boarding a plane out of town with a carton of beer on his shoulder bearing the slogan WING YOUR WAY WITH SFA ].
It was also here that the Darwin Press Club
was formed and had its headquarters in the bottle shop, the street entrance of
which was blocked to non-members from the street by virtue of press club
members putting a broom handle though the handles. If you wanted to buy
a bottle, you went to the bar. Amazingly ,the forbearing licensee of the pub,
one Bailey Pitt, copped this outrageous behavior for about six months.
Mainly ,I suspect, because consumption by the parched press club members more
than made up for any loss of sales. Foundation members of the club were
NT News editor Jim Bowditch, Les Wilson, stroppie transplated Kiwi who worked
out of the NT News office as the Darwin correspondent for the now-defunct
Sydney Daily Mirror, news editor Keith Willey ,
award winning journalist and widely published author, sports reporter Peter
Blake, always willing to back himself in a speed-drinking contest, and a
handful of hangers-on, including Paul the soccer player, a sex-obsessed
New Australian who was welcome, not just because he was an entertaining liar,but because it was hoped his success with the sheilahs would rub off on the
(single) desperates from the NT News. Never happened.
The Press Club opened formalities on Saturday
morning after the paper was put to bed. Those days it
published three-times weekly, Tuesday and Thursday afternoon and Saturday
morning. Some serious two-fisted tippling occurred at the
Press Club and many sought entry but few were chosen. Come Sunday
the drinking landscape in Darwin was a barren wasteland - non Sunday opening
in those days - and the nearest pub to quell hangovers was way out of town – more than 100 km in fact – the
Adelaide River Hotel which had a sprawling beer garden and an unending
procession of characters-such as pith helmeted , cigar chomping Tiger Brennan dropping in for
a white can or six. It was well worth the trip – a perfect escape for a quiet Sunday morning’s drinking, although the
drive back to town could be a bit of an adventure.
*Shawtodds is now a hippy hippy kind of adventurer
, a mix of big game fisherman
and cardsharp , with a gullet like a Murray River Pelican , who expresses himself like Damon Runyon.
