Tony Birch

And the other aspect of the sly grog was that some sly grogs functioned as, in a sense, illegal businesses.

bars or you know sort of illegal pubs where people could drink on the premises so that there were several places in Fitzroy where they'd set up a slide rug in a backyard of a factory on a premises where people not only would get alcohol they might get some food

might even get some entertainment.

And this branched out to the illegal so-called nightclubs that were established in Fitzroy.

So there were a lot of clubs working in Fitzroy that were functioning outside hours of hotels that also offered entertainment and illegal alcohol.

But my grandmother's business was pretty much a backyard business of literally selling alcohol from her back gate.

off a house in John Street in Fitzroy, where conveniently she had a nice back lane where people would come to the back gate and she would sell alcohol from the back gate.

Oh, yeah, look, my PhD actually dealt with a lot of this stuff.

I did a lot of oral history interviews around sub-legal, illegal activities and street life.

And when I started that, I would have used the term police corruption to say, well, for these sub-legal and illegal activities to function, the coppers had to be paid off, so therefore we're talking about corruption now.

But when I interviewed people, particularly people who ran any business that required them paying police, some were strongly offended by the notion that it was corruption.

They regarded it as a legitimate relationship between police and businesses because the only way that these businesses could function in an orderly way was to have that relationship with police.

It was clear that police could never stop these activities.

That was, you know, everyone understood that.

And by having a formal relationship with the police, as illegal as it was, allowed the businesses often to run in a very orderly fashion so that in my nan's case, she would certainly occasionally pay police and she would certainly give free alcohol to the police.

In exchange for that

she wanted to run a business itself that was orderly.

She didn't want to draw attention to the business.

So in other words, yeah, she wouldn't want people sort of trying to stand over her for alcohol or people fighting in the lane or drinking in the lane behind her place.

So she could call the police and they would make sure that people were moved on.