22june2014
sort of hard trying not to think about the 1990s, and think of other things. i thought i write something about the oxford hotel. i'd been going there ,probably since about 76, 77 , around then. their just about to pull it down, that's been on the cards for about 6 or 7 years now. around here their pretty good at pulling things down and jack hammering all fucking night. they've nearly pulled down the whole fucking town. then forever to build a shithouse, with rents that are so unrealistic, that makes things bullshit. they build these arcade things with the same shops as anywhere, people go there for a week that's it. they've been doing that shit for years in the name of progress, it just kills everything.
6july2014
i was going to put a photo up , but i may have left it to late, the scaffold is up. my earliest memories was just a dive of a pub in 1975. i used to walk past it when walking the street, as you did back then. i remember looking in there, the ladies lounge was just that old outdoor wooden furniture. like most old pubs, not really old , there just not the same anymore. back then most pubs had a public bar, a saloon bar and a ladies lounge. in the early days women weren't allowed in the public or saloon bar. the saloon bar the beer was a penny dearer than the public bar to keep the riff raff out, mainly business people drank in the saloon.
19july2014
it's sort of hard figuring the year of the first time i went there. this is mainly because a lot of things happen in such a short space of time. i can remember the day and how, but year is difficult. the day would have been a saturday. me and a mate had been riding down a place called oilies , a name given to parts of the beach, south beach. surfies have nick names for such parts of beaches. other names along the beach are shitpipe, where they used to just pump the sewer in the sea. oilies was an industrial part, where they pumped sand in and built on it, and there was a large flat and small tracks to ride bikes. it was my first time there. i bought my first bike off a bloke i worked with for $260, a dt 175 yamaha trail bike. i was pretty hopeless at riding. i remember the day i bought it. after learning and crashing a few times, i got around here and there. an old friend said we should ride to tracks down near the beach. looking back now it's strange how certain people pop into your life from the past. he was another kindergarten friend from way back. i had been an urchin , and now i had a bike a so did others, he took me down to the oilies track. down there was this big group of old friends with their bikes, doing really good riding things. there was a couple of toffs with good bikes, bragging. i went there a week or two later, and one of the guys said we should ride up town to the oxford , apparently they just done it up. we rode up along the beach and i nearly rode into the shitpipe channel, luckily i hit the skids and the front wheel just went in a bit, i remember that.
22july2014
i remember riding up to the pub and parking the bikes out the back car park. i'd never really been there before that. my local was unanderra pub or morwarra as it used to be called. i didn't mention before, that there was also beer gardens, just an outdoor drinking area really. it was late in the arvy, when we got there . we just checked it out , at that time they where still doing refurbishments . we were pretty grubby from riding , i think we just had a beer , a cig and something from the snack bar. oh yeah , pubs used to have good snack bars them days. we decided to go there later that night and check it out. that's when i started hanging with some old friends and/or enemies from high school. certain nights were certain places with that crowd. nothing was on that night so it was the oxford.
1august2014
with the refurbishments came the new trading hours. i'm not to sure, but i'm pretty much sure, trading hours used to be 12 hours a bar. so some pubs had bars opened at different hours. in the early days , some early openers were 6am to 6pm, some were 7.30am to 7.30pm. most pubs up to that time opened 10am to 10pm. as a child , i dreaded 10.30pm , you'd hear the old boy coming home pissed as a nit. the oxford was the first around here to open at 11am to 11pm, with a small corner public bar that opened and closed early for the old pisspots. you could just move into the new part after it closed. us young crowd mainly turned up thursday night was the main, friday and saturday nights. saturday could be a dead night if something else was on. they decked it out okay, mainly to sell more grog. there was no bands at that time . mainly just drinking and conversation , there may have been a jukebox, there was one later . the wollongong hotel was where the jukebox was then. most pubs had jukeboxes and pool tables and maybe a pinball , although they came later.
3august2014
me writing about a pub, you'd think i like them. i never really liked pubs to tell you the truth, although they did have an air about them. some say the oxford had a ghost. ghost ain't uncommon to such places. you could rent out rooms and live there , as we all know. one lived there in the 90's , and died there upstairs. they closed the top part up for that reason apparently. but even before that there was trouble. in the fifties some hungarians stab the bar manger to death, a woman. i didn't know that until the 2000s and somethings. before that incident ,there was some kind of harmony between the races. that changed after that, as well as the hungarian bloke who kidnapped a lottery winners kid and held him for ransom, and eventually killing him.although not related to the oxford, here is the lottery story. the oxford was a dive after that. that end of town always had a bad vibe.
4august2014
so did the top end called piccadilly , but that's another story. hey , i could easily go on type this oxford hotel crap and any other blog nonsense. at this point in time , i could n't give two fucks either way. two fucks, two minds who gives a shit. at this point in time , i feel it's not really going anywhere. i've said a few things. i feel like just not doing it anymore, let things pass. maybe if i'm still around i'll come back to it, the truth about the oxford hotel is it was a fucking dive , just like any of them places. if they were any good people wouldn't let them go.
