Sly-grog shop

A sly grog shop (or shanty) is an Australian term for an unlicensed hotel or liquor-store, sometimes with the added suggestion of selling poor-quality liquor. The term evolved into usage from the mid-1830s during a period of progressive establishment of farms and pastoral runs in districts of south-east Australia that were distant from police and bureaucratic control. From the 1850s cattle began to be replaced by sheep on the pastoral runs along the inland rivers. Large numbers of workers were required to manage the sheep, particularly at shearing time. There were few townships at that time and consequently law enforcement was over-stretched in these areas. In consequence sly-grog shops (sometimes of the travelling variety) became an institution in these districts, often associated with particular pastoral runs or situated along mail-routes. As townships and police-stations were established along the inland rivers the sly-grog shops tended to be found on the back-blocks and regions further inland, following the squatters and their workers as they developed more marginal areas.

Newspaper reference

Extract from the article ‘Our Social Position: Baneful Effects of Sly-grog Selling’ (1857):

Sly-grog shops are positively the curse of the country, and to these dens of infamy and shame can many a single hearted youth trace the ruin of his character, and his initiation into every species of evil and immorality. At these places will be found congregated the known thieves and blackguards of a district; there they inveigle the unthinking, induce the habit of rum-drinking, and at last lead them from one illegal act to another, until the scholar becomes as proficient as the master in the practice of robbery and stealing the property of others. It is a question, which bears strongly on our moral and social standing as a people, how the sly-grog shops are to be extirpated; and surely it is a question which ought to be earnestly taken up in Parliament, which is as much bound to preserve the morals as the liberties of the people. Sly-grog shops are worse than nuisances; they are gangrenes eating away the morality and religion of the denizens of the bush, they are deadly fountains, diffusing poison and death around the neighbourhoods where they are found. These wretched sly-grog sellers are the pests of society, they are the secret underminers of its pillars, and if they are not shortly eradicated, our Quarter Sessions and our Circuit Courts will be the revelation of their accursed doings.

Literary quotes

• Tom came home that night from Bob O'Brien's, who kept a sly grog shop, quite tipsy. His poor wife shrank from him in sorrow, and his children crowded round their mother as if afraid of him. Alas! what wretchedness, what misery does this dreadful vice bring with it! [from ‘Susan’s Dream’, Tales for the Bush (1845) by Mary Theresa Vidal].

• She was a hard-looking woman – just the sort that might have kept a third-rate pub or a sly-grog shop. [from ‘The Blindness of One-eyed Bogan’ (1907) by Henry Lawson]

• Sad to relate Red Fred, for the first time in his life, found himself possessed of a class-conscious spirit. It had been all right to call each other Jimmy and Fred in the days when he was a shearer and the Chinaman used to visit the sheds with his hawker's cart which was really a travelling sly-grog shop. Things were different now. [from Chapter VI – The Big Wager, The Shearer's Colt (1936) by Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson].