Outback Australia banishes the topless barmaid
Small Australian towns have insisted the era of “hard-drinking and women” has ended after an outback pub was fined £1800 when a barmaid removed her final coverings and appeared completely naked.
By Jonathan Pearlman, in Sydney10:31AM BST 20 Sep 2013
Authorities fined the Bedford Arms in the farming town of Brookton in Western Australia for breaching its licence conditions, saying the barmaid gradually removed each of her nipple tassels or “pasties” and was later seen completely naked.
“It was observed in the bar area of the licensed premises a skimpy barmaid who was not wearing a bra top and had her nipples covered with pasties,” police told the state’s liquor commission. “On a couple of occasions she removed either one of the pasties revealing her nipples. At a later time in the evening she appeared completely naked.”
But the hotel’s licensee, Gregory William Marr, reportedly said he was annoyed at the barmaid, saying she was hired through an external entertainment agency and was instructed to “keep it clean, keep it legal".
The incident prompted a vigorous defence of the state’s towns by the mayor of the Western Australian town of Kalgoorlie, Ron Yuryevich, who said the days of “skimpy” barmaids in bars throughout small towns were long gone.
“Outside every pub there was billboards advertising the skimpy’s name, and happy hours and whatever else,” he told ABC News. “That’s all changed. You don’t see that now... It was very much a hard drinking culture - wine, women and other things. But that has transitioned tremendously to a very much of a family friendly town.” A pub owner in the state’s north, Mike Windle, said his establishment, the Roebuck Hotel, in Broome, no longer called the barmaids “skimpies”.
“We now call them sports girls and they don’t wear g-strings or briefy-briefs,” he said. “They wear shorts and a bikini-style top… We’ve had different disagreements with liquor licensing and police that come up on race round. Some of them said they were too brief, the bottom part, showing too much cheek. That’s one man’s opinion at the end of the day. But to save all the discrepancies, we decided to put them in shorts.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/australia/10322556/Outback-Australia-banishes-the-topless-barmaid.html