'Skimpies' night: the Western Australia pub tradition that refuses to die

A failed application to allow topless waitresses at a suburban pub in Perth has reignited debate over Western Australia’s culture of “skimpy” barmaids.

Skimpy barmaids, or just “skimpies,” refers to female bar staff who wear a bikini or lingerie. They are a feature of working class pubs in industrial suburbs and mining towns, which often advertise skimpies during traditionally quieter times such as midweek lunch and dinner services in an effort to attract customers.

The use of skimpies flourished and was a subject of east coast media fascination during the mining boom, when the massive influx of fly-in fly-out mining workers to towns such as Kalgoorlie and Port Hedland was met by a corresponding influx of fly-in fly-out barmaids, often hired out by a central Perth recruiting agency to do the circuit of regional towns.

But the practice has faced a challenge in recent weeks when grassroots campaigners Collective Shout, which campaigns broadly against using the objectification and sexualisation of women and girls to sell products, likened it to prostitution and linked the treatment of women as a form of entertainment to increased sexual violence and violence against women.

Collective Shout made the comments in objection to an application by a venue in Merriwa, in Perth’s northern suburbs, to allow topless waitresses, but said they also applied to skimpies – who, in accordance with WA’s liquor licensing provisions, keep some form of top on.

Both publicans and agencies that manage skimpies were outraged, accusing critics of undermining the agency of women who chose to work in the industry and suggesting that banning the practice would put people out of work.

“If they want to put the dole queues up, go right ahead,” Geraldton Beach Hotel owner Jason Moylan told the West Australian. “It’s a tradition of a lot of towns; it helps bring people to these country bars.

“The industry is struggling as it is, and that’s our major entertainment for our workers.”

A spokeswoman for Collective Shout WA, Caitlin Roper, said stripclubs or topless bars and bars that had skimpies relied on the sexual objectification of women, and both could be seen as fostering gender inequality.

Skimpies agency manager Natalie Baker said Roper was ignoring the voices of women who work in the industry, who “have a choice to do what we please”.

“So we’re here stepping up to say we wish to continue and we are women so please respect us,” she told the ABC.

Under liquor licensing provisions in WA, venues do not need special permission to have skimpy barmaids so long as their nipples and buttocks remain covered. If they are uncovered, the venue needs to apply for a special entertainment licence, which involves proving there is a public interest in bare breasts.

As the Liquor Commission noted in a 2012 appeal by the same licensees on another failed bid to allow nudity at their venues, customer demand alone is not sufficient.

“Whilst ‘Dan the Man’, ‘Show me pussy’, ‘Robbo’, ‘Marshy’, ‘Bob’, ‘Jacko’, ‘Swanny’, ‘Fido’, and others may want to see strippers at the hotel based on their signing of the questionnaire, there is nothing before the commission that is capable of establishing that the variation of the licence is in the public interest,” the commission said.

The other difference is that unlike strip clubs or topless bars, which are prohibited from serving alcohol within the euphemistically named “special entertainment zone”, skimpies can serve food and drink.

It gives skimpies a ubiquity that strip clubs lack. Strip clubs are places that people go to consume explicitly sexual entertainment, but a country pub on a skimpies night is just the pub with sexual entertainment tacked on. It’s interchangeable with a meat raffle or a quiz night.

In larger mining towns such as Port Hedland, where the family-friendly Esplanade Hotel offers yoga classes on the same day that the roster for the skimpy barmaid working at the neighbouring Pier Hotel ticks over, that is less of a problem.

But in towns with fewer pubs it can be difficult to avoid.

A women working in the mining industry in WA, who asked to remain anonymous, says she has been taken to skimpies bars by work colleagues because it happened to be the local watering hole. Neither she nor any female colleagues had ever raised a complaint.

Mining has the second highest gender disparity of any industry in Australia, with men making up 86.3% of workers. Like Peggy Olson going to the strip club in Mad Men, the expectation is that women will just go along with it.

Curtin University’s Prof Donna Chung says her concern is not with skimpies themselves but the “highly sexist” culture they represent.

“Pubs have traditionally been quite male-dominated places anyway where women have been quite ostracised,” she says. “Even if women attended these places as a customer, they feel objectified by virtue of being in that sort of place where women in their swimsuits are wandering around serving drinks.”

Chung says skimpies bars adhere to outdated rhetoric around mining or working towns which assumes that men, either single or away from their families, need some form of sexual entertainment. That doesn’t really stack up in an age of internet porn and Netflix, she says, indicating there is a broader underlying culture built up around objectifying women.

“It’s not a private act, it’s a public community of men,” she says.

Bradley Woods, chief executive of the Australian Hotels Association in WA, describes skimpies as an “ancillary entertainment service” catering to male blue-collar workers.

“These venues that do engage skimpies use it to attract and retain certain customers in what is a very difficult economic climate at the moment,” Woods says. “People are choosing to drink at home, they [the bars] are looking for ways to attract people to their venue. The skimpy barmaid is a big part of that.”

Woods says that while it was always a factor in mining towns, the number of suburban pubs offering skimpies usually increased as the economy contracted, in an inverse of George Taylor’s hemline index.

Poker machines are banned in WA in venues other than Perth’s Burswood casino, and options for entertainment services guaranteed to attract customers are limited, Woods says.

“It’s what they are having to do to keep their pub open,” he says. “There is a clientele that will select the venue based on that promise of ancillary entertainment … The guys that are looking for skimpies may not really want to go to the quiz night.”