A busy Halloween day 2020: Dani went to a friends birthday party in the morning then attended a Halloween festival in the rain. Meanwhile his old dad sampled a few beers at the Rocks Brewing Company…

Halloween Day – Birthday Party

One of Dani’s school mates had a birthday party in an amusement arcade. It is located in an odd area of Sydney called Alexandria, which has all sorts of businesses old and new. It’s a weird almost surreal area but there’s plenty going on there. This particular amusement arcade was in a section called Entertainment Square. The amusement arcade is open to anyone but they also organise parties for kids who each get a kind of ‘access all areas’ pass/ticket so they can play on as many games as they like. That’s basically like honey to a bee, or shit to a fly, for kids of that age. Of course they all loved it.

Meanwhile…

Parents could leave their kids and collect them later. The best part was that just around the corner was this place…. The Rocks Brewing Company brewery and tap house…

They had 15 beers on tap. Over half are their own while the others are brews from their partner brewery in Portland, Maine, USA (a place called Shipyard Brewing). I tried a few from each brewery and I have to say they have some excellent beers. Far more to my taste than most that were on offer at the Stone & Wood brewery in Byron Bay (see here).

I couldn’t leave without buying a six pack of their excellent Hangman pale ale. This is not only a tasty beer it comes in one of the best designed cans. In fact all their brews are marketed in a similar way. The mural in the toilet area clearly shows the artistic method of selling their wares. In this portion there’s the Hangman with other beers like Convict and Butcher.

Halloween Washout

Later in the day we went to a Halloween festival in the entertainment zone near the Sydney cricket ground. It was raining but there were still plenty of people, naturally mainly families with young kids. Most were in Halloween costumes. There was a fun fair which even had some of those scary looking ‘Laughing Clown’ games – just like the one we saw in the old Railway Museum in Broken Hill (see here for that post). There were also several ‘trick or treat’ stations so the kids could (kind of) do a bit of trick or treating. But it wasn’t exactly trick or treat… So, after we left for home and just as it was going dark, we stopped off in a street where we had seem plenty of Halloween decorations. Then it really rained! But there were still a few kids out so we did a bit of trick or treating and got soaked. We could have been trick or treating in the UK. I was expecting it to be too warm this Halloween but there you go…The main thing was that Dani was happy.

Interesting Facts:

The last person to be hanged in Australia was a bloke called Ronald Ryan, back in 1967. He was in Pentridge prison in Coburg, Victoria (which was closed in 1997) serving an eight year sentence for robbing butcher’s shops of all places. The meat trade must have been good in those days as he had to blow up the butcher shop safes to get their money. In prison he met a fellow convict and between them they made an escape attempt. During the escape Ryan shot and killed one of the prison officers who was chasing them. He was recaptured in Sydney and extradited back to the state of Victoria where he was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. 

Following the hanging there were protests by those opposed to capital punishment. By 1985 the death sentence was abolished. Thankfully times really have changed for the better in the state of Victoria. Now you can be arrested there for not wearing a face mask or going for a walk in the park!!  Try protesting against that and… Yep, you get arrested!