The Empress Hotel in Regent Street, near Central, (also known as the Big E) is an important meeting point for new arrivals, and one of the few pubs where Koori people are allowed (by the publicans) to drink. Ruby Langford remembers it as the place to find out where your relatives live and who is having an affair with whom. Other well known Aboriginal pubs are the Clifton Gardens and the Cricketers Arms. Ruby writes ‘There was another pub called the Clifton Hotel down Botany Road. It stayed open ‘til midnight, so when the Big E closed its doors at 10pm, down the road to the Clifton we’d all trudge, ‘cos they had bands playin’ there and we carried on regardless. ‘And I remember there was a curfew then, and police would hunt Koories off the streets ‘cos they had to be inside by 10pm or the police would pick them up and put them in the paddy wagon just to make up the numbers. It was only Blackfellas they did this to. Every Thursday, Friday and Saturday night you would count three paddy wagons lined up outside the ‘Big E’ waiting to round up the Koories to make their numbers up’. (V54, ‘Gordon Briscoe’s Redfern: The police were at war with us’)