Sitting down with a scotch and fixing a rollie into cigarette holder, she says she has worked in more than 30 hotels - Port Headland’s pubs, Kings Cross hotels during RR, Chinatown’s Covent Garden, but says she prefers blue collar pubs: “They’re better to work in than a white collar pub - most of their customers are arrogant pigs. If wharfies stand in front of you and swear, they apologise. They treat you like a lady.”

The Big House, one of three early openers around the Quay and the Rocks, is a lofty barn of a pub which was known as the Hungry Mile during the Great Depression. A reminder of those times is etched on a plaque beside a portrait of Big Jim Healy, the general secretary of the Waterside Workers Federation from 1937-1961 and hero of the wharfies. It reads:

“They tramp there in their legions in the morning dark and cold,
To beg the right to slave for bread for Sydney’s lords of gold,
They toil and sweat in slavery, t’would make a devil smile,
To see the Sydney wharfies tramping down the Hungry Mile.”

And underneath: “Big Jim Healy changed all that. It is his epitaph.”

The sunny, emerald-green tiled public bar is called the Jim Healy memorial bar and the table and chairs underneath Big J’s epitaph are reserved for certain wharfies.

“This place isn’t rough. People think certain pubs are rough but they’re not. Ones you’ve been behind a bar, you’re protected. I remember there was this particular pro at the Junction and when she got drunk, glasses, knives and everything would fly over the bar. We’d all have to duck. She didn’t mean it. She didn’t know what she was doing. Rough? There’s no such thing as a really rough hotel.”

Debby wakes at 5am to run a shower for her husband Paul, the manager, pushes him under it and goes back to bed until 8. By 6 the wharf night workers and truckies are pressing to get their drinks before they go home to sleep. On the weekends, says Debby, all sorts of drunks, the mob from the Cross and young kids who have been out all night are dying to get in. It’s bad news if Paul’s five minutes late opening up.

For seven days a week, Debby cooks the roast beef, potatoes, stews, salads for the hot food bar, does the washing for the 16 rented rooms, works flat out in the public bar, helps her husband with the wages and accounts, then settles down to cook what Paul describes as closet gourmet feasts for dinner. One weekend in four they take off and go fishing.

“I love kids but I’m a worker. I don’t like the idea of having one. I’d be stuck up there with a child. I’d be bored stiff. I’d be glad if Paul could have the babies and he’d get fat”

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The best thing about being a barmaid, says Debby, is the people: “I love the people. I like talking to them even though sometimes it gets a bit boring when they repeat the same story. You get one or two regulars who are your close friends. You talk to them when you’ve got nothing to do. I suppose they’re your best customers in a way.”

Debby has Thursday afternoons off for shopping: “I find I get lonely and bored on Thursday afternoons walking around the city. I can’t wait to get back to the bar.”