In Melbourne, real beer came only in bottles (~750ml, in current metrics and I forget how many fluid ounces; I had too many scruples) and were collected when empty by "Bottle-oh"s who drove horse-drawn carts through the back lanes. These empty beer bottles (called Dead Marines) were my major source of pocket money.

In the late 50s we started seeing transistor radios and that was when I first heard "tinny" applied to sound quality. The earliest cans of beer were the same size as the bottles (as I recall) and were made of steel. Steel cans for food/beer/etc were plated with tin to prevent rust from forming and tainting the contents' taste. Such steel is called 'tin plate' and I suspect that was a major reason why such beer cans were called tinnies. These tinnies needed a 'church key' to open them as they didn't have ring-pulls. The usual church key was a handle about 5" long with a crown seal type bottle opener at one end and, at the other, a curved triangular 'beak' with a short protrusion underneath it. The protrusion was held underneath the metal seam around the top of the tinny and, by raising the handle the curved beak would drive a triangular hole into the top of the can. I mention this for our northern hemisphere friends who may not be familiar with Australian ritual.

By the end of the 60s smaller beer cans had become popular and we'd gone all metric so we standardised on 375ml as a size. Being shorter than a real man's can they were called 'stubbies' (stubby, if you only had one) and were still made of steel although aluminium started making its appearance (as did glass) and were also called tinnies. You still needed a church key to open the cans until they invented the ringpull, which came only when cans were made of aluminium. Small boats made of aluminium started becoming popular in the 60s and were also called tinnies but I'm unsure of whether the terms were more onogenetically linked.

The ringpulls from beer cans came adrift from the can when opened and were a major rubbish problem where people wore bare feet (probably not in Parliament or the Opera House) and concerned people used to daisy chain them into long strings and hang collections of such strings over doorways to keep flies out while letting breezes and people in. Nowadays the ringpulls stay with the can.

Small cans were sold in slabs of two dozen (giving rise to the slab as a unit of currency) until glass bottles (also 375ml) were introduced; these were sold in shrink-wrapped half-dozens called sixpaks, so called because their appearance on a grog shop shelf reminded women of the ideal shape of a man's torso. These stubbies caused Australian musos endless trouble.

The original beer bottles used crown seals which had a cork insert. A beginner could easily collect lots of dead crown seals and flick out the cork insert with the point of a knife or a screwdriver. The naked bottle top could then be attached to a lagerphone and give the instrument its distinctive ring tone. When (in the late 60s & early 70s) women cornered the market in cork for their platform shoes, makers of crown seals had to start using plastic inserts; this allowed them to use screw-threaded crown seals which could be removed without a bottle opener.

Trouble was, plastic doesn't come out with a flick of a screwdriver and the slightest trace of it deadens the tone of your lagerphone. Some may find this welcome but true believers could go to the makers of crown seals and acquire some of the seals before the plastic has been inserted. You get the distinctive tinny ring tone but must space the screws further apart as the seals are squashed to their useable size only after the insert has been ,,, inserted. Careful observation will thus allow you to determine the age of the instrument.

To find a crown seal supplier who'd give you a case of seals for nothing is the sort of luck that would get you called a tin arse.

Cheers, Rowan