on the bash

on the bash

1. (slang) Working as a sex worker.

   Synonym: on the game

   • 1959, Streetwalker, page 58:

     From the hours you keep […] I'd say you were on the bash.

   • 2001, Andrew Vachss, False Allegations, →ISBN:

     A quick smile played around her lips. "It's from Bondi Beach. Right near Sydney. In Australia, where I'm from. My mom always said I was conceived on that beach, so she gave me that name. She was a young girl then, working square, before she went on the bash. All she could tell me about my dad is that he was a soldier.

   • 2008, Martina Cole, The Business: A compelling suspense thriller of danger and destruction, →ISBN:

     Once they had lost the first flush of youth, started to look like they were on the bash, he saw to it that they were relegated. Like West Ham, his home team, he loved them, but he knew they were not going to win any prizes. Basil's main girls were big earners and, as such, he expected them to look the part. He believed that you got what you paid for, and he saw to it that his girls were paid very well. He walked all the new girls through their first steps personally; he told them how to sit, […]

   • 2010, Paul O'Grady, The Devil Rides Out, →ISBN, page 243:

     The only bloody difference between serving drinks to the passengers of British Airways and handing out aperitifs in Mrs Leighton Hunt's Mayfair drawing room was 35,000 feet. It was at a small cocktail party in St John's Wood that I met Amy, a strikingly beautiful young woman who told me that she worked as an escort for an exclusive agency off Park Lane, as indeed did all the other female guests at the party. I'd sort of guessed that they were on the bash, […]

2. (slang) On an alcoholic drinking binge.
   • 1967, Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives [of New Zealand]; Mr McCready, in debate about the Milk Bill, page 3917:

     In the evidence he gave before the committee he said that 50 complaints a week were received by his authority. When asked what they were he said late delivery, dirty bottles, wrong change, milk bottles in the wrong place, changing the caps on the tops of bottles, delivery on the wrong days, and vendors going on the bash. That is an indictment of the milk vendors. If the Hutt Valley and Bays Metropolitan Milk Board is giving licences to people to carry on like that, [...]

   • 1979, Christine Hunt, Something in the Hills: Yesterdays in Central Otago, page 34:

     […] cooked lunch, three o'clock smoko, a big dinner and then supper. We always kept a man cook, and you'd never believe how we got them. At the hotel in Wanaka they'd always be getting chefs who were alcoholic; they'd work till they had enough money to go on the bash, then they'd be sacked, so the hotel owner would ring Minaret and send the chef up to us. He'd work as station cook for a while and then, when he wanted a bash again, off he'd go and the hotel would take him back.