lamb down verb to defraud a worker out of their entire end-of-season pay packet by keeping them drunk until it is all spent AUSTRALIA, 1850
Inns on the tracks to the diggings were the scenes of almost con-tinuous revelry and many of the bad old type of landlords, who had graduated in the art of “lambing down a shepherd”[.] — Russell Ward, TheAustralianLegend, p. 122, 1966