In the women’s bar there is a gazelle skin and leopard skin given to Duke (pronounced ‘Dook’) by an actor friend who went on a safari to Africa.
The public bar is the heart of the hotel and Saturday is its big day.
Regulars begin arriving at the hotel late morning for their ‘heart starters’. By mid afternoon there’d be about sixty men in the public bar. The darts game is played throughout the afternoon and transistor radios are tuned to the races and football. Like most suburban hotels the Royal Oak has its own SP bookie.
In the evening there are likely to be regulars coming back after the evening meal to listen to the dogs, sometimes bringing their wives who would go into the women’s bar or the garden. At about eight or nine o’clock there is likely to be a little singing.
Joan and Duke call 9 o’clock the ‘witching hour’ – when the pub becomes visibly merry, everyone is talking loudly, and there is likely to be some argumentative shouting.
The Royal Oak is a beer-drinking hotel – Tooths new and old. Most of the older drinkers drink old and most of younger drinkers drink new. Some of the drinkers have new with a dash of old, some drink 75/25, some drink 50/50.
One drinker claims that between 10 a.m. and 10 p.m. on a Saturday he and his mates would drink about fifty middies each. We thought this was a bit high but Duke thinks that a few regulars would get near to it. By observation we thought that drinking was not this fast.
Duke says that the bar is self-policing and regulars handle any troublemaker who might drift in. The police haven’t been called for eighteen months.
Duke says that if you’re a stranger and are introduced to the hotel by one of the regulars ‘you’ll never have to drink alone’.
Balmain once had a reputation as a rough-house suburb and the Royal Oak was reputed to be a tough hotel. There is a bullet embedded in the wall from these days. But still, a man was stabbed in the Sackville Hotel in Balmain recently, and a drinker was shot from a car which pulled up outside the Cricketer’s Arms.
The Royal Oak’s wilder days were during the Second World War when it found itself with the largest bottled-beer quota in Sydney during a time of rationing, black markets, sly grog and desperate demand.
The changes are coming to the Royal Oak. Duke and Joan have made the backyard into a beer garden with a barbecue and tables and chairs. You can cook your own steak. There is coleslaw, potato salad and bean salad provided.
The regulars of the public bar are from the waterfront occupations – boilermakers, fitters, tugboat workers, wharf-labourers and seamen. The barbecue is drawing some of Balmain’s white-collars, from the hospital especially, and students from the College of Arts.
You can now buy table wine by the glass.
The Angel is Gone
(adapted, from the Bulletin, 9.6.73)
It was six p.m. and we’d just finished lunch. We were boulevardiering along Pitt Street when we met Lenore Nicklin, the journalist. Under pestering, she let slip that she was going to a fashion parade at John and Merivale’s new shop, Jam Jeans, in the former Angel Hotel. Much to her horror we said we’d go along with her. She said you can’t do this to me. But we had wanted, for some time, to protest personally about the desecration of one of our great drinking hotels.
Like a blowfly we followed Lenore into the old public bar, now a dress shop, up the flights of stairs to a restaurant-milk bar built for the Jam customers.
We were about to protest noisily and offensively about the outrage of tearing the guts out of a landmark, our historical heritage, a haunt of old bohemia, a memorial to bygone days, an architectural master piece, a sanctuary from the hurly-burly of mid-city life, the dislocation of social pattern and so on when Mr John put a glass of champagne in our lunch-stained hands and made us instant and lifelong friends.
We put our arms around his shoulder and said that he’d done wonders to the old eyesore and how a living city is a changing city. The old has to make way for the new – that is vitality. And how much more pleasing it was to see aesthetic and healthy, beautiful young people stylishly dressed rather than a musty old hotel filled with beer-drinking, maudlin, weary men.
We then settled down for the fashion parade among fifty or more selected customers and journalists.
The models had those stylised frozen smiles, glazed looks and hypnotic movements which thrilled us. They modelled all the latest forties gear and included a set of perfect size-eight twins (the ideal Jam measurement). And there was Gary who looked as if he’d stepped from a Coca-Cola advertisement.
We especially loved the lurex and satin.
There was a voice which kept saying Jesus Christ – they’ve turned the saloon bar into a milk-shake shop.
Judi Harrison, the compere, came over later and told us that in the new shop she would be the ‘coordinator’ and that the Jam shop assist ants would be known as ‘fashion advisers’.
One of Jam’s leading designers, Judy Le Cash, joined us and said that it was all like the first night of a play.
Richard ‘Scruffy’ Hall, then a private secretary in the Whitlam government, was at the parade. He had been described in the Sydney press as always looking as if he’d just fallen off a bus.
We asked Judy Le Cash what she thought of the Hall style of dress. She said, ‘I don’t want to sound rude but …’ and stopped.
Go on, we urged.
‘Well I know the suit is well cut and obviously expensive – he knows about clothes – but he looks, well …’
She was right so far.
‘Go on.’
‘Well he looks as if he’s fallen off a bus or something.’
We hugged her.
We asked her whether she could dress him at Jam.
She said no they wouldn’t be able to fit him, but she added that he ‘looks trendy for a person of his generation [thirty-five] and obviously feels confident in his clothes and that’s a sign of style.’
That wasn’t only confidence.
The Newcastle is Gone
(adapted, from the Bulletin, 18.12.71)
The distress that people feel about the demolition of some buildings illustrates that buildings are not only ‘machines to work in or machines to live in’.
In Sydney many buildings with historical associations have been demolished in George Street near Circular Quay as part of the Rocks Development plan.
The buildings have associations with the literary and art bohemia of the first half of the century. They contain memories worth drinking to.
As with all demolitions, there were tenants who were distressed about having their lives dislocated when they thought they were secure and at a time of life when they were least able to adapt to the change.
One tenant who had been in the George Street terraces, just along from the Newcastle Hotel, for thirty years was a woman in her late fifties who lived alone in an elegant flat named the Attic Studio. She had throughout her life associated with the arts and had seen them leave the area.
‘I don’t want anything to do with trade unions,’ she said, when we told her that we wanted to talk to her about the buildings, just before they were demolished.
‘We are not from the trade unions,’ we told her, wondering what it was all about. We told her we were interested in the buildings.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘this was the centre of the art world – yes, there were literary connections with every building but I don’t want to talk about it unless it can do something for me’ – her voice was frantic.
‘We can make a protest for you.’
‘What good are protests against the millions of dollars of the developers,’ she said.
‘I guess that’s right,’ we said, ‘there is no way to stop the demolitions now.’
Jack Mundey had stood on the bar of the Newcastle Hotel a few nights before it closed and said that it would not be demolished. The Builders Labourers union would prevent that.
But the Newcastle is gone.
‘These walls haven’t a crack,’
she said, ‘these walls are sound. Why don’t they pull down slums and leave us alone?’
‘You mustn’t mention my name – I don’t want my name mentioned and I won’t talk to you – there’s no use. None of us have a place to go.’
Her elegant flat is now rubble and she has died.
The blocks from Grosvenor Street to the overhead railway at the Quay had a unity of design. They were built as live-in shops and flats at the beginning of the century, after bubonic plague was found in the slums around the Quay. Unemployed workers had formed a circle around the suspected plague area and killed the rats as they ran from the burning slums. The government had reclaimed the land, demolished the slums and rebuilt.
This time the demolition took the Newcastle, a drinking place for journalists, academics and other city workers of a nonconformist nature. Some of us said that the drinkers would regroup somewhere else – but it didn’t happen. The pattern was irrevocably destroyed.
Andronicus’s coffee shop has gone.
The painters’ garrets have gone – some were still in use up to demolition.
Those who worked in the area included Norman Lindsay, Raymond Lindsay, Unk White, B. E. Minns, Arthur Streeton, Robert Johnson, H. R. Gallop, Thea Proctor, Rah Fizelle, Ralph Balson, Roland Wakelin, Sir William Dargie, John Maudson, Frank MacNamara, Wal Taylor, Douglas Dundas, Adrian Feint, John Alcott, W. Rubey Bennett and Julian Ashton.
The Hilton Arrives
(adapted, from the Bulletin, 27.12.75)
We are so bad at holidaying that we decided to stay in the new Sydney Hilton – built on the site of the old Tattersalls Hotel and the Palace Theatre.
The marble bar has been moved intact and reconstructed.
We are bad at holidaying; we play no sport; we have trouble making friends with foreigners; we do not get along well with bell captains; and we have trouble lying in the sun – we get over-hot, we think of things ‘to do’ and things we did wrong.
Staying at the Hilton in your own city has many advantages. You can invite friends up for drinks from the automated bar in your room. You know the best restaurants in town. At the Sydney Hilton you have the Sydney library opposite, run by Sara Walters and Fay Lawrence. You can use the hotel pool, massage service and health club.
And some of the rooms look out on Balmain.
Days can go by, if you choose, when you rarely hear an Australian voice and can forget that you are in Australia.
The Value of Lunch at the New Hellas
Myfanwy Gollan
(abridged extract, from Kerr and the Consequences, 1977)
By 8 p.m. on Monday 20 September 1976, three thousand people had crowded inside Sydney Town Hall for a public protest meeting entitled ‘Kerr and the Consequences’, and the doors had been closed to at least another fifteen hundred.
These people, young and old, from businesses and professions, factories and shops, schools and universities, from all over Sydney, had come to show their continuing concern for the anti-democratic action of the previous 11 November, when Sir John Kerr as governor-general (a post not filled by election) had dismissed a government holding the confidence of the House of Representatives, had installed the leader of the opposition as ‘caretaker’ prime minister, closed down parliament and called an election in circumstances which grossly favoured one political party.
Within a few weeks newspapers were describing the ‘Kerr and the Consequences’ meeting as ‘unusual’, ‘extraordinary’, ‘now famous’ and ‘historic’. It was to be the prototype for meetings to be held in town halls in most of the other major Australian cities …
The idea had come at a lunch the authors Frank Hardy and Donald Horne had at the New Hellas Restaurant in Sydney some weeks before. Contemplating the fracturing of the Australian political consensus and the anger and despair felt by so many who had been deeply affected since 11 November 1975 by the betrayal of the principles of responsible parliamentary democracy, they wondered what could be done. News paper editorialists had dismissed demonstrations against the governor-general as representing the views of only a small, suspect section of the Australian community. Donald Horne and Frank Hardy believed that the feeling against the whole grubby business of the events leading up to the action of that 11 November was much wider.
They made the sort of decision more likely at the end of a lunch than at its beginning. They decided to hire the Sydney Town Hall for a public meeting.
Saturday Afternoon at the Nedlands Hotel
A very hot day. On the river below an old
converted lifeboat just moves under red sails.
With clipped heads the Children of God advance,
pass out their pamphlets, suggesting five
cents to cover the cost of printing. The world,
they claim, will end in forty days. Their blue
Californian eyes betray no shade of pride
or uncertainty. My Polish friend and I drink beer,
still live with our theses. Under the trees
students revolve in swimsuits. Older men in the bar
are variations on red and yellow meat. Windless, the lifeboat
drifts by rafts of cormorants. Thunder is in the air.
The Children of God avert their eyes from two
melon-breasted girls bending over a sports car.
Hal Colebatch
(from Spectators on the Shore, 1975)
Pot v. Alcohol
(adapted, from the Bulletin, 31.1.71)
What the introduction of marijuana into Australian social life did was to demonstrate the dependence of our social life on alcohol – how, for some of us, social timetable was determined by alcohol. Where to meet, when to meet, what to do was determined by alcohol and its availability.
A marijuana party or the ‘pot scene’ – the slang keeps changing – was the first time that some of us have seen people socially together without a glass in their hand.
As one of the alcohol generation, we found ourselves uncomfortable, defenceless, and bewildered about what to do. The pot culture seemed insufferably younger, cabalistic, earnest and evangelical.
A pot party or ‘head’ party, in the early seventies (and still, among purists), was a circle of people with marijuana cigarettes passed from person to person, usually becoming heavy with saliva. The smoke was drawn in and held as long as possible – without becoming red-faced – and then the ‘joint’ was passed on. There was little conversation except for remarks which celebrated marijuana – ‘great shit, man’, and sometimes stream-of-association chatter known as a ‘rave’.
All pot-smokers are experts on the ideology and pharmacology of the drug.
There was, in the early seventies, something of an anti-alcohol movement among marijuana-smokers, as if the two drugs were incompatible and as if those who used them were different types of people – with marijuana-smokers being morally superior.
The antagonism was seen as a social division between ‘juicers’ and ‘heads’, or those who smoked ‘shit’ and those who drank ‘piss’.
Talking of the Aquarius festival in Canberra in 1972, Pat Lewicki, a participant, said:
Perhaps the most obvious clash between the two cultures was the ‘bar scene’ and the ‘Rock Tent’. Juice-heads and heads don’t mix. The scene in the bar was reminiscent of a wild-west movie – beer spilled on the floor, beer in the piano, aggressive uptight people downing their coldies as quickly as they could. The other scene is much calmer. How much damage, anyhow, can a group of kids in a circle do.
The earnest, cerebral left see the marijuana scene as ‘privatist, anti-rational and male chauvinist’ (the male chauvinism charge comes from the custom of heads calling their women friends ‘chicks’). A writer in the now defunct marxist newspaper Old Mole attacked the heads for rigidly segregating the realms of human experience by exclusive concentration on the sensual drug experience.
Lewicki’s moralism contains the marijuana-smoker’s self-image – serene, non-violent, mystic. The drinkers are
seen as violent, tension-ridden. The evangelical heads claim every positive value for their drug – better sex, better perception, better health, better domestic relations.
Chris, a journalist, who has smoked marijuana for years and was an observer of the marijuana scene, had his first ‘nirvana experience’ in 1970.
He thought the days of single-minded drug talk – ‘talking shit’ – were over. He found the total head scene alienating.
Then the drought left us without any shit, sitting around waiting for some to come on the market. Someone eventually went out and bought a flagon and the singing and the raving started again. But I think we always drank, we just pretended we didn’t. The ‘everything’s a groove’ stuff won’t work. You can’t make a house work on that. All the head houses I’ve ever known have become heavy; but, of course, if you have enough marijuana, domestic scenes are better – you’re too loose to fight – you know, the two eastern prophets – No Way Man and No Hassle.
Practicality has turned some people back to alcohol who would prefer to smoke marijuana. The price has been forced up and people are scared off.
‘Everyone got paranoid. And there’d be guys you didn’t know drop ping in to your place because they’d heard it was a great place to blow a log.’
CONFERENCE-GOING
The seventies seemed to be a time of conferences – of inquiries and new problems.
This pooling of information and ideas provided the basis for many decisions and distilled into positions which will continue long into the eighties.
I wrote a novella called Conference-ville in 1977 and in that I saw the conference as a place of drama. This didn’t convince everyone.
The blurb-writer at Angus & Robertson annoyed me intensely. The blurb said, ‘The book shrewdly observes the pretensions and shifting allegiances in Conference-ville … [and] explores the limitations of Australian intellectual life’.
Days of Wine and Rage Page 28
