‘I’m sorry – I don’t follow.’
‘Are you sitting in the back because I might have leprosy or some thing?’
Christ. I thought of retorts but instead I asked him to pull up and I caught another taxi.
I sat in the back.
In agitation I decided to take up Crawford’s offer of interstate membership of his gentlemen’s club – ‘for the convenience’.
But I had changed my mind again by the time I got home. That would be heresy for heresy’s sake.
A Change of Restaurant
(adapted, from the Bulletin, 8.7.72)
Then Monte Walsh rode the last range, buddy and girl dead, left with his horse, his Winchester 94 and sap enough, perhaps, to wrestle one more wolf.
The lights came up but I was still riding along the aisle of the State Cinema, plaster dream palace, 1929 backlot grandeur.
We rode up the aisle.
‘What are you doing then?’ Don asked.
‘I don’t know. What are you going to do?’
He shook his head.
‘Might as well go down to Dienthnes and have a meal and go to the party,’ I said.
‘Dienthnes.’
‘Well, it’s close. Haven’t been there for a while.’
‘I might give it a miss. Push off home.’
‘Okay, okay then.’
We walked along the lighted shop-fronts – changing backdrop for our silence.
We reached the bus stop to Balmain.
‘See you then.’
‘See you, remember me to Nick.’
I rode on. I rode down the steps of Town Hall station, bought a copy of the New Yorker to share my dinner with, rode up the underground station steps.
Clip, clop.
How does an Australian see the western? In New York an American would see the western as folklore from ‘the west’. In Arizona the movie-goer sees it as local history? We’re told that in Asia they are seen as revolutionary statements. How do we see the western? I think that I see the western as something from childhood. As a child I saw the western as the game cowboys-and-indians better done. Now John Flaus tells us that it is Greek drama.
Do Nick and Mrs Nick at Dienthnes see it as Greek drama?
Up the steps to old Dienthnes. The old place. Nick and Mrs Nick. They ask, ‘Where hava you been?’
Shrug, unreasonably guilty.
‘Busy, maybe you too busy nowdays,’ says Nick, answering for me, excusing me.
‘Is business good?’ I ask, fumbling, wishing it good, wanting the empty tables wished away, feeling that I have to say, ‘Some of us are overseas now.’
Some of us have ridden to far-off ranches, looking for work, prospecting for gold, to hire out our guns; some have found spreads and settled.
‘Some of us live further out now – changes where you eat – and so on.’ My colloquial sentences always shape up badly, especially my colloquial lies.
‘Yes, yes,’ they say, fussing about me.
I sit down – pea soup, lamb, Greek salad, beer.
‘Half bottle?’ asks Mrs Nick, urging me to moderation.
‘Full bottle,’ I say, smiling (when have I ever taken a half bottle?) ‘Some of us have children now, babies.’ Further explanation of why we don’t seem to get there any more.
The waiter comes. He has seen a story in a magazine about Mike and his films.
‘Where have you been? Haven’t see you for a long time. You too important now for us, ah?’ he laughs.
‘Some of us have babies – Ken has a baby.’
‘I too, I have baby.’
‘Good,’ I say, ‘how long, I mean, how old?’
‘Four weeks ago.’
‘Good.’
‘You useta,’ Nick says, coming over, ‘you useta have the big table – all your friends, wine, talking – you useta come up here every night. Talk wine until we close.’
He remembers the good times. Don’t give me a hard time now, Nick.
Up the stairs we would come, babbling, fantasies, projects, schemes.
Firstly as a cadet journalist in the fifties.
And women – ‘I know a rather nice little Greek place. Do you like Greek food?’
The planning of little magazines, films, books, chapters of books, conferences, reviews, attacks and counter-attacks. We didn’t start all the magazines, write all the books, make all the films – but we started some magazines, wrote some books, made some films.
The projects we’d tried to mount, spur, ride, which sometimes died under us, threw us, galloped away. Some we rode for the full time, hat in hand, yahooing.
Broken alliances, lost friends. The way things never came out as good as we could visualise them up in Dienthnes. Vicious mocking by enemies and of enemies. Anxieties about money borrowed, money lost, money risked. The printing press we leased – and ‘lost’.
‘Here your soup,’ Nick says.
‘I tell you another thing,’ I say, trying to find the formulation which would absolve me from not having been there for so long, ‘some of us earn too much money now,’ I grin.
‘I know,’ Nick says sternly, ‘you eat all the time now at big restaurants,’ he smiles, no offence intended.
Some of us still don’t have that much money at all.
‘Too much money,’ I repeat, ‘now – some of us.’
‘I know,’ says Nick, ‘you eat the same food but at expensive places, I know.’
The poor days. Spaghetti, mincemeat, the cheap red, eating all the bread and butter and asking for another basket of bread.
I see the table – eight of us. ‘Bring more chairs,’ we shout as new arrivals come up the stairs, sit on the table corners. ‘Nick, another bottle of wine – make it two – olives, anchovies, feta, taramosalata.’
I prop up the New Yorker on the beer bottle and wonder if I’m going to be able to get through the full bottle.
‘Did you hear that Ken and Helen had a baby?’ I say to Nick, still searching for that explanation for the empty cafe. Don said recently that he thought he’d ‘outgrown’ Dienthnes. I had said recently to some one that I found my stomach couldn’t ‘handle’ Nick’s food. Someone said that Dienthnes was really a ‘training restaurant’ where young people learned to eat in restaurants properly.
We all ate more at the New Hellas these days.
‘Had a baby, that is good.’
Ken complained recently that he went up there and they gave him a whole packet of spaghetti. Once we would have praised a cafe for that. Now we needed low-carbohydrate diets.
How did they know our names? How did they know what work we did? Did they listen?
‘How is that girl – you know – that dark one – you were always here with her,’ Mrs Nick says.
The dark girl? The dark girl?
Edmund Wilson’s ‘Upstate Diary’ talks to me from the New Yorker – ‘I am still a man of the twenties,’ Wilson says. ‘I still expect something: drinks, animated conversation, gaiety, brilliant writing, uninhibited exchange of ideas.’
What cultural shuffling brings Monte Walsh (Lee Marvin), a western film, Resch the German brewer, Edmund Wilson aged seventy-seven and the New Yorker, together for a Greek meal with an Australian writer in Sydney, Australia, hovered over by Mr and Mrs Nick, immigrants from Piraeus?
‘Why you not got a family?’ Nick asks from his family table where his children sit, drawing sail boats with triangles for sails, houses with smoke curling from the chimney, bent lines for sea gulls.
I read: ‘Ellen’s stay with me this summer was not a success. Things came to a climax on August 27 after a celebration of her birthday and we had a rather bitter quarrel.’
The Hungarian woman who works in Boonville will not go up to Wilson’s house to teach him Hungarian because he has had four wives and is rumoured to have a cellar full of wine. (I am to visit this house next year and to see a mailbox with ‘E. Wilson’ painted on it, thrown in a junk room after his death.)
‘Where is the tal
l one?’ Nick holds his hand twelve inches above his head. ‘You know, what happened to him, the tall one.’
David. I tell him that David is married with children.
‘Why you not get married?’ – a solicitous, sad inquiry – ‘You come here with nice girls.’
‘Oh I’ve tried all that,’ I say, remorsefully. ‘Oh, I’ve tried all that, Nick,’ I say, squeezing his arm, implying something, one man to another, surprised that so much emotional chaos sums up simply like that.
I went to the party. Kate’s birthday. I give her the New Yorker as a gift and kiss her twice affectionately. We do not know that it is to be her last birthday and that she is to be killed on her motorcycle, drunk.
A young woman says, as we dance, ‘I read your stories and imagined you to be older.’
‘I’m not.’
‘You dance the old way.’
I told her the story of my night. ‘I went to see the film Monte Walsh – about a cowboy whose work runs out and whose buddies get shot and whose girl dies – the old cowboy. It’s a cop out, because his horse doesn’t die. Then I went to Dienthnes to eat alone and read the New Yorker, which is running Edmund Wilson’s “Upstate Diary”.’
‘Where’s Dienthnes?’
‘It’s a good little Greek place in Pitt Street – we used to go there a lot.’
‘Who’s Edmund Wilson?’
‘A good critic, and the New Yorker is a good magazine from New York established in the late twenties which all the good writers wrote for – once.’
‘I know about the New Yorker.’
‘Well, Nick, who owns the Dienthnes said, ‘Where are all your friends? You used to come here and drink wine and talk and laugh.’ I told him that my friends were either married or too well off to eat at cheap cafes any more. In so many words. But that wasn’t right. You just change restaurants. You move on.’
I thought about it as we danced. ‘It’s all really sad, in a way.’
‘Do you like Greek food?’ she said, back along the track in her very early twenties, flat-footed before my misty sense of loss, and my first experience – the first sensation I’d had – of the infuriating moving on of time.
The New Bar
(adapted, from the Bulletin, 17.4.71)
Having a drink at a hotel is a public appearance, in the theatrical sense, an image projected, lines spoken.
Don Beavis, London-born industrial designer, and Malcolm Searle, hotel manager and actor, work on this theory.
Together they created the new-style thematic bars in hotels which characterise the seventies. The first was the King Arthur’s Court in Kings Cross, Sydney. The hotel was formerly the humble Sutton, which was traditional, with much visible intoxication and sometimes singing. Now it is a mocked-up castle with a Port Cullis bar, Lancelot Hall, and a Bottle Shoppe. Inside it is carpeted – carpet came to the bars in the seventies – with a striped canvas canopy over the bar, and decorated with shields, swords, medieval illustration and a suit of armour. It is a stage set.
Its manager, Malcolm Searle, took the idea from the stage play Camelot.
‘I saw Camelot in New York and thought it was very beautiful, very romantic. When I was discussing renovation of the hotel with the owners, one said, ‘Well, what would you do with the hotel?’
‘My brain went boom, boom, boom,’ Malcolm snapped his fingers three times, ‘and I said – King Arthur’s Court.’
‘It’s terribly theatrical,’ Malcolm said with possessive pride, ‘every thing’s faked. Except the two rubbings, they’re authentic. The rest is made from synthetic materials – the suit of armour is fibreglass.’
We went over and touched it – in the dim light it was undetectable as fibreglass.
‘The Round Table is compressed plastic.’
‘This hotel is the most cosmopolitan in Sydney. Look, there’s a couple petting over there – no one minds.’
A specialist in hotel and restaurant design, Don Beavis had developed and created Malcolm’s idea.
‘We can supply a complete theme with names and artefacts – instant atmosphere.’ Don had wanted to be a theatrical designer but was side-tracked into industrial design.
‘Pubs went downhill in amenities after the war and lost a whole generation of drinkers. There’s a generation of young people who wouldn’t be seen dead in a lavatory-tile pub. The wine bars got them – they’re a non-beer-drinking generation.’
King Arthur’s Court was the first hotel bar to offer keg cider, and white and red wine in the glass – as well as beer.
Don’s first re-design job was the Grand National at swinging Padding ton. It remains a transitional hotel, retaining the original public bar but with a Victoriana theme in the lounge for the new generation.
‘Now all the pretty people in the world and the intellectuals go there – courting and posing. It is what I call a rendezvous. Before I trans formed it the bar was chrome pipe-work furniture, lino tiles, fluorescent lighting – in a word, sterility.’
The old use of hotel spaces is no longer socially relevant. The traditional hotel had a public bar, required by law, which offered its wares at the minimum fixed price and usually with minimal amenity. Australian hotels followed the British pattern of having a second bar, called a saloon or a private bar, or ‘the back bar’, with better amenity and higher prices. By custom the back bar or saloon was used by the employer or white-collar drinker and the public bar by the blue-collar drinker.
The hotels had a ‘parlour’ for women only, or sometimes for ‘gentlemen accompanied by a lady’. The parlour was usually built so that it was shielded from the view of the public and saloon bars.
The fifties and ten o’clock closing of hotel bars in some states created the ‘lounge’ for mixed drinking.
Most drinking is still done in segregated bars closed to the street view – a male atmosphere, uncomfortable and secretive, if not guilty.
During the seventies the saloon bar became the ‘club bar’ or the ‘cocktail bar’, usually with a theme and a suggestion of plushness. Many are opening windows to the street and giving exterior views, usually with one-way or smoked glass.
Themes are romantic or exotic, or historical; sometimes they honour the specialist clientele – the Wellington in Canberra has a press bar which was created because of the journalists who drank there. The Olympia in the Sydney Showgrounds has a show bar. Romantic themes include aviation, shipping, exploration. Exotic themes use artefacts or symbols from the orient, the south seas, Africa.
The bars become flights from the mundane – an environmental fantasy.
‘The everyday surroundings of most people are hostile and harsh,’ Don said. ‘People like the romantic as a relief. To create a mellow feeling is difficult and expensive with contemporary design and art, so we are forced to go to a romantic or historical theme.’
The Old Bar
Balmain has twenty-three hotels at last count. But it’s losing them. Within these hotels are many small informal and formal ‘drinkers’ clubs’ which make up the web of neighbourhood life. The Royal Oak is a green-tiled, two-storeyed corner hotel servicing about five hundred people who live or work in the streets around it.
We have even rented a room there to finish a book.
The drinkers at the Royal Oak have two social clubs – the Royal Oak social club and the Other End club – the people, literally, at the ‘other end’ of the bar. The Other End club was formed after animosity arose between members of the original club formed in 1930. The differences have gone but the two clubs continue with their own notice boards.
The Royal Oak also has a Darts club, Punters club, and a Pool club.
We’re told that the Darts club is the hardest to join, with strict requirements for sociability and skill.
The Darts club plays in the district hotel competition among the twenty-three hotels in Balmain. The competition game is 301 but other social games are played, including Killer, Mickey Mouse, Cricket, Burma Road and Round the Clock.
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br /> The two social clubs at the Royal Oak organise picnics, cricket matches and a Christmas tree for the kids.
The Punters club is a small group who each week put in money for a stake and take turns at picking a winner at the Saturday races.
The Pool club is new and formed by the younger men – some of them sons of the men in the public bar. The Pool club drinks in the pool-table room where there is also a juke box and where the young women from the neighbourhood go.
The Royal Oak has five drinking areas: the public bar, the women’s bar, the pool room, the beer garden, and the ‘fifth bar’ – the footpath (which is illegal). The car would be called the ‘sixth bar’. Some drinkers sit in their cars and drink, especially if they have children with them.
All are serviced from the public bar.
There is no enforced segregation between the men and women at the Royal Oak but by custom the women drink in the small bar just off the public bar. They sit on stools while in the public bar most drinkers stand, although there are some tables and chairs.
Other women who do not wish to drink in the hotel but want to drink draught beer, buy beers at the hotel bar and take them home in carriers which hold about four schooners (designed for milk bottles).
In atmosphere, the Royal Oak is probably the same as it was when the brewery took it over in 1900.
The public bar has the darts board with the usual rubber motor tyre around it. Above it hangs a six-foot-long leaping tiger, a symbol of the Balmain football club. Behind the bar there is also a large mock wooden knife and fork and spoon, a bar novelty. There is a brewery clock, a crayfish shell in a bottle caught by one of the customers, buffalo horns, a kangaroo skin, a Hereford skin (these were all collected by the licensee’s husband, Walter ‘Duke’ Taylor, on their trip around Australia). There are posters advertising the Northern Territory, a framed photograph of the finish of the 1972 Melbourne Cup, a sign advertising ‘fresh sandwiches’ (made by licensee Joan Taylor), a blueprint of a redevelopment plan for a nearby site. The club notice boards carry no notices.
There is a television set which is on day and night, usually without sound – it will be turned up if someone wants to hear something. Drinkers claim that the Royal Oak was the first hotel in Balmain to have television.
Days of Wine and Rage Page 27