That said, I don't have any great affinity for the Gardies. I've gone there exactly once. The other day, at the (northern) end of an impromptu pub crawl with one Ronnie Flotsam, troubadour to the pissed cunts of London, brother to the pissed cunts of this chair. (We weren't actually aware it was marked for destruction or even on the auction block when we wandered in for a couple of pints of Summit. It happened to be there and so did we.) Let's not mince words, it was and is shabby as fuck. A poo-brown brick blockhouse out of the Legoland school of architecture, with a dilapidated beer garden strewn with broken furniture, more akin to the backyard of one of the neighbouring student flats than a licenced house of ale. But, unlike the shiny, overhyped, conspicuously empty Cook a few blocks away, the kids of North D were actually happy to turn up to the Gardies and sink a few sharpies and a few pool balls on a sunny Saturday afternoon, instead of hanging out in their scabby fucking flats. And that's the thing. Uni bars aren't meant to be shiny. They're meant to be functional. Like the backyards, living rooms and garages of the student flats they stand as proxies for.If anything, I'd compare the Gardies to the old '90s uni bar at UNSW, the Squarehouse. Same conspicuous lack of architectural merit, same strangled greenery, same sense of dilapidated, hard-used utilitarianism. And yet the same sense of good times having been had, and likely to continue as such, within those '60s-vintage poo-brown brick walls. Well until the cheque cleared from the Registry mandarins at least. Despite it being less attractive than the back end of Mr Shuffles, I've still got a soft spot for the old UNSW Squarehouse, more so than the Roundhouse which replaced it. But this is the point: anyone who didn't know it, wouldn't care that they'd missed out. They'd be in precisely the same position I was on moving up to UQ and hearing endless tall tales and true of the glory days of the Rec Club. It was gone by the time I got there, lost to mythology - like the Squarehouse for anyone who went through UNSW a few years after me, or the Gardies and Bowler for next year's influx of Otago first years. This is the nature of the iconic watering holes of your past: once they're lost, they mean nothing to the people who never knew them but a bunch of old, faded stories from a bunch of old, faded hellraisers.
Still won't make a fucking lick of difference about how wasted the first-years get in their flats before heading out, though.
Anyhoo we'll throw the question over to the panel - stories of long, lost watering holes of one's old, faded, hellraising (or otherwise) past?
The Doctor is OUT.
9 comments:
Doc - hope it was a great birthday for ya. I'm only tapping into this entry on the fly.
But...and a big fucking but despite my fleetness of interwebzing is that you are fucking totally spot on about the destruction of lower priced boozing spots. I've seen this so many times I've run out of salty water leaking out of the corner o' me eyes. It sucks big time and I've yet to see anyone come up with alternatives aside form brown paper bags and smashed glass. For uni students its a drive to corporatise their ITWPT and Felafel days. Oh yeah, Dogs are gonna beat them Bunnies in a coupla weeks. I'll be posting late next week. Tell Bedes my tips are going to his big fucken fish email.
I can't be certain...but I am pretty sure the QIT refectory is no more. Cheapest frosty ales with chips slathered in gravy...I used to live in that place between lectures. I was forced to take opera in third year and I believe I failed that uncategorically due to my pissed-ness-ness. I remember my teacher visibly blanched when once I jet-streamed her with beer breath that'd make your toes curl.
Nat - I've seen them renovated and up-priced near UNSW and Sydney Uni. I feel for students these days. Well, er, not in the "copping a feel" sort of way, sort of..
I'll get me coat.
Hey DocY, I didn't know you were at Otago (if I understood you correctly). I've got a cuz there finishing medicine.
I remember The Square House at UNSW quite well - saw a few bands there. I didn't know they replaced it with a Round House, that's how long since I've been there.
'Functional' is exactly the word for student hangs. The buildings are often puke brown and the rooms furnished by plastic chairs and a crap lino floor. But usually there's a killer good sound system to ameliorate for all of the rest.
I was at ANU in the early 80s and then again in the 90s then the 2000's so I 've seen the decline and yuppification of the uni bar-- which was at its peak as a grungy, graffiti and politics hole upstairs in 1979.
It was a place where people took drugs, slept under tables , woke up briefly, took more drugs , woke at 3 am under a table and wandered off to catch a taxi in the freezing Canberra winter after eating a Dolly's hot dog.
By the 90s it was moved downstairs into a huge hall, but still with a pool table so legitimate I guess.By the 2000s ,however, it looks more like a lounge room come shopping mall food hall from what I can observe and yes, tons more exxy-- in keeping with the march towards becoming a pure research university for post- grads with their slightly higher income. Abigail
The best/worst bar that I was ever a regular at was Cafe Neon on Given Tce in Paddington, Qld. It was a top spot that has $1 rums from 9 to eleven and $2 cans of XXXX until midnight. The whole place was painted black and it smelt like an ashtray. The dance floor was always litterd with hot chicks and there was a convenient spot to watch them from (sealed with perspex, no less) that ran alongside it. I spent many a night and not much cash there over a 2 year posting in Brissy. Awesome. Someone even wrote a play about it once; Dirty Caff, I think it was called. It showed at the Avon, but that was when it had shut down and I'd moved on. Now it has been re-furbed as an uber club for the next generation. Time passes!
It was 1989 and the bar I thought of as my first "local" (though we lived a good few suburbs away) was the Wyndham Park Tavern, downtown Auckland.
The downstairs "Marble Bar" was, well, it was a dive, but the staff were friendly enough, and my mates and I were all in love with the head barmaid, Sharon. Yeah, that was her name, at least to all except my mates wife to whom she was instead "little miss short-skirt". Good times.
The upstairs bar to which we'd retire after a few ales and shots each night was a seedy little den of eniquity called "No Names", a dance club where lingerie-clad bartop dancers entertained the crowds and we would hang with Boyd the DJ in his booth, swapping cones and tall stories to early hours in the morning.
Heard Boyd was killed in a car crash a couple of years later, haven't been back since and can't say what became of the old place. But yeah, nothing like old times with old mates...
Nat - chips and gravy are All Gold when on the turps. Many a plate thereof got put to work over jugs at the RE - particularly in the years when UQ was unibarless between the death of the Rec Club and the invention of the Red Room. Not sure what QUT kids do for a beer these days, probably wander into town.
Therbs - yes indeed. Though it's not been all bad, the demise of the Red Tomato down at the Kingsford 5 ways (a surrogate uni bar, along with the Regent, for those at the western end of UNSW) wasn't really a tragedy. This was the only place I've heard of where if you bought a beer after 6am you got a free breakfast. It was grot.
Abigail - certainly the unibar as ground zero for fomenting political revolution (or as much as you could get away with in student politics) is long gone. As really has student politics. The advent of the user-pays degree factories has really meant student politics seems to have been dumped into the who-gives-a-fuck basket for most undergrads, apart from the International Socialists who are still surviving.
The Roundhouse-Squarehouse switch at UNSW was just before O-Week 1999 - wrote about it in a previous post here, the same bit of history also got lightly fictionalised into an episode of In The Worst Possible Taste where McCarthy, a UNSW journalism alum, leads Flange Gasket, his band of bogan no-goods and desperados back there to play on the '99 O-Week undercard, and is fairly horrified by what they've done to his uni bar. Student bars and the gentrification thereof is a big theme in that episode actually.
~tbc~
Lerm - sadly it seems with modern liquor licensing laws the days of hose-out beer barns oozing with desperately cheap drinks and likewise members of the opp sex are over. The places are usually still shitholes but the drinks cost heaps more. No wonder the kids just stay home and play Goon Of Fortune until they hurl behind the shed.
Mofo - yup, sounds a fucking zoo. Funny to think though that the same way the Rec Club exists to me as only a mythical creation lost to the (alcoholic) mists of time, so will the Bowler or Gardies to students from now on. Actually I think we ended up smashing beers at the Bowler on one of my buckseses watching Otago losing the NPC rugby final? An evening which ended with someone falling down a flight of stairs in their boxers clutching a live electrical wire, I believe.
Drej - sounds appropriately grotty! Wyndham and Marble Bar - slightly ironic Westralian references given where you ended up.
The Alley would fit your bill, a room that was two reclaimed bowling lanes, inside a venue that managed to fit in free pool and darts with live original music. Crappy purple walls, carpet that was more nicotine than fibre, 44 drums as tables, chairs and stools that needed constant maintenance and were covered in more crappy purple, 2 meters of bar that could pump out the beers like you wouldn't think possible for a bar that small with no taps and one beer fridge.
Friendly staff, cheap drinks and now all it is is flattened rubble waiting for apartments to go up.
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