THE WORSHIP OF BACCHUS WON'T CEASE

The Exeter photographed by Ned Meldrum in Counter Meal - recipes and stories from great Australian pubs, Funtastic 2005

Wowser Prohos Come And Go
Waves Of Dries Ebb And Flow
But The Exeter Still Runs Pure 
by PHILIP WHITE

So. The proho dries are on a rise.  Don’t panic.  They come and go.  Dry waves wear out through public boredom and the need to keep the wheels of the economy well greased.  In more ways than one, the Exeter is the ideal location for the contemplation of wowserism.  Lean your bows against her rubbing strakes, get the ebullient landlord Kevin Gregg to set one or two up for one, and ponder.

Blue-green biker: the author arrives at the Ex to contemplate abstinence.

Even the name Exeter has form. The ancient Gaelic word for water is uisge. Whisky is a corruption of usque-baugh, the water of life.  The Old Welsh Celtic for current of water is wysg; water is gwy or wy.  The Welsh take a wys, not a piss. And they tend to get, shall we say, on it.  They have a river Wysg, commonly mispronounced by the English as Usk.  As also happened with a river in Devonshire, this name was mispronounced by the Romans, who called both rivers Isca.  The Devonshire stream gradually morphed into the Exe.  It quite naturally flowed through the place which became Exeter. 

Former Exeter publican, Nicholas Binns, with the late Gabriella Bertocchi, photographed by Victoria Straub in 1996

Although his quote came from the lugubrious Peter Ustinov character in Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, my esteemed colleague John McGrath glanced nicely through the edge of this history when he called a previous Exeter publican, Nicholas Binns, on the occasion of his retirement, “a river to his people.” 
 
The Earls of Exeter traditionally lived in Cecil House, opposite the Savoy Hotel on the Strand.  It was on this site that the mighty Exeter Hall was raised and opened in 1831.  This quickly became a meeting-place for non-conformist protestants, the Anti-Slavery Lobby, the opponents of the Corn Laws, the suffragettes, and, well, the YMCA. As its main auditorium  sat 4000, it was also a favourite concert hall for the likes of the revolutionary French composer, Hector Berlioz.

 It was in these rooms that the fathers of this British colony held a meeting at which it was first decided to establish the South Australian Company. Flushed with this proud recent history, our forebears named a suburb and two pubs after it.

As wowser uprisings follow waves of over-indulgence like tides, Exeter Hall also became a favourite hangout for the proho dries of the day.  Enter one George Cruikshank (left), a second-generation political satirist, cartoonist, illustrator and drunk.  The nineteen-year-old Cruikshank had watched his father Isaac perish in a coma after downing a whole bottle of spirits in a drinking competition in 1811, but seemed to take more competitive challenge from this than purposeful consideration of its folly.  He spent the years between this and his 55th swinging in constant exacerbation between merry drunkenness and extreme and audacious creativity. His biographer, Robert Upstone was to call Cruikshank’s 1819 toon of the Prince Regent (later George IV) farting in the parliament’s face “one of the most deliberately offensive and provocative images ever produced.”  Even after the Crown paid him £100 to desist, our man was quick to be back at his feverish assault.

Between public bouts of carousal and long absences from society and sobriety -- “surely no man drank with more fervour and enjoyment, nor carried his liquor so kindly, so merrily” wrote a contemporary -- Cruikshank produced some 10,000 illustrations, etchings, paintings and designs.  He illustrated two books for Charles Dickens -- Sketches by Boz and Oliver Twist – and his annual Comic Almanac always sold out.

But at the age of 55, Cruikshank produced The Bottle, a series of eight prints portraying the collapse, through their abuse of alcohol, of a fine lower-middle-class family.  This sold over 100,000 copies in a few weeks. It was reproduced on tea sets and dining plates.  He followed this up with The Drunkard’s Children the next year.  These highly profitable enterprises led to Cruikshank morphing rather quickly, through a new-found moderation in his attitude to the booze, to outright evangelical wowserism.

“An admired, theatrical, highly-effective speaker” writes Upstone, Cruikshank “lectured  tirelessly on temperance … a mass movement … a following of around three million being claimed out of a total population of around 20 million ... The temperance movement, however, were a generally compassionate group, not usually targeting drinkers for anger but instead the distillers and politicians who benefited from the poor’s weakness. ”
 

William Hogarth, Gin Lane, engraving 35.7 x 30.5cm., London 1751

Cruikshank himself was becoming increasingly perturbed at the links he saw between alcohol and crime.  “There are a number of besettling sins connected with drinking,” he preached, “such as robberies, brutal assaults, garottings, house-breakings, suicide and murder … if we could do away with intoxicating liquors altogether, we might wheel out that dreadful instrument the gibbet … and make a bonfire of it.”

To illustrate his frustration, Cruikshank had a big idea in 1859.  He envisaged The Worship of Bacchus, a a terrifying epic work in oils, encapsulating the decay of Britain in the mood of Hogarth’s Gin Lane with respect to Pieter Breughel the Elder’s surreal The Triumph of Death. Powerpoint and the movies were still a long way off, but Cruikshank dreamed, if you like, of a huge still version of Mickey Rourke doing Charles Bukowski with a cast of thousands in Barfly, delivered, with associated promotional billboards and brochures, live to a hall near you.

The Triumph Of Death - Pieter Bruegel The Elder (c.1525-69), oil on panel

Cruikshank began pencil sketching and watercolouring immediately, but his impatience led to him working harder on the big oil than on the initial watercolour and consequent prints, which would pay his income while he toiled away at the big picture.  This bungling with the schedule caused a delay in the making of the prints, so there were no sales when they were most needed, and anyway, public interest was waning. 

“I have not the vanity to call it a picture,” he told a temperance gathering of the finished work in 1862, “it being merely the mapping out of certain ideas for an especial purpose, and I painted it with a view that a lecturer might use it as so many diagrams … In the centre of this mass is a madman … it may indeed be said that madness prevails over the whole of this mass of worshippers; for excitement from strong drink and drunkenness is in fact temporary insanity.”

When he launched The Worship of Bacchus for public view in August of that year, nobody came.

Exeter Hall, The Strand, 1905. It was demolished in 1907 to make way for the Strand Palace Hotel, which survives to this day.

Mortified, Cruikshank moved the work to Exeter Hall.  As if once again forecasting the movies, it was propped up on the stage.  Even at a monstrous 236 x 406 cm. the work would probably have looked small in that huge empty auditorium:.  However, it turned out that our man’s giant dry vision itself had shrunk not just in the social change from Georgian to Victorian taste, but, as critic Francis Turner Palgrave noted “his high tragic power has been exercised mainly against those abuses by which the poor and the helpless suffer. His sympathies are clearly those of a man of the people for the people; and this excludes drawing room popularity.”

For drawing room, read the private parlours, sitting rooms and counting-houses of the distillers, brewers, lawyers and politicians on the make. There was far too much money at stake, and the public remained very thirsty.

The Worship of Bacchus, etching after the oil painting (236 x 406 cm) by George Cruikshank, London, 1860-2 ... click image for closer look 

After a century hidden away, The Worship of Bacchus was restored and exhibited by the Tate Gallery in 2001, where it resides to this day, and, given the current form of the ascendant wowser wave, initially attracted much more supportive fame than it ever did in the artist’s time.

These waves, however, really do come and go.  Hannah at the Tate tells me that unfortunately, the work is back in the vaults, and Cruikshank’s bio is no longer in the bookshop there, so you’ll just have to trust my account or make the hits I suggest below.

Cruikshank went to his grave leaving a document a lot more pertinent to the nature of the colleagues moored beside you there at the bar.  Buoyed, he professed, by his obsession with fitness and teetotalism, he lived into his 86th year. His will looked well after his widow, Eliza, but provided even more proficiently for a woman called Adelaide Archibald.  This secret mistress lived just around the corner from Cruikshank’s marital home.  Of all the contents of Adelaide’s house, Cruikshank bequeathed to her “all such furniture books wines and household effects belonging to me” adding wry irony to what could have been the perfect acronym for the lass: AA.

For household effects read their ten children, for whom Cruikshank had stacked up capital in trust.

Adelaide’s relationship with her Exeter rarely gets more simple than this.  While the proho dries, the wowsers, and the busybody interferists will always come and go, order a double, and draw it so slowly you can fully digest the fact that there are always more old drunks than old doctors.  And many, indeed, are both.



The Worship of Bacchus is so big and intricate that no normal browser can handle it in any detail.  I have selected the best links to it here:

The Guardian’s Steve Bell takes us to visit The Worship of Bacchus in the vaults of the Tate Gallery.

Fine detail of Bacchus from the British Journal of Psychiatry
 
Medium and very high resolution images of the etching which was printed for general sale.

One of my all-time favourite prohos is the American evangelist Billy Sunday, whom I was taught to revere without much idea of what he was like. Turns out he was like this (official clip). Although he enjoyed the support of the Almighty, even Billy lost his battle gainst the mighty thirst of America.  You can also see him preaching on prohibition on this scratchy old doco.

The top half of Adelaide's premier thirst emporium, The Exeter Hotel, 246 Rundle Street, East End, drawn by Millie The Kid (Amelia Dickins) at 17 years of age in 1987. And oh yes, just in case you're wondering, that's my grandfather, Pastor Teddy Seymour, below. Having married his daughter, my father, Pastor Jimmy White, followed in Teddy's street-preaching footsteps, being active in the Women's Christian Temperance Union and the Lord's Day Observance Society as well as being close buddies to the likes of Rev. Ian Paisley, Pastor Wally Betts, Dr. Bob Jones Jr., and Dr. Carl McIntyre.  After that dry ebb, I'm a Mercurial wave of the opposite, thanks to Bacchus and Pan.

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DRY WOWSER BASTARDS KILL BOHO STREET

MARGUERITE DERRICOURT'S WONDERFUL SCULPTURE OF FOUR PIGS - "TRUFFLES, HORATIO, OLIVER AND AUGUSTA - A DAY OUT" - IS A BIG HIT WITH KIDS AND THE FAT ELVISES, BUT IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE TO LOVE ABOUT THE BLEAK SMOKE-FREE CANYON CALLED RUNDLE MALL, FORMERLY THE MAIN DRAG OF LITTLE OLD ADELAIDE, SOUTH AUSTRALIA?

Prohibitionist Drones Kill City
Who The Hell Are These People
%@#&! Interferist Do-gooders
by PHILIP WHITE

There are three good things about Rundle Mall(1). John Dowie’s girl on a slide, Bert’s balls, and Jane’s pigs. Sculptures. The rest of it is either a pox on the creative intelligence of the lot of us, or a perfect reflection of it. Or maybe both.

BERT FLUGELMAN'S BALLS IN AN EMPTY RUNDLE MALL ... NOW A CUSTOMARY MEETING PLACE FOR THOSE WHO DARE ... COMMISSIONED BY PREMIER DON DUNSTAN IN THE MID 70s

I walked its length last week, all the way along that haunted jangle of a gully from the chocolate shop to Hungry Jacks. I kept my spending hands safe inside my jacket pockets, hunkered in as a sort of protective thing, but it was no comfort. The only joy was that splendid lace verandah of The Exeter (2), glimmering like Heaven way down there on the left. The place which Thinkers-In-Residence habitually attend to gather their lucrative ideas – mercenary touch-and-go missionaries paid great fees by the state which takes this money from those of us who think unpaid and unheard.

MILLIE DREW THIS POSTCARD WHEN SHE WAS ABOUT 13

The Exeter. Exactly where it has been since the day when it was erected and named after its contemporary temple of free thought, Exeter Hall on London’s Strand, where the suffragettes and the anti-slave movements held their meetings, and the enlightened documents for the South Australia Company (3) were drafted and signed.

EXETER HALL, THE STRAND, LONDON







The minute Don Dunstan (4) ripped the fountain out of Henry Ayer’s (5) front lawn, plonked it in the middle of that vile stretch and filled it up with champagne, I have always felt that Rundle Mall was no place for smokers and drinkers.

I learned about these carnal arts at a very early age: just after the war. They were the habits of admirable men and bachelors: the rakish Jimmy Clarke, my grandfather, A. J., and that golden Greek, Cockless Themostokolas. I knew they were one hundred per cent hellbound, and while I primarily loved the smell, I could see through my bright infant eyes that they were enjoying themselves a lot more than the Exclusive Brethren.

With the relentless march of the years, these glamorous tendencies gradually infested my soul, driving the god of those droll Johns, Wesley and Calvin, clean out. Before Dunstan took control, we would drive straight down that old Rundle Trundle from Terrace to Terrace in Threddie’s grey FX, pulling the odd smokey from the retreads while perfecting the wolf whistle and the drawback between slugs of Seppelts Sedna, that miraculous speedy brew of powerful alcohol and kola nut which one could buy from the chemist, even in school uniform.

When Donnie D decided to cut off our traffic, brick the street over, and devote it entirely to the pedestrian worship of mindless expenditure, the main public discussion focused on whether mall would rhyme with ball, as in Bert’s, or mal, as in malfunction. To the bemusement of the nasal whiners of Melbourne and Sydney, the plummy St Peter’s (6) throat of Adelaide won the day, and by the time we’d all got used to that new word, Rundle Street was cactus. Flugelman’s glistening orbs were installed to reinforce the pronunciation, and the whole mob got quietly down to the mindless greasing of the wheels of commerce.

It’s been downhill ever since. And now, as if it will save that decrepit wreck of a precinct from civic damnation, the hammy burghers, money-changers and Sadducees of the city council have declared it a smoke-free zone.





















THE WONDERFUL GABRIELLA BERTOCCHI WITH LEGENDARY EXETER PUBLICAN, NICK BINNS, IN 1996 photo VICTORIA STROUB autograph NICK BINNS - THE PERFECT PUBLICAN'S SIGNATURE: NEVER WASTED ON A CHEQUE! NICK'S RETIREMENT WAS CELEBRATED IN THE GRIEVANCE DEBATE IN THE SOUTH AUSTRALIAN PARLIAMENT

The anti-smoker movement is precisely that: it is more a revilement of the person than their unfortunate habit. It the opposite of the enlightened philosophies that flowed from Exeter Hall, changed the world forever, and put Rundle Street where it is. It is essentially a wave of savage contempt for people who are hooked on nicotine: generally poor folk who pay more tax than just about anybody else whilst easing the pain of their addiction. This contempt thrives in the twisted souls of the wowser, the interferist, the sanctimonious and the pious.

There are still millions who find smoking a kindly twin of drinking. Many of us prefer these perfectly human pastimes to the droll compilation of the types of caucasian artefacts peddled by the businesses of the Mall. We should be reviling this determined erosion of our preferences by those who don’t share them.

The wowser bastards who revile the smoker are the same mob who impose alcohol bans. They are white and wealthy, the types who habitually attend church to eat their god and drink his blood. They have forgotten their idol was known as “a gluttonous man; a wine-bibber; a friend of publicans and sinners” as they bow to the same graven images he explicitly forbad.

Once we accept their ban of our pleasures in that most boring stretch of Adelaide pavement, it will creep malignantly to devour both east and west. It will ruin the Exeter Hotel and its like, and drive underground those of us who prefer such halls of determined enlightenment.

Last week I overheard the velvet tones of Theo Maris, the developer, soothingly re-assuring ABC listeners that he felt this prohibition would be a good thing for the precinct. Last time I looked, he owned the southern side of the East End of Rundle Street. One must surely presume his general consistency would assure that what he thinks is good for the bit he does not yet own will bring the same wave of profit to the bits he does. So there goes the stretch from the Stag to Frome.

From there, the whole of Hindley Street and the north side of Rundle Street must appear to be a cinch to this Nanny State.

Once they’ve driven great halls like The Exeter into extinction, and we’re all hiding at home, locked in the dark with our browsers, our smokes and our booze, where will the Thinkers-In-Residence learn what to advise the Premier?

NED MELDRUM PHOTO OF THE EX FROM THE BOOK COUNTER MEAL: RECIPES AND STORIES FROM GREAT AUSTRALIAN PUBS (FUNTASTIC, 2005)

FOOTNOTES

1. Rundle Mall. The main street of Adelaide, capital of South Australia.

2. The Exeter. Named the best pub in Australia by Mark Shield in the Penguin Guide to Australian pubs. A formidable boho haunt with an astonishing wine list and really good food.

3. The South Australia Company. A private company set up in London in 1835 to settle South Australia as a convict-free colony.

4. Don Dunstan. A gay, left-wing, libertarian graduate of St Peters College who was Premier of South Australia from 1970 to 1979.

SA PREMIER DON DUNSTAN WEARING HIS PINK SHORTS TO PARLIAMENT IN 1972









5. Henry Ayers. Patrician and highly influential early settler who built a grand mansion a block away from Rundle Street. Ayer's Rock - Uluru - was named after him.

6. St Peter’s College. Posh Anglican boarding school.

MADE IN SOUTH AUSTRALIA: CHRYSLER VALIANT OUTSIDE THE EX.

HIGH COURT HEADKICKS PROHO DRIES

THE AUTHOR AT THE EXETER ON A TYPICAL SATURDAY NIGHT: FAR TOO SMART FOR A VEHICLE WITH AN ENGINE

Judges Side With Publicans Shaft Of Welcome Wisdom How Much Is Not Enough?
by PHILIP WHITE - a version of this appeared in The Independent Weekly

When Nicholas Binns steered that bespoke East End drink emporium, The Exeter, he once refused a friend of mine more alcohol, for annoying other patrons with his eccentric conversation and behaviour. A hyper-intelligent gent of some years, my friend has a penchant for intriguing and unusual conversation, which he is quite capable of conducting when there are no listeners. He took his orders well, and strolled purposefully to the Crown and Anchor, just up the lane, where he drank until closing. Then he drank all night, completing a full twenty-four hour shift, before confidently re-entering The Exeter, where he ordered a malt whisky with a Coopers Stout chaser, which was promptly served to him. He had, he explained, drunk off the full head of steam which has caused the earlier, er, inconvenience. There would be no more trouble.

Publican Binns was never one for deciding how much anybody should drink. He refused to serve customers only when their behaviour irritated or concerned others, quite fairly including himself and his staff. Peace in the tills; peace in the valley. Upon his retirement, Binns was celebrated by Pat Conlon in the parliamentary grievance debate, and called “a river to his people” in a reverent piece by the great John McGrath.

I thought this line was taken from the lubricious character played by Ustinov in Spartacus, but it’s Roman in another way.

The Exeter is named after Exeter Hall in London, where the South Australian Company was set up. This hall was the home to the anti-slavery movement and housed hearty meetings of temperance activists, Protestants, and remarkable musical performances. Exeter, on the Exe River, takes its name from isca, the Roman mispronunciation and spelling of the Gaelic and Erse uisge, which means flowing water. And whisky.

EXETER HALL, THE STRAND, LONDON, 1905. THE HALL WAS DEM,OLISHED TWO YEARS LATER TO MAKE WAY FOR THE STRAND PALACE HOTEL..

In their 10 November ruling that publicans have no general duty of care to protect patrons from the consequences of drunkenness, High Court justices French, Gummow, Hayne, Heydon and Crennan have struck a Christlike blow at generations of interferist wowsers who struggle to control humankind’s eternal propensity to self-medicate. Our drug policy is written by drug companies and people who don’t take drugs; our liquor laws are written by boozemongers and wowsers. No humans.

“Expressions like 'intoxication', 'inebriation' and 'drunkenness' are difficult to both define and to apply”, asserted justices Gummow, Heydon and Crennan. “The fact that legislation compels publicans not to serve customers who are apparently drunk does not make the introduction of a civil duty of care defined by reference to those expressions any more workable or attractive ... It is difficult for an observer to assess whether a drinker has reached the point denoted by those expressions. Some people do so faster than others. Some show the signs of intoxication earlier than others. In some the signs of intoxication are not readily apparent. With some there is the risk of confusing excitement, liveliness and high spirits with inebriation. With others, silence conceals an almost complete incapacity to speak or move.”

This is some of the most exquisite sense I have heard from above for a long, long time. The ruling is a beautifully-written analysis of a terrible event, and a sparse, crisp piece of logic it is. Look it up.

Of course the inebriated should take some responsibility for their state. My friend in The Ex realised this, and, having been confronted by a good publican, dealt with it in his own way. He broke no law.

SOBRIETY TEST FOR EXETER DRINKERS: IF YOU SEE TWO PAIRS OF LEGS SITTING ON THIS FENCE, YOU'VE HAD ENOUGH

Being a thirsty type who found it impossible to drive slowly, I removed my driver’s license from myself twenty years ago. Just sat there and watched it expire, before anything terrible happened, and somebody else had to take it away from me. This has made life difficult, and could be a cop out, as I cast the responsibility upon others. But other motorists should be relieved that I have become an expert at public transport systems, hyper-aware of how many empty cars travel in every direction at almost any time of the day or night.

Which is not to say I can wash my hands of transport accidents. I was recently hit by an unmanned car parked outside a pub. I was on foot. It was stationary. Having expertly rolled off its bonnet and presented myself at the bar for a very strong drink, I was refused by a polite young fellow who suggested I might like to try a glass of water, which he presented.

After a conciliatory pint on the veranda, I digested the responsibility for my prang, and withdrew from society.

I suspect the justices of our High Court are reasonably appreciative of the notion that publicans should be rivers to their people. That is the nature of public houses. Which our Lord understood when they said of him “Behold a man gluttonous, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners.”

http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/HCA/2009/47.html

CLASSIC SOUTH AUSTRALIAN CAR OUTSIDE A CLASSIC SOUTH AUSTRALIAN PUB. GOD DRIVES A VAL. THE DEVILS DRINK IN THE EX.

A WEEK OF FEVERISH WOWSERISM

Grenfell Street, Adelaide, 1974.  Adelaide has seen a steady decline in the number of its beautiful old pubs, losing at least 40% of its stock over the last century ... photo Philip White.

Politics and public drinking

Adelaide loses more pubs

Business hard, says Exeter

by PHILIP WHITE

I’d not seen a week of such feverish wowserism for a very long time.  It started with the death by violence of the unfortunate 18 year old, Thomas Kelly, during his first night out without his parents in Kings Cross.

The New South Wales Minister for Hospitality, George Souris, sounded suddenly like that great slave of the big publicans, Premier Sir Robert Askin (right), whose 60s and 70s rule saw him promote himself as a libertarian hero by abandoning the six-o’clock swill and extending liquor licensing hours for all the biggest players.  But little guys getting new licenses?  Not a hope in hell.  Bob Askin’s licensing thugs ruled Sydney with the same rum-riddled brutality that was rife in the days of the Rum Rebellion and the Holey Dollar. 

After Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore’s drive to admit more little independent bars to trade, Sourois made clear his sentiment when he accused small bars of having ''a lower level of surveillance, a lower level of supervision, a lower level of compliance'' … he went on cite the big old venues from Askin’s day as being ''better policed, better supervised than those smaller venues''.  He attacked Moore’s 2008 change of laws to make it easier, cheaper and quicker for small independent operators to get licenses, and made outrageous statements about people drinking Chardonnay.  Put short, he looked really bloody foolish.

This panic was followed by bad Adelaide news.  Chesser Cellars, the genteel timbered gaslit buffet pub for conservatives who couldn’t get entry to the Adelaide Club went down, as did that ancient temple to judicial intemperance, the Crown and Sceptre. Other great pubs are teetering.

Which took me back to the days of the Aurora Action Group, which was formed to save the Aurora Hotel from demolition on the site where Wolf Blass House now sits in Hindmarsh Square. While this became became an outspoken conservationist action group the like of which we have never seen again, it gradually lost steam and fizzled.

 It was the colonial NSW governor Sir John Robinson (1816-1891, left) who best encapsultated South Australia’s early attitude to the booze. 

“None of the men who in this country have left footprints behind them have been cold water men,” he wryly observed. At that point, Adelaide was more a city of pubs than churches.

“Adelaide’s traditional respect of a good beer was always reflected on her street corners,” I wrote in  The Adelaide Pub Guide a decade back, “where beautiful bluestone and sandstone pubs stared at each other through their lacy verandas.”  In 1900, there were 128 pubs within the City square mile.  Paula Stevens of the Adelaide City Council says there are "approximately 79" left, but I think it would be fewer.  And Bacchus only knows how many wine bars we had; they were everywhere.

I asked Kevin Greg, publican of that mighty thirst emporium, The Exeter, why the new slump.

“I don’t know other people’s business,” he said, “but from The Exeter’s point of view there’s no doubt that the cost of business is skyrocketing.  Drinking a beer in a pub is now an expensive luxury.  But it needs to be.  It’s quite alarming, but we must charge enough to pay for the cost of simply doing business.”

Erstwhile landlord of Adelaide's famous Exeter Hotel, Nicholas Binns, with the late Gabriella Bertocci ... Binns  stacked his list with 100 Parker pointers at ridiculously low prices, the cheapest Krug on Earth, house wines by Greenock Creek and Wendouree, Cheong Liew in the kitchen for a while, then Jules Zukelis with her possum pies ... It's always good for hearty food ... if you're looking for lost wine scribes, check The Ex



While it's been a revered rock'n'roll temple to the organoleptic arts and passionate discourse since Binns' day, the Exeter, remember, has no pokies. Few people realize that one of the things that makes the pubs of the East End unique is their absence of gambling machinery – in the ’80s the residents of the precinct lobbied to have this ban imposed on all licenses there.  The Ex has never even had a television.  Which is why it is so special; people love it.  But Kevin rattled off an incredible list of costs and charges and limitations imposed by one interferist bureaucracy or another, and continued with a prophecy of further gloom.

“It’s a fact of life.  I think we’re at the start of quite a significant downturn.  People struggle on, but when times are tough they curtail their discretionary spending and one of the first things to go is the beer in the pub.  The publican’s turnover drops.  It was already tight, but suddenly it’s too hard to pay the rent or the power and you come to work and the landlord’s changed the locks.”
 
This deadly combination of wowser interferism, restrictive legislations, meddling bureaucracies and ridiculously complex business regulation is killing the pubs of the United Kingdom, too.  Perhaps simply because there are fewer left to fail, pub closures there have slowed from 25 per week in 2010 to 12 per week in 2012.

And what’s the main excuse for these restrictions and crippling regulations? Tragedies like Thomas Kelly’s death never help.  Precincts devoted to sex, drugs (incuding booze) and rock’n’roll inevitably develop as cities change and morph, simply because a certain percentage of the population needs such precincts.  We are humans. We self-medicate and party.

Because of their bohemian atmosphere, these precincts confound and annoy all sorts of sanctimonious and pious brethren, many of whom savour the chance to say “I told you so” at terrible accidents like Kelly’s death, or the jobbing of the former Treasurer of South Australia during one of his famous midnight carousals.

“And it IS an accident,” Kevin Greg explains.  “A shocking, unfortunate accident.  Nobody goes out to kill anybody by punching them.  It happens.  It’s not the first time and it’s not the last.  We all feel terribly for the poor victim and his grieving family, but what about the perpetrator?  Has he got mental health issues that are not dealt with?

“When these things happen we should take a deep breath and step back and consider.  We should think of the parents and sisters and brothers of the kid that has done this terrible thing and work out how to help them and support them, too.  It’s never simple.  Instead you’ll have a queue of politicians looking for a sound grab!” 

I’m sure things would be very different if some our politicians had been publicans instead of lawyers.  But then, as Bob Askin knew so well, the big publicans, and their union, the Australian Hotels Association, can be very powerful lobbyists indeed.  Maybe they don’t need to become politicians.  I do seem to recall one big pokies publican, Rod Hurley of the Arkaba, as head of the local AHA, even taking a seat on the board of the ABC for a few years.

Obviously an expert at public broadcasting.

Illegal, but hardly a capital offence: the author learning a little pub culture with a refreshment on his way to school ... not a drink of water man ... photo Stephen Sprigg

82 NOTCHES ON BRIAN BARRY'S CORKSCREW

BRIAN BARRY PHOTOGRAPHED BY KATE ELMES FOR THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY, WHERE A VERSION OF THIS STORY WAS PUBLISHED LAST WEEK.










Brian Barry Pours His Watson Winner
Our Greatest Palate Still Sniffs Em Out
by PHILIP WHITE

When winemaking friends marvel at the mad slurp and crash that mark my repetitive passage from squalid depression to brittle ecstasy, I tell ’em the columnist has at least one deadline per week, whilst the winemaker has just one per year.

Not that I seek sympathy. The wiles of vintage aside, the wine business has been a fairly reliable clock, bringing a skeleton of longer-term rhythm to my irregular life. So far.

Winemakers have added various repetitive milestones to their cycle. They go to the Royal Adelaide Wine Show, for example, at the same time each year. Then there’s the London Wine Trade Fair, regular as clockwork, coincident with cricket. And bottling, and the bloody bank, and the interminable PR/sales tours.

Many, whose properties are now on the block, will never know that cycle again.

My fear of deadlines – which are inevitably met, if bent - feeds my addiction to any irregularity I can get, so I avoid most of these groundhog winebiz fixtures.

But there are some which are annual treasures beyond belief. Like the day, just before vintage, when I lunch with Brian Barry OA, to celebrate his birthday. Apart from this horror vintage being almost over before the birthday, his 82nd went pretty much like the others: me marvelling at his amazing history of service; both of us marvelling at the old glories he pours on the day; a little private chortling at the antics of the odd pretender, and more at the miracle of our survival.

Brian was born in 1927. He was dux of Roseworthy in 1948, and chairman of judges at the Royal Adelaide from 1974-79. He blessed many other shows with his amazing sensories. He was the Chairman at the inaugural National Wine Show in Canberra in 1976, and presided there for many influential years.

He has the best palate I’ve encountered in Australia: intensely intellectual and analytical, but priceless in its ability to name the sensual delights good wine unveils.

Brian quit wine shows a decade back. At his 73rd birthday lunch, he said “It’s extremely disappointing now. Faulty wines get awards, and very high quality ones are overlooked. The classes have become so huge, and time is so restricted, that the judges can’t possibly do all the wines justice”.

His 1999 Jud’s Hill Clare Riesling had just come in equal first (94++ points) in my 1999 Top 100 tasting. “That wine’s truly beautiful”, said Ernie Loosen when I poured one for him in The Exeter. “It would look beautiful anywhere in the world.”

But the Adelaide Wine Show judges gave it only 15.2/20, indicating a faulty wine unworthy of bronze. At the same show, Joe Grilli entered his colombard in another class prescribed for riesling and carried off one of the two gold medals awarded to that class!

“For twenty years or so, we entered our colombards in the colombard class at Adelaide”, Joe said at the time, “and it was never awarded. The judges seemed to feel that no colombard could ever win gold, because they regarded it as such a second-class variety”.

So they awarded a colombard gold, thinking it was a good riesling, and begrudged a seriously good riesling any medal at all, because they thought it was faulty.

This year, Brian poured a Jud’s Hill Clare Riesling 2001, which unravelled one’s socks before stringing them on the lightglobe. Which it had failed to do when I first tasted it, almost immediately after bottling, in that year’s Top 100. But in the next year, I awarded it 93+++, and Brian re-entered the show circuit with it.

Back then, on the occasion of his 75th birthday, I suggested we should direct ourselves forthwith to The Exeter Thirst Emporium for the odd celebratory ingestion.

“Thanks, but I’ve already had a few”, he confessed without contrition. “They reckoned I oughta head up to Sydney for the Wine Show lunch, and I’ve just come back with four trophies. Not a bad birthday present!”

We attended The Exeter anyway.

And now, he poured that eight year old birthday present again. It absolutely sang: bright, crunchy and fresh, reeking of roses and citrus, with formidable acidity and length and that tantalising, unlikely mixture of sassy tease and austere Germanic authority. It’ll live another twenty beneath that trusty screw cap.

And so, too, will the rieslings he’s released since.

But while riesling’s the king of all grapes, Brian has earned great success with sorts much more lowly.

In 1972 he was winemaker, with offsider Orgy Williams, at the Berri co-op on the Murray. Orgy was at lunch, too. They made a 50-50 shiraz cabernet using the radical cold settling method Brian had been working on. By leaving the chilled juice to sit quietly, he permitted the delicate water-soluble aromatics – the florals: violets and lavendar etc. – to dissolve into the wine before the alcohol-soluble aromatics - the coarser tars, lignins, licorices and whatnot – took over during ferment.

“Mick Auld rang and said he’d got some good Barossa-cured German oak” Brian said, as if that were yesterday. “You’d have to be bloody stupid to say no ... oooh boy, you could put your nose in the bung and it was bloody beautiful!”

“The co-op bosses wanted me to start showing our wines at Melbourne so I resigned from judging there and the other judges gave my Berri wine the Jimmy Watson Trophy! We were selling it for 89 cents! It won many, many awards!

It was already on the market when we won”, he reminded us, offering a stark contrast to the way the trophy these days goes generally to barrel samples. “Because of the nature of the fruit, it was possible to release it very early. It was an experimental cold-ferment wine: the same technique the winners often use these days. The runner-up was ours, too: a straight cabernet made the same way.

“And here it is”, he said, pouring that old winner.

That’s the only time the auld Watson mug’s visited the River, which is little wonder when you consider the industrial crap they tend to make these days in the tortured desert of our biggest valley. And there we were, drinking the last bottle in captivity from that trophy-winning batch, thirty-seven years later. Tired, but dignified ’neath its soused cork, it rose for a final fragile bow after thirty minutes’ air, gave us one fleeting glimpse of its pretty primary fruit, and departed.

It would have been breathtaking under a screw cap.

If you have any Brian Barry locked up anywhere, liberate one now. The ’03 riesling’s undressing as we speak.

BARFLIES: THREE TRUE BEAUTS

The Exeter Hotel, 246 Rundle Street, East End, Adelaide, drawn by Millie The Kid (Amelia Dickins) at 17 years of age, from across the road in 1987, when all the adults she knew drank there. This postcard is now a  precious rarity, and Millie's a grown woman with a family of her own.  Funny thing is she only drew the top floor, which nobody seems to question. I always thought she'd hoped we'd leave the drinks at the downstairs bar, and head up to that balcony for solids.  We were always a bit short of solids.

No Headline Required
by PHILIP WHITE

DATELINE: Mid-to-late eighties. Summer.  Head for The Exeter.  Damn!  There’s a bloke on my barstool in the corner, where I like to sit with my back to the wall so I can watch the door.  He looks sickly, effete, so I stay away and drink further down the bar, with Lawrence.  The next day, the Englishman’s there again.  This is becoming a bad habit.   I sidle closer and make conversation.  He’s a dismissive Pom who seems to think we’re half-witted alien peasants, but he understands architecture: he’s fascinated by the pub’s chamfered corner with the door in it - the door I like to look through from my perch in the corner - and he likes his Cooper’s Ale by the slow pint.  He has the distant smell of the traveler: the man adrift without a bed; almost without interest. He reminds me of the schoolteacher in Wake In Fright.  Day three, I go earlier, to beat him to my spot.  When he arrives he seems irritated to be dislodged.  I explain my historical attachment, and why I like to keep an eye on the door; he seems to accept my theory, but would prefer to have the corner to himself as he’s not too well and would prefer to sit.  We talk about the bush he has just traversed and how big and ancient and overwhelming it is, and the sorts of dried-out people who inhabit it.  He mentions Africa with the sort of disdainful familiarity some folks show their dirty kitchen. He never returns.

POST SCRIPT: It was at least a year later when my copy of Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines arrived.  It had been much discussed: the great Brit travel writer focusing his sentimental gaze on Australia’s relationship with its original peoples.  I had devoured his In Patagonia, The Viceroy of Ouidah, and On The Black Hill, but they’d been in paperback.  This time, I’d gone the whole posterity hog and paid full tote for the hardcover.  It had the author’s photograph on the back.  I’d never seen a photograph of him before.  It was Bruce, the Pom in the pub.  We had never discussed our professions.  He died in 1989.

DATELINE: The Exeter, early ’nineties. “Hey Philip,” a mate says.  “There’s an interesting bloke in the saloon.  Big hat.  Cowboy. Wonder who he is.” Eternally curious about potential drinking compadres, I lurch through for a look.  He’s denim from arsehole to breakfast, and sure, the hat’s big.  He’s got his worn-out ostrich skin cowboy boots up on a chair, and he’s stretched out, reclining, back to the wall, drinking a short whiskey on ice.  He’s legit.  I am too close not to offer a howdy.  “Howdy mate,” I say, awkwardly.  “Where you from?”  “I live in a trailer in Willie Nelson’s backyard,” he drawls in a smoky baritone.  “Where you from?”  When I shake hands, I realise there’s not much of his right one left: it seems all little finger and thumb.  He holds it up.  “Never try to stop a .44,” he says with a laugh.  “I’m Billy Joe Shaver.”


POST SCRIPT: I couldn’t believe my luck.  This was the dude who’d written songs, not just for Willie, but for Elvis and Kristofferson and Waylon and the lads.  

They revered him.

His album Old Five And Dimers Like Me was an outlaw classic; among his more memorable couplets is the inimitable "The Devil made me do it the first time, second time I done it on my own".  

We drank awhile and talked of my heroes and his, and later clomped around to the Queen’s Head where he held a plectrum with that claw-like thumb and finger and played his hits to about forty of us, mainly women.  He seemed to lose interest in singing after a while, and took most of them back to his hotel.   

Somehow, Billy Joe’s still alive. Having repeatedly married and divorced his wife, Brenda, she eventually died of cancer; their beloved son, his regular guitarist, Eddy, died of a heroin overdose. Billy Joe survived a heart attack on stage in Texas and continued to record.  Bob Dylan boasts of to listening to him in I Feel A Change Comin On. He appeared in Robert Duvall’s brilliant The Apostle, amongst other movies, and was most recently in the spotlight a couple of years back when he was acquitted of shooting Billy Bryant Coker in the face in Papa Joe’s Texas Saloon. Billy Joe’s defense was self-defense: he said Billy Bryant pulled a knife on him.  Dale Watson famously recorded Where Do You Want It?  to immortalize the event.  The story about Billy Joe having his hand shot off was bullshit: he’d lost it in a sawmill accident.

DATELINE: Kinselas, Sydney, mid-’eighties.  I’m drinking cognac in the cocktail bar with Adam Wynn: we got a late start: it’s 2AM. A short Indian fellow approaches.  He’s in dark blue blue drill shirt and pants, like an electrician wears - just like Allan Ginsberg wore continuously through his stay in the early ’70’s - and he’s carrying an airline bag stuffed with newspapers.  “Gentlemen,” he says in a perfect Trinidad-Indian-Oxford-English, “I admire your attitude to cognac.  May I buy you a drink?” We hit it off like a house on fire.  The guy’s so funny, slapping high fives and hollerin’ “Get down” in faux hillbilly.  We drink and laugh; laugh and drink until they gently usher us out into the skinny morning light of Taylor Square.  As we bid our farewells I tell Adam “I’ll see you back at the winery on Wednesday,” referring to his new venture a thousand kays away, on the High Eden Ridge at Mountadam.  Our Indian mate suddenly shows a new interest.  “Oh,” he says, “do you gentlemen have contacts in the wine industry?  I plan to visit the South Australian wineries in a few months, when I have finished my work in the Northern Territory.”  I mischievously suggest that between Mr Wynn and myself we could arrange the odd good day at a winery sort of thing, and enquire as to the work in the Territory. “I am writing a book about Australia,” he says, “about the relationship here between black and white.” Which triggers a raggedly unison “Well who the hell are you?” He puts forth his hand.  “I am Shiva Naipal.”

POST SCRIPT: Shiva, the younger brother of V. S. Naipal, had written two novels, but I knew him through his prickly acuity in The Spectator, and his two riveting travel books, North of South and Black and White. The former was wry account of travels in Africa; the latter a terrifying history of the Rev Jim Jones, and Naipal’s account of visiting the Guyana jungle as officials were still cleaning up bodies after the horror of the Jonestown Massacre.  Once his tour of the north of Australia was cut short, Shiva took the spare room for a time in Adelaide while he drank my cellar dry before going back to London to finish his highly contentious and much-publicised book.  

But he died suddenly, of a heart attack, at his desk in August ’85.  His widow, Jenny, later forwarded me an unposted letter she’d found in his papers. 

“Life has been hellish,” he’d written, “and somewhat unreal since my return.  Hardly had I unpacked my bags when Indira Ghandi was assassinated … the next day, at the behest of The Observer, I was on my way to Delhi … not surprisingly, given the events of the last few weeks, the Antipodes receded from the foreground of my consciousness.  I am now faced with the not too easy task of restoring those six months to their proper place. If all goes reasonably well, it should be done by the autumn of ’85.”  It wasn’t of course.  Imperfect skerricks of it eventually found their way into An Unfinished Journey, but I think to this day his book would have blown Chatwin’s clean outa the water.

Once one had won his trust, and grown the confidence to ask him, Shiva spoke much of his fear of visiting India.  He felt it would flood his writing brain, so nothing else would fit.  He'd been born a Brahmin in Trinidad, and admitted that he would never be ready to visit India.  It seemed to terrify him. His travail, to look at Indira Ghandi's blood for The Observer, must have been deeply confronting.

His was the most challenging, entertaining, vivid intellect I have encountered.  

Click the image for precise view.

BASS PHILLIP DANCES TANGO IN EXETER

THE TWO PHILS GETTING FULL OF BASS PHILLIP DURING JONESEY'S PHILIPPIC IN THE EX ... all photography MILTON WORDLEY

Phillip (sic) Jones Brings Bass Phillip (sic) To Fill Up Philip The Pinot Sicko ... One L Of A Night In The X
by PHILIP WHITE

Phillip Jones came to The Exeter for a few slow quiet ones last week. An engineer who fell in love with pinot noir is a scarce beast. An engineer who so frequently masters the mystical and confounding nature of such an ethereal drinking genie is an absolute rarity. For Jones is a passionate and erudite man, and makes his wines with the flesh of his hands and feet rather than employing anything as harsh and brash as a pump.

I first suspected this man had studied and practised engineering purely to eventually focus all his engineering skills upon one critical job: the disconnection of his brains from his heart, as he seems to run most of his life with the latter organ. Which is, as any cardio surgeon will tell you, a lot more visceral and gentle on the life-juice than your average open-throat mono pump made of steel. And which is never to say Jones is not an highly captivating and rewarding conversationalist. After an evening wallowing in his estimable company, one could only wonder what in the hell his engineering was like. You don’t get sensual engineers.

Away back in the ’seventies, when Jones began his errant vineyard dreaming, there was bugger all of this weird Burgundian variety about. Murray Tyrrell had a patch in the Hunter; having tired of the frustrating monoculture and frosts of Coonawarra, David Wynn was planting it at Mountadam on the High Eden Ridge. The most common one was the Hardy’s Keppoch, a vast-volume cheapy made from a huge monoclonal vineyard near Padthaway. And that clone was in fact a sparkling wine model, so the chances of it being a great red pinot were remote. That wasn’t what Jones had in mind.

Although he started out growing Bordeaux varieties, he sought somewhere as cold and damp and humid as Burgundy, south-east of Melbourne. He passed the outbreak of Jaguar XJ12s of the Yarra Valley, and even the Ferrari and Porsche appellation of Mornington Peninsula. This obsession was no hobby. He went to Leongatha, away down near Victoria’s southernmost point, Wilson’s Promontory, at the bottom corner of wet old Gippsland.


Leongatha’s wetter than Burgundy. Mainly dairy and onion country, it gets over 1000 millimetres a year. It rains roughly every second day from April through October. The average daily maximum temperature peaks at 26 in January and February, but through June and August it’s all twelves and thirteens. The critical mean’s 18.2.

So much water is not much of a problem: the extremely deep loose soils south of the mountain ash country of the Strzelecki Ranges just soaks it up. “It’s so absorbent there are hardly any rivers”, Jones tells his glass disbelievingly. “But jeez the rain brings the moulds. I can’t spray 500 in the ripening season.” He refers here to the biodynamic preparation which encourages white fungal tendrils to sprout in the soil, where they perform a healthy enlivening function, and somehow assist the vine roots to better extract every hint of mineral. “Unfortunately, 500 also encourages moulds in the foliage when it’s so wet,” he said. “There’s so much cloud that light management is more critical: I fine tune it with 501. It’s all about canopy and light management.” 501 is the silica-based biodynamic preparation which works as a light diffuser.

Jones now takes his fruit from four sites spread over 24 kilometres of country. “Every site is different,” he said. “Like the ferric soils require a different approach and give different flavours to the ferrous.”

Because he wanted low yields – hard to get in such prosperous country – he planted his vines very, very close: 9000 vines per hectare. Most of Australia’s vineyards sit on about 2000. He thins everything: leaves, tendrils and bunches, to limit his yields to 250-350 grams of grapes per vine. Then his winemaking is more like a lyrical slither than anything industrial. And his wines? Sloppy, stupefying, seductive dances all. Make that dancers.

Constant high humidity, as in Burgundy at vintage, does something to the tannins of grapes, which are highly concentrated around the skin’s pores, which constantly transpire water. A single variety grown to a certain ripeness in a dry place will generally be harder of tannin than the humid model, perhaps due to the background humidity limiting the amount of transpiration. Jones’s Bass Phillip pinots show this to the extreme. “In older vineyards, the humidity really brings out the provocative aromatics,” he said. They also seem softer, plumper, and wetter. Freakishly Burgundian. Yet below each peculiar beauty, there is the tickling piquancy of the soil and the rock from whence it came.

Away down at the bottom of Australia, Bacchus and Pan do the tango, held up by the Norman Lindsay lasses, the Rubens mob having occupied every couch. Soused in Guerlain’s Jicky, of course.

Bass Phillip Estate 21 Gippsland Pinot Noir 2006
$53.75; 12.8% alcohol; cork; 93+++ points
This, the twenty-first vintage, came from a difficult year, in which Phillip Jones says he “blended everything” to make this wondrous confrontation. It smells like maraschino cherries soused in lemon juice, with a whole barrage of other stuff coming in soon after: the potato sack earth, the gingery oak, the plump dancing girls. In fact, my notes are specific about the lass here in question: it’s Vanessa Redgrave’s Isadora: dancing like a giraffe, then too keen to leap into the deadly Bugatti, the silk scarf immediately dragging the neck t’wards the beautifully spoked wheel. Give it six years, breath in, accelerate. (All my other Bass Phillip notes were stolen in the Great Bag Heist of 09)

PHILLIP JONES CLINKS PINOTS WITH EXETER PUBLICAN KEVIN GREG ... IN BACKGROUND, WRITER LANCE CAMPBELL (LEFT), WITH WINE MERCHANT PAUL JAMES. all photography: MILTON WORDLEY