australian pub

For nearly four years, I worked in one of those suburban pubs in which every staff member either looked no older than eighteen or no younger than sixty-five. One of those pubs where the barman knows which pony to pick every time and making suggestive comments to the barmaid is considered a perfectly appropriate pastime. In other words, it was not the sort of place where one wished to stay too long unless there was patently no other choice. The euphemism us younger ones liked to use was in reference to our long-planned escape - “I’ve got to get out of here” becomes a mantra oft-repeated.

This is not about working in hospitality. There are worse things in the world than being forced to smile against one’s will. It’s about the paradox of the Australian family pub: a strange territory fielded to the north by a clean, well-lit dining room (Hemingway would probably find it too well-lit), to the south by a comfortably spacious gaming room. Close your eyes and you’ll remember the sounds of the arcade at the Royal Show. Open your eyes, now: it is the violent, flashing lights of the Show as seen in one of those drab liminal spaces that appear in a dream. Anything is possible in this room, if you dream hard enough.

I made a point of evading every request to work less in the dining room and more in the gaming room. When your average $500-a-day gambler ambled down the thoroughfare, change jangling in his pockets as he approached the cash register, they left a dark aura in their trail that was practically visible. They were often rude; if there is one thing pub staff bitch about more than anything else, it’s a rude gambler. It’s part of the make-believe that what is happening when you hand over their coin cup is a perfectly normal market transaction - “Geez, what’s his problem?” The answer: it’s that you’ve sold a bullet to a suicidal man.

The poker machine industry in Australia made a turnover of around 20 billion dollars in 2018. The venue where I worked had a weekly turnover of about $1 million, which is in the upper crust compared to most venues. Part of it was because the suburb adjacent was of a low-socioeconomic status, and any study will show you there is a correlation between one’s desperation for money and a predisposition to gambling. Actually, common sense says the exact same thing. But once again, part of the make-believe is that there isn’t a problem. At worst, it is a symptom of the great liberal tendency to let others ruin their lives as long as you’re not forced to see the consequences of it.

WORDS BY JIALUN QI

I did see the consequences. In fact, I am living with them. One remortgaged house later, not to mention litigation by angry creditors, my family is very lucky to have a roof over their heads. But nor is this a sob story. It’s a matter of fact, and fills me less with self-pity than with the kind of resentment that is poisonous if ignored too long.

This particular hotel chain paid $30 an hour, which is the béchamel of hospitality awards. A co-worker of mine, a university graduate, confided in me she was scared of becoming too comfortable there. She said what terrified her the most was how little impelled her to move on from that dank, stuffy sports bar. And who could blame her? In the words of a wise songwriter, sometimes you just want to go where everybody knows your name.

Even the gaming staff were on friendly terms with the “addicts”. They would get free coffee, free drinks, food, you name it. It’s the VIP experience for those who have never felt worth given to them by anyone else: lonely pensioners, drug addicts and problem drinkers, refugees who were abandoned by the promise of the Australian dream, the wretched, the damned, the evil, the hopeless.

The great Australian pub, however, does not belong in the Fourth Circle of Hell, as good a view as it gets perched on its periphery. If you want to find wisdom, go either to the sports bar of your local pub, or a library. I used to have a chronic daydream in which I imagined I wasn’t in the company of sedated tradies, but instead members of a modern-day Symposium who were not admitted on the basis of nobility, but were a free association committed to the Socratic ideal of telling it how it is.

But it was all a load of hot shit.

The great Australian pub is no longer an idea. It is a cover operation for the pokies. Everyone knows this. The rest of the pub is allowed to exist only to decorate this terrible truth. And you kid yourself when you buy into the make-believe that because you were born with a better head on your shoulders, with a name that could yet be tarnished by associating it with the most pitiful of all vices, that you are somehow closer in stature to the robber-barons who glutton themselves like pigs from a trough than you are with the guy who can’t tear his hands away from the pokies. It is one of the worst sentiments of modern capitalism distilled to its essence: that you should judge yourself based on who you will be five years from now and not who you were five minutes ago. And who can say to themselves, honestly, that they’ve never been fooled by a false beacon of hope? What about three lots of bullion in a row?

So, spare a glance for the addict the next time you visit your local. It will tell you more about the great, deflated Australian pub than any number pulled out of a census can.