John Brack, The Bar, 1954, (visit this work on Level 2 at NGV Australia)
By the gift shop is where you’d find me after most exhibitions, Sarah emerging 10 or 20 minutes later than me. Sometimes more. We’d talk briefly about the exhibition and then, “time for a quick drink?”
That was, still is, the pattern of our art-going, if you want to call it that. On the rare occasion that I’m last out I’ve probably been drawn to a single piece, or people watching. Though it’s more people listening really. I’ve an unscientific theory that galleries are a place for honest conversations. People assume that no one is listening, and there’s very little eye contact as you make your way from work to work. A hushed confessional without the privacy screen and a few Hail Mary’s. Much like bars and restaurants I store up other people’s conversations and more often just single lines. There’s gold in other people’s words.
On arriving in Australia, I found myself repeating this well-worn routine at The National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. Moving from painting to painting, lingering at each long enough to not betray myself as a complete philistine, and in a city built on the money of a gold rush, sifting for those tiny nuggets. Until I reached The Bar. Not an actual bar, but John Brack’s painting. I was stopped in my tracks.
If there’s such a thing as an art namedrop, it was on a par to the times I’ve been in the presence of the work of Caravaggio. Once in the grand surrounds of the Vatican hung without ceremony amongst many works, and in the more humble Basilica Santa Lucia al Sepolcro in Syracuse, Sicily. There was a feeling of being rapidly drawn in, that everything around me was suddenly blinkered, and that for that moment nothing else existed. It’s not lost on me, that those moments were on consecrated ground.
Brack’s painting was for me a cultural and social education in a single image. Described as ‘stepping away from the gum tree idyll to an urban, postwar view of Australian life,’ it was for me, a very different view of Australia than I’d grown up with. In my grandmothers living room in Yorkshire there were paintings of rural South Australia painted by my aunt. Images that formed an imagining of Australia, alongside the onslaught of Aussie popular culture in the 1980s, that was suburban, outback, and sun bleached.
Painted in 1954, it depicts the Six O’Clock Swill, when public bars were forced to close at 6pm. The temperance movement had campaigned hard from the late 19th century against the demon drink and took further hold during the First World War when it was thought that home-front temperance (albeit not complete) was a step closer to victory.
Brack nods to Manet’s A Bar at the Folie-Bergère but the grey, sallow- faced drinkers and ageing barmaid staring out from The Bar tell you it’s far from Montmartre. The men are oblivious as they smoke and drink. She a contrast in her mustard blouse, grips the bar, a thin sliver of a smile and darkly ringed eyes that tell their own story. Gritty and austere, but it doesn’t tell the full story of the Six O’Clock Swill.
It’s a familiar scene in British pubs to see a last-orders rush. You slake a pint to get another in, or simply line up your next with your unfinished to beat the bell and the landlord’s call. One more drink before closing time and the wobble home. The Swill was so much more. Men hurriedly clocked off work, heading for hotel bars where they’d dive into a destructive race. It was a culture of hard drinking, and the environments were modified accordingly. Where bars were once divided into different rooms they became open and functional. Every inch of standing room used, furniture was stripped out, walls knocked through, and what remained was tiled for the proceeding Seven O’Clock Sluice.
In some places up to ten bar staff would sate the punters thirst as the clamour grew, filling glasses with spigot guns on hoses. Rapid and dextrous service was essential, and technique was honed both sides of the bar to ensure that drinking was maximised in the allotted time.
Men would line up their drinks five at a time to be inhaled before closing, some reportedly placing them between their feet for safe keeping – a crowd of men protecting their amber nectar like male penguins guarding their eggs. They’d become adept at fending off jostles and wayward feet as spillage could mean joining the bidding at the bar once more.
The apparent compromise of the Six O’ Clock Swill, far from promoting a degree of temperance, supporting family stability, and getting men home to their wives (women, with the exception of barmaids, all but absent from pubs), instead fuelled a culture of speed drinking that bound the working man’s ability to drink to the hands of the clock. Either that, or to go outside the law and turn to ‘sly grog’ – bootleg liquor or alcohol sold without licence.
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