Philosophy, a Pub Crawl Map, 13 pubs reviewed, with a further 15 suggestions...
If you are reading
this in the US of A (or anywhere else for that matter – especially China where
the only equivalent I could think of is a tea house), you might not be overly
familiar with “pubs”, which is an abbreviation for “public houses”. A short treatise.
As opposed to a “bar”,
a wine bar, or a club, pubs hail from the English and Irish tradition; the
little lounge on the corner, usually an old building with timber or tile lined
walls, beer on taps, stained glass windows, and a quiet place to socialise and forget your troubles, a
bit like a lounge room for the poor.
It’s a place that might have a dining room for a wedding, a nook for
lovers, perhaps a ladies lounge apart from the men’s front bar where the girls weren’t supposed to come in (in the olden days).
In Australia, pubs are
a big part of Victorian and South Australian cultures, and tend to be in old (in
excess of a hundred years) buildings that have always been pubs. Places built on the way to the gold
fields, dotted in little country towns.
In NSW, it seems they’ve been replaced by Leagues Clubs, huge rambling
barns with poker machines and tellys everywhere. Queensland still has a few, but the old classics in Brisbane
with big verandahs seem to have
been broken up into lots of little businesses in the old edifices or turned
into monster nightclubs where you can score hard drugs.
Pubs are your “local”,
a place to drink beer, and maybe see a band. And they’re distinctly part of the core of southern
Australian drinking culture; in short, if you ever come to Melbourne, get out
of the CBD (the Central Business District) and into the inner suburbs like
Richmond, Fitzroy, or Collingwood, and go to the fucking pub for fuck’s
sake. Or else you’ll have missed
one of the key cultural experiences on offer.
Diatribe over (and sorry for swearing Mum!!).
Now for some
background to the planning of this particular pub crawl (see map here); one
which you might try yourself some day.
... full text
