These clubs, which still exist right around the country, are the weirdest anomaly. They sit jostled up against the Australia they firmly shut their doors against; their purpose in modern Australia seems almost neurotic.
Members of the Savage Club have voted to end a proposal to allow women to lunch in the main dining room on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.The last time I had cause to write about the 131-year-old, men-only Melbourne establishment, the Savage Club , I was taking photos with my little Nokia of a comatose former ACTU official, Greg Sword, as he was being gingerly inserted into the back of an ambulance.
Sword had spent a very, very long Friday afternoon at the Savage Club, which sits like Gringotts on Bank Place, in the Harry Potter corner of the city. After many hours at the club, Sword and his lunch companion, former beer mogul and one-time Liberal prime ministerial hopeful, John Elliott, went on drinking at Syracuse, the bar across the road, but Elliott had volubly abandoned Sword, after he had locked himself in a women's toilet and could not be coaxed out by the staff. The 163-year-old Tasmanian Club has, after much fuss, voted to overturn a rule excluding women from the bar — but before you ladies begin queuing up for a peek inside, please note — you'll still need to be accompanied by a gentleman. I was there at the time, watching and recording all of it in my little notebook, as Elliott had moved unsteadily from table to table at which any attractive young woman was seated, until he finally gave up and Sword made his dash for the loos. Asked by the hapless maître d' to please intervene, Elliott had barked, "He's not my problem!" and stomped out the door.When I rang Sword the next day to inquire after his welfare, he told me he had been on medication which he had mixed with alcohol. He was mercifully feeling better. It's a story that's followed me for years, and yet that incident has remained my sole peek inside the door of a club so exclusive that this week it almost blew up over the mere idea of letting a woman like me sit at a table for an Elliott/Sword-style long lunch. With presumably a lot less booze.Barely three months into a six-month trial, the majority members of the exclusive Savage Club have voted to end immediately a proposal to allow women to lunch in the main dining room on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Tuesdays and Wednesdays only. Now, don't think for a second that this idea was a feminist takeover: in the grand tradition of Melbourne's men's clubs — all founded when the city was drowning in gold — I am happy to report that steely, capitalist principles alone informed the idea of the trial: the Savage Club needed the money.One of Australia's top linguistics experts believes the pop culture term has evolved into one with derogatory and offensive connotations., as business groups and members wanting to dine with their wives had to seek alternative city restaurants. A club info sheet sniffed that the places these members and their presumably inconveniently gendered partners had been chased to were "probably nowhere near as good as the Savage Club", so something had to be done to get them back ."The loud and boisterous bohemian behaviour that the club is famous for will now have to be tempered for fear of upsetting a 'Karen' at the other end of the dining room. "Our wives no longer will have the comfort of knowing we are at a male-only venue, so long hours spent at the club will no longer be viewed as favourable on the home front." Can you see it? On the one hand, men will become neutered and constrained by the mere presence of women but, at the same time, they might become wild and be plausibly accused by their wives of poor behaviour if said women were there at all. Such alluring women would, of course, only be there in the company of their male partners and therefore preoccupied with their own marriage, but let's put that to one side.Women in the dining room — or "ducks on the pond", as the immoveable Australian tradition would have it — had become intolerable. And here the trial ends. One assumes the Savage Club will now have to hire Melbourne luminary chef, Andrew McConnell, to keep the wandering palates of male members firmly at Bank Place. For the women who were part of the trial, never has the Groucho Marx dictate been more meaningful: writer Jen Vuk was one of them. If they wanted to have her as a member, she didn't want to join. Writing in The Age, Vuk believed she'd dodged a bullet — or a chewy braised kidney: "You can keep the nostalgia, exclusivity, taxidermy and misogyny," she sniffed. These clubs, which still exist right around the country, are the weirdest anomaly. They sit jostled up against the Australia they firmly shut their doors against: the ramen bars and hookah joints and dumpling cafes and nightclubs and restaurants and shops owned and run by the generations of migrated Australians not represented in their membership. The clubs' purpose in a modern Australia seems almost neurotic.Start your weekend with the best of the ABC's journalism, presented by Virginia Trioli. Discover compelling features, big ideas and revealing analysis to understand the stories that matter to Australians. I've only set foot in one of them, I think. I can't remember who invited me to lunch, but I vividly recall weak sunlight filtering through heavy Victorian windows that didn't seem to have been cracked open since Edward the Seventh was tupping Lily Langtree. Old men were nodding off over their cauliflower soup, and I could smell the dust. I perched on the edge of my chair with buttocks clenched: there wasn't a surface I wanted to touch. I was part of an original group of Melburnians who were invited by Myer scion and arts patron, Carillo Gantner, to be foundation members of a rival club to the untouchable establishment, but I couldn't muster the enthusiasm. And the former state shadow treasurer, Louise Staley, once spotted me lurking in the foyer of the Lyceum Club, waiting for the architect, Kerstin Thompson, who had completed a beautiful redevelopment of the 113-year-old women-only club. She asked if I wanted to become a member: it was useful to have a place in town you could sit and make some calls, ease off your shoes and pull out your laptop, she said. The Lyceum was founded next door to the Melbourne Club as a place for the excluded wives to go while the members were at lunch. Standing in the club's lovely tree-top level lounge, you look down over the grand rear garden of the Melbourne Club — a clever way to keep an eye on the goings-on back there. No thank you, I said. Groucho knows why. This weekend, my admirable colleagues are the greatest defenders of our great democracy, at a time when this institution has never seemed more fragile. Here is the brilliant Julia Baird introducing you to this year's Boyer Lectures, which focuses on Australia's "future in a changing world"; andhas taken over the national sausage sizzle with her new social history program, Annabel Crabb's Civic Duty — everything you always needed to know about our political process.This is the vibe those of us fleeing our desk jobs need this weekend Virginia Trioli is presenter of Creative Types and a former co-host of ABC News Breakfast and Mornings on ABC Radio Melbourne.Courts Photo shows Sean Combs, wearing a black jacket, looks neutrally off camera in front of plastered logos.Photo shows Sean Combs, wearing a black jacket, looks neutrally off camera in front of plastered logos.Analysis by Laura Tingle
Men-Only Clubs Melbourne Viriginia Trioli Syracuse Bar Savage Club Lunch Jen Vuk Andrew Mcconnell Bank Place Lyceum Club
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