Ale house readings, spiritual zest, and the inevitable crapulous effect: a pub, the public house, the inn, the tavern, that home that functions between your actual home and the funeral rites that lie ahead, a space where so much living is done, the indifferent years passing in unnoticed flow. “There is no private house in which people can enjoy themselves so well as at a capital tavern,” the garrulous lexicographer Samuel Johnson is documented as saying in March 1776. “There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.”
Despite Johnson’s fine assessment, few drinking places necessarily achieve that existential midpoint of living and imbibing and carousing. They are often sullen abodes, desperate retreats, and despairing hives. In the last three decades, they have become residences for the dead on an extended holiday, wasting away before multiple television screens and that life-destroying device known as the poker machine. Get thee to death, and in the afterlife awaits a ghastly screen of flickering images on an infernal loop.
Melbourne’s Irish establishment known as the Drunken Poet (so assuredly apt), located opposite that venerable agora, the Queen Victoria Market, singularly towers in opposition to that grim reality. There are no screens to distract and lobotomise. There are no poker machines to gull and pilfer. There are largely solemn portraits of poets and writers hung in a venue that evokes wood and reliability. There are advertisements for upcoming bands. There is bubbling, even flooding conversation. There are people who—and this is unusual—read books and take notes in comforting ecstasy. Also unusual and sociologically enchanting: male queues for the lavatory on a busy Friday and Saturday night.
The Poet is the product of Siobhán Dooley, a petite sample of human perfection who knows how to pour a Guinness with studied detail and religious commitment. The eager drinker, yearning to slake a crippling thirst, will be chided for prematurely reaching out for the glass as it foamily broods at the bar. “You must wait,” she growls. It’s all about the wait and what arrives for those who do so. This cherished publican is also singular in handling those monsters known as kegs, repositories of the Guinness that must be rolled, dragged and pushed each week for the thirsting throng. Giant men have wept in attempting to move these imposing beasts; Siobhán does so with aplomb, so much so she sends hearts racing for those perched on the mahogany ridge (the bar, for the unfamiliar).
Beyond the art of the pour—she is the Delphic priestess who instructs, with unmatched care, those she employs—comes the cultural scene the poet metaphorically feeds and clothes. In this regard, the pub acts as an incubator and transmitter, turning the embryo of suggestion into the child of genuine living. (The recent, modish suggestion is that this is a form of Irish soft power. This is a misnomer: such venues are bastions of generous, firm influence.) Gatherings for music, gatherings for speeches, poetry and comic interludes. Many miles are covered by those making the journey to a place where they know civilisation heaves for the better.
The accounts of those who have passed through this home away from home fill notebooks that are passed around the patrons. These are the inn chronicles of life, the record-keeping of human engagement. A sense of wonder appears across their faces when meeting a virgin sheet upon which they will mark a memory and scratch a rumination. “It’s hard to learn the easy way,” writes one from August this year. “A happy reprieve from a Tasmanian winter,” pens another from May. “Go where the mind blows, under the blue skies of Melbourne, into the depths of earth; never have I ever needed a glass of Guinness this much,” reflects yet another punter about to pipe her eye and put lips to rim. “My name is Alex,” scribbles Alex. “I don’t like homework.” Who does?
There are boys from the rural reaches of this ancient country, the arid hinterland of the world’s second driest continent, craving the Guinness of this establishment like moist manna, finding its cream and lengthy taste fortifying, and their memories of better times restored in each sip. There are Latin American cooks of smouldering beauty and Irish chefs giving off the divine, nose-tinging smell of wakame after a shift. They are first dates with thumping hearts, fools and knaves finding their bearings in a world without bearings. There are the fresh initiates who have never had anything quite so distinct as this dark brew, braving a pint as their eyes widen upon the taste. There are those who simply opt for the Kilkenny or some inferior local brew. There are cider chasers, whisky devotees and computer geeks, the sexually confused and the sexually charged, the miracle seekers and the dream builders. There are simply those who enjoy the fact that time, however artificially, is held in check by the comforting sense of the familiar.
There are those of various faiths, beliefs and persuasions who find, even in the boisterous atmosphere, a sanctuary. This is the midpoint retreat, a barricade against the unpleasant. Perhaps, as the doomed planetary species known as humanity passes into self-inflicted oblivion, it would be a fitting tribute to this finest of institutions, turning twenty today, to say that this was one of its finer achievements, created by one of its finer exponents.
Why, oh why, does this seemingly magical sanctuary have to be located at the farthest reaches of our doomed planet?