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Ki - kandidesign — Pub Life I had three personal introductions to pubs in the 70’s and 80’s: one male, and two female. Around the time I was about to turn 18, my father introduced me to the owner of the Pearl Hotel. He agreed to employ me to run the bottle shop straight away, even though it was still a few months until the legal drinking age would be reduced from 21 to 18 and I had just as many months to go before I turned 18. The publican used to say that he had had two educations in life, one in the pub and the other on the racetrack. He thought I would make a good worker. At the end of the first week, he asked me to slow down a bit, because all of his other staff had slackened off, when they realised I would do anything and do it quickly and well. The bottle shop was midway between the lounge or ladies bar (which was carpeted) and the public bar (which was solid concrete and could be hosed out at the end of the day). It was actually harder to clean the chardonnay and cheese mess that soaked into the lounge carpet. I got that job, too, which was a relief to the barmaids. Dru was a fan of folk music and introduced me to the live music bar at the back of the Story Bridge Hotel (this is well before its renovation), where I also learned to appreciate Coopers beer. Then, Sally, a resident of Sydney and my first long-distance romance, introduced me to the many pubs of Glebe, Balmain, Rozelle and Annandale. An Author Falls Out of Fashion "The Glass Canoe" captures Australian pub culture (Sydney-style) at exactly the same time I was introduced to it, which might explain the appeal of this 1976 novel to me. On publication, it won the prestigious Miles Franklin Award. Since then, the reputation of David Ireland has languished, and many critics and reviewers are openly scornful of this book. I, on the other hand, would probably rate at least one, if not two or three, of David Ireland’s novels in the top 12 ever published in Australia. I want to argue my case in this review. Beneath the Southern Cross Apart from barmaids and the clientèle of lounge bars, the milieu of the typical Australian pub used to be overwhelmingly male. The Southern Cross is a working class pub in a slightly fictionalized version of Northmead, a suburb on the far western outskirts of Sydney and just north of the city of Parramatta: "The Mead was our territory, the Southern Cross our waterhole." Many reviews of the novel condemn its misogynism, the limited role it affords women and the way its male characters treat the women. However, surely, this is to confuse the author with his work? Modern readers might not realise that the world was once like this, but more importantly that it was undergoing significant social change at the time. The Whitlam Labour Government was elected in 1972, ushering in a period of cultural progressivism, even though by the time the novel was published, it had already been dismissed and replaced by the Fraser Conservative Coalition Government. The middle class tends to think only in terms of its own white picket fences in this era, but life really was like this for the working class. Life for a working male revolved around work, pub and races. Drinking men had one "local" to which they were loyal. They formed part of a "tribe" that jealously guarded its territory against "foreigners", not migrants, but drinkers from another suburb who should have stuck to their own territory and drunk at their own pub: "I went to the bar to get us a small fleet of glass canoes to take us where we wanted to go. I thought of the tribes across Australia, each with its own waterhole, its patch of bar, its standing space, its beloved territory. It was a great life." Pictures of Matchstick Men Ireland takes snapshots of this world in beautifully crafted yarn-like vignettes, each with a heading and usually only one or two pages long. They aggregate in meaning and insight like a photo album, as we get familiar with the names and faces, and complex characters emerge. Perhaps Ireland loved these people, these characters, when some of us reading about them now might not? I think we’re the ones who lose out if we adopt too antagonistic an approach to them. These people lived under the manifold pressures of capitalism in the second half of the twentieth century. The novel’s protagonist, Lance ("Meat Man"), says it best himself: "Once upon a time they were decent men, unaggressive, hard-working, tired at the day’s end. They drank to erase the ache and the tiredness. Now…we drink to erase everything." Not only do they drink, but they yarn, brawl and fornicate. Society expects them to perform and behave like sheep, but they have other ideas: "... [these] sheep, the hunted...were something more when they were drinking. The golden drops stirred something inside that wasn’t human..." The Monster Within What was it that they found at the bottom of their glasses? "And now and then, as they drank deeply, they saw in the bottom of the glass, not the face of the man they knew, but the monster within that was waiting and all too willing to be released." This is no authorial attempt to glorify the behaviour of these men, except to the extent that the novel portrays it with verisimilitude, wit and humour (and mostly it is their wit and humour). This is a portrait that, even at the time, represented a world in transition. The working class was being ground down, and the middle class was on the move. Even the Southern Cross was under threat from the more demure haunt of the lower middle class up the hill, the bowling club. Soon, drink driving laws would encourage people to drink at home, effectively undermining the tribalism that once bonded a suburb, its community and its football team. Working class Sydney would be replaced by middleclass trendies, "critics, dissenters, reformers". These real working men were trapped. If they appear to have any beauty, it is an ugly beauty, not that of butterflies (a recurring motif in the novel): "Butterflies flew free. They dazzled the eye and the mind with their freedom. Flight was something we could never know." These men were earth-bound. They could walk, but they could not fly. They could survive, but they could not thrive. Only the upwardly mobile middle class could afford to be aspirational. The kids out the back of the Cross wanted to shoot the butterflies with their air rifles. The middle class wanted to emulate their airborne escape from mediocrity and deprivation. An Illuminated Tomb In the old world, the Southern Cross had been an institution: "The customs of the Cross were stronger than laws of parents, priests and peers." However, even now "on the back wall where the clock is, above the pool tables, there’s a crack in the bricks." The old world is crumbling, falling apart, and its men with it: "At night the Southern Cross often looked, even to me, an illuminated tomb. A sort of past solidified in masonry. The traffic tried to run by all the faster to stay in the present or the past might grab them. But to us, our tomb was where life was: outside was a world fit only to die in." These men were offered two alternative forms of death. At least, inside the Cross, they could be part of a tribe that knew how to enjoy a drink, a yarn and a bit of biff. The Tollgate Hotel, Northmead (North Parramatta) Fading Egalitarianism While the politics of the working class was based on egalitarianism, that of the middle class is based on aspiration and the acquisition of wealth (or the symbols, badges, logos and marques of wealth). Even as it is about to die, there is some old style leftist romanticism in the clientele of the Cross: "Money is shit. Piled up it stinks. Spread out, it’s good fertilizer." Perhaps there is one time when we are all equal: "In the meantime it was night, and the different classes equal in sleep." However, there is a growing sense of inevitability that the traditions of the Southern Cross will not survive: "The Cross is the past pretending to promise the future…It does not contain the future: that is up the street somewhere, over the hill, around the corner, in the brains of young children, in a pattern of words and objects that no one has recognised yet." No Place for Women It’s true, the Cross is no place for women. Lance (itself a synonym for a penis) goes by the nickname "Meat Man", because of the extent of his physical endowment. Still, he comes across as a gentle soul who sentimentally decides to document the culture of the Cross in writing. A bit of a pants man, he speaks tenderly of his sometime girlfriend, a self-employed business woman, as "my darling": "At her place I made love with her as if I couldn’t be sure I’d ever make love again. As if I was dying tonight and she was going to die tomorrow." Note that he makes love "with" her, not "to" her. Still in his mid-twenties, he has much to learn from other women. One tells him: "You just wait for me. You don’t know how to make love. The more I see of men, the more I like golf." Although these are the words of another character, he relates to them: "...I felt humiliated that I didn’t have this toughness that could look calmly on the death of love." He has a soft, sensitive centre, but a hard exterior. After the Thrill is Gone Life at the Cross was always on the edge. You had to be on constant guard. You never knew when you might be king-hit: "There’s always that one fist you miss, one knee you don’t see." Still, there was a sense of excitement, of adrenaline coursing through your body: "I was a healthy animal, I lived a reflex life of hunger, thirst, desire, aggression, revenge; but mostly thirst, with hunger and desire a good second." However, this is the world that is under threat by aspiration and the debt that acquisitiveness brings with it: "As I passed I thought of the loss of the characters who made it a pub to be nervous in, to be excited in, to be expectant in, to be wary in, to be drunk in. Now they, its spirit, were gone…I saw a host of young kids leaving off shooting butterflies and learning to drink well and play bad pool." You have to ask whether we have woken up in a world that is unreservedly better than the old world of the Southern Cross. No doubt it is for women, but is it any comfort to know that we share the same chains? Tonight I wasn’t planning on having an alcohol-free night. I’ll probably have a drink at home, where I’ll be relaxed and comfortable and safe. But something in me will yearn just a little for the Pearl, the Story Bridge and the Southern Cross. So it is that I’m grateful to David Ireland for putting this yearning into such beautiful words.

Gustavo Soares guh_soares — Clever wizard world fairy tales from the author of Harry Potter. Includes "The Three Brothers", which is the fairy tale at the center of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I was also quite impressed with the illustration, which were done by Rowling herself. And there is commentary from the papers of Albus Dumbledore! A real treat.

Leonardo Morva leonardomorva — favorite quote: "A myriad of moonbeams dance lile at a celestial party where angels mingle with intoxicated faries."-Sita describing Umara's backyard.