And, just a week ago, Dani Valent reviewed The Royston in The Age, which I have also earlier posted about, and which is also a place I want to go for dinner. If only I had the time.

Gertrude St is my preferred east-west bike artery into the heart of the city, but from time to time I find myself wandering along Gipps St, one block north. It boasts the Laird O’Cockpen Hotel which in my imagination might conceivably be the place that erotic poet and Liberal parliamentarian Bruce Atkinson visited out of professional obligation, as well as Nicholas Dattner’s emporium of super expensive wooden tables (did you know his old man was a British spy on whom Trevor Howard’s character was based in the 1949 zither music-rich The Third Man, one of the most famous films of all time?). It also sports the Glasshouse Hotel. I thought it was standing vacant, but I found out a year or so ago it was doing a roaring lesbian trade on certain evenings, and always had done. Now I find Maria from Dante’s in Gertrude St has bought the place. A little online pamphlet named Same Same says of the development:

‘Maria reveals that the Glasshouse will be maintaining its name and will be open for business from Tuesdays through to Sundays. Noted events will include the Flirt and Bitch is Black parties, plus cabaret, funk, karaoke, trannie, band and disco nights.

She describes the renovation as “classic – not as retro as Dante’s” but “in my style”.

Divine lookalike Feral Beral and ex Freakazoid DJ Arlen Da Silva are just two of the club identities linked to the new activities, with Feral Beral hinting that there will be “pole dancers and performance artists on most Friday and Saturday nights”. Up until recently, Arlen Da Silva was promoting Saturday nights at Laneway, a venue that sits at the rear of Seven. He is now also involved in Eve in Southbank with Jono Francisco and is famous for a disco/house/old school sound.’

and

‘Collingwood’s Glasshouse Hotel reopened on Thursday night with an invite only party featuring Madame Zuzu.

The party continues all weekend, with regular action each week from Wednesday through to Sunday announced.

Fridays feature DJ Arlen De Silva and misterjob playing a spectrum of music til 5am, with guests Fin on sax, Andy D on percussion, Luke McD, Chestwig, and upcoming guests Agent 86 on Friday 20 April and Butch on Friday 27 April, and Nick Whiteside on Friday 4 May and Nigel Last on Friday 18 May.

Saturdays are to be known as the Glasshouse Variety Club and are hosted by Shirley Billings who will reside over a night of comedy, burlesque and “general hilarity”. Dinner is available from 6pm and the show starts at 9pm, followed by resident DJs Ennio Styles, RaMBL aka Richard Campbell and Declan Kelly til 5am. Entry on Saturdays is free.

The Glassy is open on Sundays from 12 noon for a classic Sunday roast for $15, with chilled beats all day from Fin and Andy D, and Dolly’s Karaoke Kaberet from 8pm.

Then on Wednesday, it’s a night of Salsa dancing with Emma. Salsa classes are at 6.30pm and 7.30pm, beginners are welcome, and it’s $10 entry.

Local bands play exciting new music every Thursday from 9pm, with $2.50 pots, $10 pizza and pot! Yay!

And ahead on Saturday 28 April, the Glasshouse hosts the 7th anniversary F.L.I.R.T. The Love Machine party, with dare devil disco drivers SMUDJ, Pixleton, Dee Dee with Slack and Antediluvian Rocking Horse. $15 entry.

The Bitch is Black is scheduled for Saturday 5 May.

The Glasshouse is open for lunch, dinner, snacks and wine every Tuesday to Thursday 11am – 1am, Friday and Saturday 11am – 5am, and Sunday 12 noon to midnight.’

Henceforth, this is no longer a blog about Abbotsford as I choose to define Abbotsford. It is about that and country pubs, in particular those with old fashioned accommodation still operational (endangered species). There is a Flickr group on the subject (a future project of mine) but precious little else. If you know any other than Jeparit’s Hindmarsh Hotel, Dimboola’s Victoria Hotel, and Queenscliff’s Royal Hotel where you might enthuse about staying, let me know. (I bought Country Pubs of Victoria at Grub St Bookshop yesterday before heading over to the John Wren exhibition at the Racing Museum in Federation Square, of which much more anon.)

I went to Beechworth today and took the Canondale for a spin on the rail trail, discovering in the process the Commercial Hotel, just shy of 150 years old, and apparently in good hands. It is pictured, 3 times (the fourth is a gorgeous house in Beechworth). The pub’s proprietor fellow told me that I wouldn’t find too many hotels in Victoria in as original a condition as this one, and I believed him. It is a beautiful place — Ned Kelly used to drink there — and you can get a smallish simple clean rennovated double room containing a washbasin and a new bed — nothing else — for $65 a night (3 nights for the price of two) or bed, breakfast and 2 course dinner and champagne for $85 a couple, a bloody good deal.

Well, that’s what I heard. Carringbush. Kingston. Same owners. Thanks to Barry Barr, photographer laureate of Kingston, Jamaica, for this beautiful shot.

It is true that this post has nothing to do with Abbotsford, except that while I was sitting in Horsham’s Cafe Bagdad a suspected Canadian climber was extolling the virtues of our suburb to his mate, but I went for a drive to Jeparit via Nhill, Dimboola, Mt Arapiles and Horsham. Sadly, our energy flagged before we got to Antwerp or Rainbow. The idea was to get beyond the trappings of suburbia which in my book ends around Avoca and into the “real country” which I was sure was out there, back in the comforting world of plump bakery girls making up white bread salad sandwiches and willingly buttering your coffee scroll, with butter (tick), monuments to the Great War (tick), corellas (tick), proper gum trees (tick), quaint botanical gardens (tick), characterful country pubs with genial cockies propping up the bar (see below) serving up pots of Carlton Draught for $1.65 (nope, $3) and, most importantly in this crazy world of $100 a night motel rooms, charming simple clean upstairs accommodation for $35 a night (see below). The photos of many details of countrytownness are here.

It has to be said that though the front bar of the Union Hotel in Nhill provided the most wonderfully characterful couple of country folk, it has what I suspect may be one of Victoria’s most regressive dining rooms and its accommodation was dirty and spooky. A man who kind of belonged in the attic-like gloom of the upper level, the sole permanent resident of the hotel, loped around in the darkness disconcertingly. The breakfast was a tub of weetbix, milk, bread, and butter. Do not suppose I have left out the extras as too obvious to enumerate; there was no jam. I chatted with the previous owner who almost choked to hear they were charging $50 for accommodation; he used to charge $35 a night with a “proper breakfast” thrown in. But a more welcoming welcome from Peter the publican could not have been hoped for which went some small way to making up for the very obvious shortcomings of the place.

In the bar, there was a fallen woman, a ready made character in a novel, and a local crumple faced farmer archetype crowned by a beanie. The woman had had to live for too long in Adelaide, which she “loathed” (and she lingered like an actress on it, and paused for effect after enunciating the word carefully) on account of the town’s “filthy, ignorant” people, and manufactured a whole sequined drama of the surely-not-just-a-coincidence that I used to live in the Hawthorn street in which she went to primary school. How fondly she clung to the glory days when she was a saleswoman in a fashion boutique; how obliquely and with what ever-so-slightly-slurred melancholy she referred to certain health problems, sipping steadily on her beer at noon, and losing bets she’d gone halvies on with the publican on a gee-gee racing in the above-bar tee-vee.

The Royal in Horsham was a grand old country pub with a properly functioning accommodation ($50 a night for a double), but it was only after I got there that I understood the invasion of pokies had slipped past my radar. A black and white photo inside showed the hotel sporting a beautiful verandah. A pity that got rationalised.
I continue to cling to the dream, and reckon I have found two country pubs at which it will be realised, next trip: Dimboola’s perfect Victoria (above), and Jeparit’s much talked-up Hindmarsh Hotel, where the chef is “international award-winning”, and which is more or less a perfect country pub, though sadly this perfection to my eyes is probably the product of two Melbourners running it: Matt and Maryanne Kippin. I didn’t see the Hindmarsh’s $50 a double rooms, but I’m betting they’re just what I was looking for. Jeparit is truly a wonderful country town, the birthplace of Menzies, and home of some really classic front garden art. As at 2004, a constituent of this blog from Richmond was living there in a three bedroom Victorian house he snapped up for $30,000.

The Park Hotel duly celebrated its third birthday on April Fool’s Day with a party as advertised, though the sign outside said the party was cancelled due to lack of interest. There was a jazz band, lots of bright young things, and films, then, apparently, DJs.I had a high quality chicken parmigiana which cost $16.50. I photographed it for you:

There was an eclectic collection of short films introduced by a very tall man who I think is named Sean. They ranged from true public service announcements exhorting American kids through the vehicle of music video to respect their moms, black and white warnings from last century to schoolboys against the depravity of homosexuals who have an “illness which can’t be seen”, Gollom’s acceptance speech for best virtual character at the MTV awards, a spoof interview of Elijah Wood by one of his fellow Hobbits posing as a German interviewer, to the winning entry in a competition for film editors to make a trailer out of a movie promising as different as posssible a movie as the actual source movie.

The weather was not on their side, which explains the apparently thin crowds in the photos of the band, and perhaps also the melee of bright young things in the back bar:

Now I do like a bit of Chinoiserie moderne, and it’s a la mode right now in newly degrunged pubs and quirky Japanese cafes alike. The Park Hotel is a truly excellent pub in Abbotsford, which manages to be grungy and degrunged at once, down Nicholson St a bit from the Retreat Hotel on the other side at no. 191 (9419 4352). It has copies of Truth lying around (and I thought defamation writs had shut it down, but it seemed to have morphed even more into a racing tabloid), itself more kitsch interior decor than true fodder for the regs probably but then I’m not sure about that, and a good beer garden, with a pool table. Its kitchen serves up tasty tucker and its prices are reasonable. One time, its taps had broken down and they were selling stubbies for the price of pots. That was a good day. Its present incarnation’s having its third birthday on April Fool’s Day, and, unless they’re joshing, there’s going to be fillums ‘n all. [I can't find any evidence on the internet of The Truth being extant, but that doesn't mean anything. I did find this interview of a former editor though, in which the rag is described as something read by folk who won their money on the racing pages and spent it on the brothel pages, and in which it is recounted that a Mr Justice Innes described it in the 1890s as "a wretched little paper reeking of filth". I also learnt that it broke some serious stories, including what happened at Maralinga with the A bomb blasts. Those were the days, when it would sell 400,000 copies a day.]