Famous Labor pub to close...damn

[Redneck]

A famous Melbourne pub I have frequented many times "The Curtain Hotel" in Lygon St Melbourne is going to close.

It is very famous within the Labor movement as it was across the road from Victoria Trades Hall Council and was frequented by many Labor Party Celebrities such as Bob Hawke.

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‘We just can’t let go’: sadness as Bob Hawke’s watering hole, the Curtin hotel, set to close
Time called for Melbourne pub named after another Labor PM and favourite of unionists, students, journos and more recently live music fans

On the night Bob Hawke died, the John Curtin hotel in Melbourne’s inner north was packed – its usual crowd of trendy twentysomethings rubbing shoulders with old trade unionists and ex-journos.

Armed with cans of lager named in his honour, the Curtin was the natural place for mourners to remember Hawke, who in the heyday of the 1970s when he was ACTU president, would roll into the pub every Friday evening.

The Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, was there, as was the former Labor premier Steve Bracks and the then federal Labor leader Bill Shorten. A photo of the three of them drinking their Hawke lagers under a black-and-white portrait of the former prime minister is now proudly displayed on the pub’s website.

Now, the 150-year-old building is being sold to developers, and though its future is uncertain, the music venue’s operators have confirmed its time as a pub has come to an end.

“It’s with an agonisingly sad heart, that The John Curtin hotel’s time on this earth will come to an end,” the hotel published to its Facebook page on Tuesday evening. “The owners … have decided to sell, making way, most likely for apartments.”

“We have a lease until the end of November this year. Beyond that, we have no idea what the developers will have planned for us.”

Located across the road from Victoria’s Trades Hall in Carlton and named after another former Labor prime minister, the John Curtin hotel has always been a favourite for party members.

Students, unionists and journos have downed Coopers green at its shadowed booths for decades, though it was in the 70s the pub made its name as the preferred watering hole of Bob Hawke.

Hawke’s daughter, Sue Pieters-Hawke, remembers as a child “sitting up at the old wooden bar with all these blokes”.

“It was Dad’s watering hole, his second home,” she says. “It was a source of a lot of joy for Dad and a lot of joy, and occasional grief, for his family.”

“Dad’s drinking was a source of trouble at times … but it was also how he got to know the trade union movement and form connections. He made amazing friendships at the Curtin, often across factional lines.”

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-n ... t-to-close

[sprintcyclist]

Sad news.