Australian Pubs

Chloe is the most famous painting in 'Australian Pubs', although there are more famous pubs like, perhaps for Queensland, the National Hotel in Brisbane that featured with distinction in an enquiry into police corruption in Queensland, unless it's The Hero of Waterloo in Sydney, surely not the Wrest Point Casino in Hobart in Tasmania and so on.

The photos I have linked to were all taken by Bruce Howard, the book's photographer and mate of the writer, Melbourne journo, John Larkins. A little research discovered the photos in the book are held by the National Library of Australia and available for viewing on the internet.

You can link to other views by Bruce Howard if you are interested in following up on this photographer here - a page of links found by google search using the words 'bruce howard image National Library of Australia'.

National Library of Australia btw is the largest reference library in Australia and says you have to tell them if you want to publish anything they hold other than for study and research. C'est la vie. This is study.

Chloe hangs in Melbourne, Victoria in a pub called Young and Jackson that is opposite Flinders Street Station, as famous as you betcha. Here the Station 2010. I recall happy times in that locale for the first time in 1969, 19 years old and meeting a friend there (at the station) who gave me directions he would be standing under the clock reading a newspaper (look out for a trench coat). I couldn't have been more enchanted and wonder where Max is to catch up for old times' sake. You can imagine travellers walking across the road to Young and Jackson that started in 1861 as the Princes Bridge Hotel - early image here - that was renamed in 1875 after the persons who took it on, Henry Young and Thomas Jackson. Max and I did (walk across the road) to put our heads in for an historic glimpse of Chloe.

The model for Chloe, whose real name was Marie, was said to be 19.

As recorded in 'Australian Pubs', Chloe was painted in Paris in 1875 by Jules Lefebvre and won the 'Grand Medal at the Paris Salon'. If you see on wikipedia a photo of a portrait of a woman with a revealing cleavage and caption claiming it caused a stir at the Salon in 1884, I cannot imagine what the showing of Chloe created.

The painting was purchased by one Melbourne Doctor, Thomas Fitzgerald and bought for the Hotel in 1908 for 800 pounds.

Anybody interested to read more about the painting, can find a history here.

Here is a wikipedia link to the artist.

'Australian Pubs' was published in 1973. I picked it up for a dollar at a Friends of the Library book sale recently in Adelaide. The significance of the painting on the cover could only be in my thinking - apart from the excellent quality of the photograph - evidence of the Australia-wide resistance in the 1960s and 1970s by artists against a pernicious conservatism, but corruption that publicised gatherings of artists and philosophers in Australia as anti-social and dangerous although especially if grouped around the peace movement. Attempts using the least evidence of nudity or implication in art to bring 'persons of interest' into law courts on charges of moral offence allegedly caused by works of art was a standard ploy.

Be that maybe motivation of editorial choice, the first sentence is 'This has been thirsty work'. The flyleaf of the front cover describes the book as 'the result of a 25,000-mile pub crawl'.

The text is very well written and the photos excellent that illustrate 86 hotels in all - if my counting is right as the index is not numbered. Beautifully edited.

'Australian Pubs' - text by John Larkins - photographs by Bruce Howard - published by Rigby - First edition 1973 and reprinted each year to this edition 1976.