Lorenzi wine bar

Some may quibble about the assertion that the Australian wine bar was saved from an inglorious fate by post-war migration.Their status during the 40's and 50's was little more than a cheap drinking hole for the consumption of fortified wine mainly sherry and port. Drinking  bulk wines by economically deprived groups such as aboriginals and other inhabitants of the world of the street still haunt the wine industry, where the cost of "happiness' must come at the lowest possible cost.

In Australia the consumption of wine has historically  been associated with the upper economic. segment of society. Even today the media love to refer to the Chardonnay set, what ever that means. No doubt this is a reference to the early colonial governing class . The British working man being  a beer drinker, established a hostile attitude towards wine drinking counties as being perceived inferior.

As a young man around 20 ,I was drawn to the idea of owning a wine bar, perhaps out of bloody mindedness, I liked the idea of doing whatever was contrary to fashion. This after all was the new age were anything was possible, the abandonment of many prewar concepts of what was 'correct'. I had recently terminated my seafaring  career and was searching for some means to earn a living. I still had mother to support and in addition was attempting to learn some sort of skill that may in the future enable me to earn a living. Having left school at fourteen I was not considered eligible to learn a trade or enrol in any government educational institution as minimum educational standards applied. Hence a rather bizarre career in unusual businesses followed.

To buy a wine bar didn't seem all that extraordinary and in any case I would be able to live on the premises. In those early postwar migration years I had noticed Italian migrates turning these establishments into coffee shops come snack bars. The problem was Sydney wine bars had a very unsavoury reputation, in reality they were rather sordid affairs filled mostly with down and out characters from the streets. Men mostly dressed in hand me down cloths drinking threepenny "darts" of sweet or dry sherry. In fact anything with an affordable high alcohol content. The bars inevitably stunk of unwashed bodies, while the floors were covered with spittle.
How on earth anyone could turn such an unpromising environment into a business was anyone guess, I was not Italian nor did I have a help full family. This of course was the reason these business were being sold for next to nothing, they were not profitable nor appealing, and in the end I decided against the idea.

At the time I had enrolled at the Julian Ashton Art School of which I shall deal later, where a number of students frequented an Italian owned wine bar of the renovated type. It boasted an express coffee machine something still very rare in Australia at the time, it served light snacks along with bowls of pasta. The bar was run by a very bedable Italian girl called Auguste who would brook no nonsense. Unfortunately for the mainly male clientele she was married and not interested in any hanky-panky .She was very intelligent with large flashing dark eyes and long black hair, the visual opposite of Australian  girls. This was the sort of person I would need to help me bring this wine bar idea to fruition. Unfortunately I failed to find anyone who came remotely close so I settled on a pie van!

Lorenzi's at the time was the centre of  Sydney's Avantgard set [that is the wine drinkers, beer drinkers meet in a waterfront pub] and was generally full of all sorts of characters. Displaced persons mainly as they were commonly called, people escaping from the the new communist countries of eastern Europe, deserters from the French Foreign Legion, displaced professional men from every corner of the globe. Sydney's artistic life was then considered more extreme than would be found in Paris around the turn of the last century. You must remember this was the age of Jean-Paul Sartre, womens' feminist movement was starting to bite .

Germaine Greer held her meeting in various George Street coffee lounges as they were called, while what was called the Sydney push held sway in the Philosophy Department of Sydney University. To go to University was then still a privilege only available to the wealthy segments of the community unless you were in a position to win a scholarship. My education really took place talking to all those displaced persons in Lorenzi' wine bar.In hind sight I don't regret it.