Chance are, if you've been to Melbourne, you've been to St. Kilda. It's popular with cultural tourists and locals alike, home to fantastic restaurants, music venues, what passes for a city beach in Melbourne, some lovely idiosyncratic commercial and residential architecture, a pier, and some great streets.
If you haven't been, you've seen places like it. It's a familiar urban history: formerly scruffy area with rich historical texture, inhabited by artists and musicians from the '60s to the '80s attracted by cheap rents, edginess, and proximity to the city centre, and now spruced up and in the throes of wondering whether to fight gentrification or just submit gracefully. We may have heard the story before, but it's always fascinating to hear from the city itself and what contributes to their particular sense of place.
This documentary focuses not just on St. Kilda, but on the significance of one particular building - the Prince of Wales Hotel. If its walls could tell stories, the ones safe enough to be broadcast on ABC Radio National would sound a bit like this. A beautiful if solid art-deco building becomes a social club for US officers during WWII; segueing in and out of the surrounding red light district, and via a few costume changes becomes a particularly grungy 1970s hotel. Its sticky floors set it up perfectly for the incipient Melbourne punk and post-punk scenes (as fertile as Brisbane's Pig City of the time - listen to next week's edition of Hindsight for that) and captured memorably in "Dogs In Space". So by now you've got skinheads with shaved swastikas pogoing and playing pool directly above a gay bar downstairs, nicknamed the 'Star Wars Bar' due to the wild assortment of punters. (It's the oldest gay space in Melbourne.)
Bands with track titles like "I Spit On Your Gravy" share the stage with Art Pepper (read Geoff Dyer's But Beautiful for why Pepper would fit right in), and then we're into ribald stories of a Sunday night drag show ("Pokeys"), and a women's disco ("Pennies"). I'm afraid you'll have to listen to the show to discover the words for the venue's very own show tune, 'Dancing Dildos'.
It was the natural home for an influential community radio station, 3PBS - the "Progressive Broadcasting Service" - transmitting from a room on the first floor. This sounded fantastic, with entirely experimental radio well before the likes of Resonance FM. And of course having a radio station upstairs helped the pub become the primary music venue in Melbourne of the time.
This is a beautifully done piece, with narration almost entirely out of the way - just the characters themselves telling their own stories, jostling for space with an amazing array of recordings from the time. Lord knows how they found all this stuff, but I've rarely heard such fantastic archive sounds. The craft put into Pokeys' hilarious jingles is really worth hearing.
Now, almost predictably, the Prince of Wales is a 5-star boutique hotel. You can't stand in the way of that kind of progress in these places - and preserving the poverty associated with grunginess is a really questionable strategy - but thanks to Radio National for reminding us of the vivid histories underneath the sumptuous new paintwork.
And if nothing else, this doco is worth listening to just for the voices of some of almost unbelievable characters - their rich, battered, husky, camp Aussie drawls are testament to the good times this place has witnessed. A cracker.
Hindsight: Pennies, Pokeys, Punks and the Prince (MP3, Real)
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