Tobacco News and Interesting Information

As the clocks ticked over at midnight on December 31, 1999, the portion of our brains not transfixed by alcohol and fireworks paused anxiously for a millisecond, still half-braced for planes to plummet from the sky, the electricity grid to flicker and fail, and the rioting to begin. Ah, remember the millennium bug?

Six-and-a-half years to the minute later, a similar catastrophe was anticipated throughout Melbourne's bar scene, as publicans called "final cigarettes" and awaited their presumed apocalypse; punters would be driven away by the smoking ban enforced by the State Government at midnight on June 31, 2007, leading inevitably to empty venues.

Didn't happen, of course. Hotel patronage has risen 9 per cent, at least partly because non-smokers can now venture out without contracting tumours and going home smelling like they've spent the evening inside a crematorium.

The other contributing factor has been the wilyness and creativity of bar owners. Over the past two years there's been a flurry of ingenious activity designed to exploit a loophole in the legislation, which says that smoking is OK if there's no roof, or the walls cover no more than 75 per cent of the space.

Necessity being the mother of invention, the result is a proliferation of beer gardens, balconies, rooftops - and crazy, clever, Escher-inspired smoking spaces.

Smokers (and their friends) find themselves in the oddest of places - standing in the rain in a graffitied alley next to some steaming bins (Sister Bella), sitting at a rickety table where people brush past you on the way to the outdoor toilet (Von Haus), underneath a palm tree (The Carlton Hotel), or in what used to be an off-limits carriageway, sandwiched next to the goods lift, beer gas tanks, and cool room (Comme).

In terms of sheer invention, the blue ribbon goes to Chapel Street club White Charlie, which has sorted its smokers out by cutting a chunk out of its corrugated iron roof; you can see the town hall tower through the hole, and when it rains, well, it rains inside the club.

What's interesting is the way that these ooky, consciously artsy/urban grunge smoking areas have quickly become normal, acceptable, and as Melbourne as bitching about Sydney. Sure, there are glorious, top-end, smokers' paradises such as Siglo, Blue Diamond, Collins Quarter and Madam Brussels, but it's the weird nooks, balconies and inner-city lanes that are driving the redefinition of Melbourne's bar culture.