Sydney Bar Zine

I know, I know – like John Farnham, Motley Crue and KISS, Bar Zine has had many farewell tours.  This time, though, it’s finally happening: I’m pulling the plug. Within a month, the great Bar Zine empire, home to more hangovers and ca...

David’s journalism students petrify him. Then again, so does his cat.  His girlfriend broke up with him, he writes about bars for a shrinking newspaper that’s abandoned news reporting for lifestyle articles, and he’s desperately searching...

The unthinkable happened: I had to stop drinking for health reasons. Well, not forever, but for a while.  This all started a year ago. The good news is it turned out I wasn’t an alcoholic, at least not by Australian standards – there wa...

Perhaps this is something I ought to be telling a therapist, but I never wanted to be Luke Skywalker or Han Solo as a kid – I wanted to be one of the creepy freaks getting wasted at the Mos Eisley cantina while listening to that alien swing ba...

Let’s be blunt: no one goes to Byron Bay for its bars. Yet while drinking here once meant necking a beer near a bikie or sculling a tinny on the beach, these days you have your pick of great bars to choose from. My top four are: Miss Margarita A ma...

There are good drunks and mean drunks – and Henry Lawson, one of Australia’s most beloved authors, certainly seems to have been a nasty one. His own publisher, George Robertson, described him as having “a very nasty temper”; Norman Lindsay o...

One sentence review: the most beautifully written, moving and yet sweetly humorous collection of short stories I can remember reading. The longer yet still short review: I’ve recently read two collections of short stories by authors championed...