Gary
Guy Rundle has an article on Melbourn's bar culture in The Age.He says:

every city is deluded about its own uniqueness. For some reason, a lot of this sense of "exceptionalism" seems to hang on the places in a city where people gather and drink - and, in Melbourne, a lot of that hinges on the bar scene. And fair enough, too. The fact that getting a quiet drink in Sydney involves finding a niche in a six-storey, big screen, 4000-pokie, Dayglo-carpet toilet owned by organised crime and professional rugby, and designed to reflect the aesthetic preferences common to both, makes Melbourne's bar renaissance a miracle for which to be thankful.

He asks: is Melbourne's shift from the pub to the bar unique? Well, yes, but not in the way most people think.

Even though a lot of visitors to Australia who venture south of Bondi are surprised to find, at the end of the Southern Hemisphere, a little Prague-on-the-beach, we are scarcely the only city to undergo such a change.

He adds that the uniqueness of the bar culture can be found in lampshades:

It is Melbourne, in its strange and distinctive bars, city of a million lampshades, that now apes Edna, consciously or otherwise. It is living proof of the words of that other great Melburnian, Ern Malley: that art is difficult, and in its delirium "the mind repeats the dream of others".

Pam,
Over lunch FX Holden and Nabakov told me that the rise of the inner city bar culture in Melbourne had a lot to do with the deregulation of the state's licensing laws. See this account by Matthew Evans in the Sydney Morning Herald. We had a drink to the liberalisation of the licensing laws.

Gary,
Sydney desires some funky bars where you can have a quite drink and talk to friends.

so does Adelaide. The hotels control the way we drink here. So we have pubs. It is difficult to find somewhere quiet so we can talk with friends.

Adelaide's drinking culture, like its architecture, continue to be soulless rather than inspired like Melbourne's.

Gary,
Clover Moore, the Lord Mayor of Sydney, is presenting to the NSW Parliament this week a new licensing regime as part of her campaign to encourage intimate, Melbourne-style drinking venues in Sydney.The SMH reports:

Under her Small Bars Bill, to be tabled in Parliament tomorrow and debated later in the week, premises for 120 patrons or fewer would not have to complete an expensive social impact assessment and a licence would cost only $500. "People would like to have a drink with a friend without being assaulted by a large screen, lots of poker machines and loud noise," Ms Moore said yesterday.

At present, operators of small venues either have to apply for a $2000 hotelier's licence or a "drink or dine" licence costing up to $15,500 for restaurateurs wanting to serve alcohol without a meal. Under a "drink or dine" licence, only 30 per cent of patrons can be served alcohol without ordering food.

The bill is expected to fail because the Liberal and Labor parties have already signalled their opposition.

Pam,
I keep on reading that John Thorpe, the NSW president of the Australian Hotels Association is bitterly opposed to small intimate bars. He is widely quoted as saying in the past that Sydneysiders did not want to sit in a hole in the wall and drink chardonnay and read a book.

His latest enlightening comments on the subejct are:

People can sit down, talk about history, chew the fat and gaze into each other's eyes and all this sort of baloney but it's pie in the sky stuff.That's not what Sydney wants.

It's not what the Australian Hotels Association wants.

AC/DC in Melbourne in the 1970s