It’s Thursday – student night – and a new generation is streaming through universities for orientation week festivities. First-years clutch flyers for student clubs in motorsports and pickleball, queue for “speed-friending” events, or squint into their phones as they download the campus map app.
“I just want to know how to find the bar!” laughs 18-year-old Shay on the University of Melbourne lawn.
The Age is on a similar hunt.
First-year RMIT students Hardi Patel and Tobey Nunn enjoyed the O-week “street festival” on campus on Thursday.Credit: Chris Hopkins
After visiting campuses and speaking to students across Melbourne, a tally by this masthead reveals that most universities in the state are now without a dedicated bar. Just three have one left on campus, as student life struggles to return post-pandemic and enrolments hit a near-decade low.
Yet Melbourne University student union president Disha Zutshi hopes 2024 will be the year that campuses reawaken. She confirmed to The Age that the union will run a new bar being built as part of the university’s redevelopment.
It will open in semester two this year – “a little smaller than a lecture hall”, she said, but with a balcony and a “retro vinyl record collection” as a nod to the old campus bar Ida, which closed in 2022.
As universities grow larger and ever more corporatised, student union power fades, and the cost-of-living squeeze hits students, uni bars are dying out, bemoans Ben Eltham, president of the staff union at Monash University.
“They’re such cookie-cutter places now. And kids just aren’t on campus or drinking as much. But uni pubs are important. Even the crap ones.”
Campus bars have long been key incubators for live music and comedy, corners for student politicians to plot factional deals, and the backdrop to countless life-changing first meetings. With student unions increasingly running food banks and free meals for students, Zutshi says it’s important to keep bars in their hands so prices stay low.
Former Melbourne University students Duncan Wallace and Tim Staindl spent most of their time at their beloved uni bar, the Corkman, across the road from the university’s law school. “It was a beautiful old building and a very average pub, but it was the place to go because everyone was there, every day,” recalls Staindl, now a barrister.
From the university library across the road, you could see the crowd at the Corkman. “And from the Corkman you could see everyone still studying.”
So when two “cowboy developers” took a wrecking ball to it in 2016, the two law students took them to court.
One Monday morning, after developers outbid the university for the site, Staindl and Wallace arrived at uni to find the Corkman had been torn down illegally, despite its heritage overlay. The bulldozers came in the middle of the night, just days after a suspicious fire tore through the pub.
Planning ministers and the city council soon joined the students’ court battle to bring it back and block the developers’ plans to build apartments and, late last year, they won – a court ordered that the Corkman facade must be rebuilt.
Former law students Duncan Wallace and Tim Staindl at the site of the Melbourne law school favourite, the Corkman Irish pub, which was illegally knocked down in 2016.Credit: Chris Hopkins
Standing at the site on Thursday – now a small park “in need of a mow” – Staindl wondered if it would ever be a uni watering hole again. “I heard the other day about an O-week water-skolling competition. Man... ”
But not all university bar closures are as dramatic as the Corkman’s.
La Trobe’s union-run Eagle Bar was quietly turned into a corporate function centre for private events, its dance floor and indoor trees ripped out. The glass atrium that once opened onto a bustling beer garden – hosting live music, wild Thursday parties, and more than one sleepy afternoon philosophy tutorial – is closed now, save for those who can pay the hire fee.
“Bands that used to play there can’t afford it any more,” says Harry Tindley of the La Trobe Student Union. “Meanwhile, they keep opening student lounges that are just empty because there’s nothing to keep students here.”
La Trobe students James Belcher, Harry Tindley, Jedd, Lucy and Chich outside the Eagle bar, now closed to students.Credit: Latrobe Student Union
The curtain has also fallen on Swinburne’s The Hammer and Swine, with its balcony and live music, after the student union was moved out of its original building by university management last year. Deakin’s Einstein’s is long gone, as is its brief predecessor Mrs Robinson’s.
RMIT’s Oxford Scholar is one of the few university bars still alive in Melbourne, rebuilt after the original Gold Rush-era pub closed in 2017 due to Metro tunnel works. When The Age first visited, Rick and Morty was playing out the back on a big TV where students could cast their phones, and burgers were cheap. But some were at RMIT’s dedicated computer gaming lounge nearby.
By Thursday, however, the O-week crowd had started to spill through the doors, and a festival had taken over Bowen Street, with rollerskating, biodegradable body glitter, free food, live music and – to keep everyone happy – a silent disco too.
The Hammer and Swine in the old Swinburne union building used to have packed gigs and host politicians.Credit: Swinburne Student Union
First-years Hardi Patel and Tobey Nunn said the vibes were good as they explored their new campus. Though they hadn’t properly explored the pub yet, Nunn expected it to be a must “after some late-night lectures”.
Sir John’s at Monash in Clayton is also hanging on, though not all students seem impressed. “Is this the pub or like, a cafeteria?” asked one when The Age visited. Food, at least, was still cheap.
RMIT first-years Alisha Ali, Marianna Mossonidis and Vanessa Jacob enjoying their time at the O-week “street party”.Credit: Chris Hopkins.
There is also hope of a renaissance at Swinburne, where the student union is soon expected to merge with a university-owned subsidiary running student activities, after a long battle with the chancellory for more student control.
Meanwhile, at La Trobe’s sprawling main campus in Bundoora, student union elections continue to run on a platform of bringing back the beloved Eagle, though funding has been whittled down since the union split into two – and COVID hit.
“At least a bar on campus means there are more jobs available for students, there’s already security here,” says Tindley. “These days in the main strip, so many shops are closed. We need something to bring [the campus] back to life.”
But a La Trobe spokeswoman said the university had been buzzing during O-week, with DJs and a small pop-up bar.
While she did not answer questions on the future of the Eagle, she revealed La Trobe is now “exploring options for bar and social spaces” in the central Agora hub as part of its masterplan to “reinvigorate and refresh the heart of the university”.
With Hannah Kennelly
La Trobe’s Eagle bar once hosted wild student nights but became a corporate function centre during COVID.Credit: LaTrobe Student Union
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