Can Balmain get its groove back? Well, it depends

There’s been an audible stiffening of muscles across Balmain today; a tightening of the hand joints belonging to the peninsula’s most seasoned NIMBYs, as they ready themselves to swing their laptops open and punch their forefingers up and down like pistons on a keyboard, cranking out complaint letters to every councillor in the ward.

There’s a renewed energy about their work. Life in these parts for the perpetually joyless has been hard going of late. In fact, the pickings have been so slim that the only local issue to excite anything approximating a moral crisis was the recent announcement by St Augustine’s Church to add a few more bells to its belltower.

The howls of opposition were swift but unconvincing. Objecting to the celebratory pealing of church bells, especially on someone’s wedding day, is a bit like objecting to the smell of freshly baked bread. (Which some people in Balmain do, on a semi-daily basis.)

St Augustine’s Catholic Church in Balmain is seeking to increase the number of bells in its tower.Credit: Wolter Peeters

But today the professional grumps are on much surer footing. An extension of bar and pub trading hours is the closest thing these community curmudgeons get to a second Christmas; a home game for people for whom home is everything.

Under the new laws, licensed venues in Balmain and Rozelle will be allowed to trade as late as 2am on Friday and Saturday, as part of the Inner West Council’s commendable attempt to spread some of Enmore’s magic-dust vibrancy to other suburbs in the area. The recently created “entertainment precinct” in Enmore has been a great success, partly because Enmore was already a pretty happening place to begin with.

Balmain, by contrast, comes to this from a standing start. Non-believers might say that it would be easier to breathe life back into the dodo than into Balmain. After all, this a suburb where a pharmacist staying open past 6pm on Thursday night is hailed as a night-time economy success story.

But the community’s desire for revival is real; and, as the recent openings of The Dry Dock hotel and Cicci wine bar have demonstrated, if you give nice things to people in Balmain, they are willing to put down their poison pens and leave their homes for a taste of the revelry and hedonism that once defined the area.

Of course, longer hours alone won’t turn this ship around. Balmain and Rozelle are currently home to scores of tired, unimaginative public houses where on most evenings the empty bar stools outnumber the occupied ones. Nobody expects a pub that can’t pull a crowd at 8pm to miraculously heave into life at 1.30am.

A martini from the small but perfectly formed Bar Planet in Enmore Road. Credit: Dexter Kim

So the new trading hours, one assumes, aren’t there to prolong the ghost-town torpor of existing venues so much as lure new operators into the area, inviting them to capitalise on generous licenses to open 20-seater martini bars, late-night-kitchen tapas joints and the kind of small live music venues that Marrickville has in spades.

The changing demographics of the area will no doubt dial up the degree of difficulty here. While the peninsula was once home to row upon row of share houses, crammed with university students for whom the Monkey Bar circa 2002 provided a second (or, in many cases, a first) loungeroom, today the area is mostly home to young families whose idea of a night out begins and ends with a 6pm booking at Gigi’s pizzeria. Finding a restaurant that does good high chairs, not highballs, is the foremost priority.

But it’s been over 20 years since those first waves of affluence crept into the area, and the babies those families gave birth to back then are now all in their early 20s, still living at home, and almost certainly sick to death of the Uber fare to and from The Golden Sheaf every Wednesday night. These are the people the new Balmain is being created for.

And remember too, even if it fails, there’s a sure-fire Plan B staring the council right in the face. Rather than focus on bars and pubs, they could always look at extending the trading hours of the places that locals actually love. If Bertoni’s cafe and the Mecca cosmetics store could each trade until 2am, Balmain would have the richest night-time resurgence in the world.

Chris Taylor is a Balmain local. He’s currently presenting Nightlife on ABC Radio.

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