Harmony Club effectively homeless after getting kicked out of private clubs

A GROUP of old blokes who call themselves the Harmony Club and have been meeting regularly for decades for wine-fuelled long lunches are effectively homeless after getting booted from two of Brisbane’s most prestigious private clubs.

The Harmony Club has been barred from two private clubs in Queensland.

LACK OF HARMONY

THEY call themselves The Harmony Club but their actions of late appear to belie the name.

It’s a group of about a dozen old blokes in Brisbane who gather informally every month or so for long wine-fuelled lunches.

But the band of brothers, who have been meeting for about 40 years, is now effectively homeless after getting kicked out of two of the city’s most prestigious private clubs.

David Bark, the new boss of Tattersall’s Club, gave the lads their walking papers recently and they then found their way across to the Queensland Club.

It didn’t take long for equally new Queensland Club GM Paul Wilsher to get word about the group and he also showed them the door.

Bark, who took the helm in January after operating hotels in China, did not return a call yesterday.

Wilsher, a former Brisbane Club chief executive who came aboard in February, declined to comment.

Illustration of David Bark by Brett Lethbridge

But City Beat spies tell us that two gents in the Harmony Club had a massive falling out and they hoped to get Bark to help sort out the dispute.

It’s understood that allegations were flying around about Tatts and the behaviour of the Harmony Club. We hear those claims turned out not to be true but, by that point, Bark had had a gut full and didn’t want to get dragged in to the morass of trying to sort out the mess.

So he asked the group to up stumps and find another venue even though they can remain Tatts members.

DRACONIAN LIMITS

IT’S not the first time that Tatts management has had a dust up with the Harmony Club.

Former CEO Mark Woolf, who departed in November after just two years on the job, pushed for a rather draconian limit on wine consumption and the length of long lunches in late 2016.

The Harmony Club’s boozy gatherings are understood to have figured prominently in his rationale to impose a cap of four glasses of wine and gatherings of no more than 2½ hours at Tatts.

Ex-Wallaby Jules Guerassimoff is a member of the Harmony Club. Picture: Adam Armstrong

Indeed, one Harmony Club member, rugby union legend Jules Guerassimoff, was slapped with a permanent ban from Tatts in 2016 after he admitted to pouring a glass of water over a barman’s head after his request for another wine was knocked back.

We had no luck reaching Guerassimoff yesterday so it’s not clear if he is now searching for a new home with the rest of his pals in The Harmony Club.

In a somewhat ironic twist, Bark has made clear that he is sympathetic to the plight of the homeless.

Last month, he joined other captains of industry for the annual Vinnies CEO Sleep Out to raise money in the fight against the social scourge.

Clad in a black silk-like outfit, he beat his fundraising target and pulled in an impressive $15,027. Among his financial backers were prominent local bizoids Kevin Seymour and Dean Merlo, both of whom are long-time members of Tatts.

FLOOD OF MONEY

THE cost of the class action launched on behalf of 2011 flood victims continues to skyrocket.

Maurice Blackburn legal eagle Rebecca Gilsenan informed her 6000 or so clients this week that the plaintiff’s cost alone of the class action had blown out to an eye-watering $52 million because of the extended length of the hearing.

That’s up from a $38.6 million estimate in December and almost double the $28.3 million predicted back in August 2016.

Whether victims ever get a cheque in the mail remains to be seen. But Gilsenan said she remains “pleased’’ with how matters are progressing.