A couple of days ago Mairéad included a shot of an Irish pub in her PAD gallery. What struck me was the difference in architecture between Irish pubs and Australian ones, which is probably down to the different climates. The Irish ones seem to be much cosier and closed in, whereas traditional Australian ones, such as the Terminus in Pyrmont, tended to have much larger doors and far more windows to allow some air in during the summer.

Obviously it didn't do the Terminus much good, since as can be seen here it's long since been abandoned. (A recent news story suggested that the owners were sitting on it as part of a "land bank", hoping to sell it off for redevelopment when it crumbles too far to be preserved.)

The Terminus is also a victim of changing demographics. Its heyday was at the turn of the last century when Pyrmont was an industrial area full of blue collar residents. In those days you didn't have to walk far to find a pub. (In fact there's still another one on the opposite corner to the Terminus.) While they've thinned out substantially as Pyrmont has become gentrified, there are still quite a few around though most have become more gentrified themselves. I shot the Terminus since it's a more or less preserved example of the older style of pub.

Anecdote: The Terminus did go through a phase of being a topless bar for a while. Back in my student days, one of my co-students was employed there. Being of a very slender frame, I was never quite sure how she landed that gig but I'm sure that it had nothing to do with the Terminus' eventual closure.
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Edit September 2024: The Terminus would be revived (after a $AUD 2 million refit) toward the end of the decade. From a Sydney Morning Herald news article on 20 March 2018, a couple of weeks after the reopening:
The Harris Street old girl was established in the early 1860s and originally called the Coopers Arms Inn. It became the Terminus Hotel in 1911 and by all reports it was a real knees-up boozer Back In The Day. A proper cops-and-crims haunt in the 1970s, the Terminus may have also been the first Sydney pub to employ topless barmaids.

The original closure was in 1983. The reopening... well, it's now a very much up market hotel, pub and restaurant in keeping with its new neighbours.

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