Two well loved venues on opposite sides of the country will play their last shows on the same night, Saturday 29 August. Neither closure was driven by a lack of audience.
A significant number of well-loved Sydney venues closing recently including Mary’s Underground, 185 Bar and MoshPit, citing costs including insurance.
In Collingwood, Victoria, the Bendigo Hotel is calling last drinks. The Johnston Street corner has been a pub since 1871, when it opened as the Collingwood Arms, and it has spent more than a decade as one of the country’s most reliable homes for metal and heavy music. The Mill Brewery took the venue on at the end of 2024 and has now sold it. The new operator has not been named, and there is no public commitment to keeping live music in the room. A farewell party is set down for 29 August.
In Dulwich Hill, Lazy Thinking is closing after being evicted from the old butcher’s shop it has run out of for three years. In that time it hosted more than 850 shows as a not for profit, charged no venue hire, and never turned away an artist who could not pay. The landlord gave them until the end of the year, but the team has chosen to go four months early rather than keep subsidising a building they already know they are going to lose. They are pivoting to an artist development organisation and hunting for a permanent home.
Both rooms had extended programs, audiences and community standing. What neither had was control of the premises they operated in. That is a different problem to the one most live music policy is currently built to solve.
Grant rounds, special entertainment precincts, noise reform and licensing changes all quietly assume the same thing, which is that the operator will still be in the building next year. When a freehold sells or a lease is not renewed, none of that support follows the venue. The public investment stays with the operator while the cultural infrastructure walks out the door.
There are levers worth talking about here. Longer minimum lease terms for live music tenants, a right of first refusal when a freehold goes to market, tenure conditions attached to public funding above a certain size, and planning protections that attach to the site rather than the licensee are all used in one form or another overseas. None of them are free, but none of them require new money either.
Overall, these closures underline the incredible vulnerability that these important cultural institutions continue to face.
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