Feature / Food & Drink
Sláinte! Celtic Club begins a new era in Brunswick
The club has taken over the historic Sarah Sands Hotel in Sydney Road
Mark Phillips
Friday, March 15, 2024
“We know there’s only two types of people in the world – the Irish and those who want to be Irish,” jokes Celtic Club chief executive Robert Clifford.
Sláinte! Celtic Club begins a new era in Brunswick
The club has taken over the historic Sarah Sands Hotel in Sydney Road
Sláinte! Celtic Club begins a new era in Brunswick
The club has taken over the historic Sarah Sands Hotel in Sydney Road
Mark Phillips
Friday, March 15, 2024
A
USTRALIA’S largest and oldest continuing Irish social and cultural club has found a new permanent home in Brunswick.
The Melbourne Celtic Club, which was formed in 1887, has taken over the lease of the Sarah Sands Hotel in Sydney Road.
While it will serve as a new home for the 600-strong Celtic Club with a private members’ lounge and library and function rooms, most of the venue will be open to all comers as an upmarket pub called The Wild Geese, with Guinness on tap and serving modern Irish cuisine.
It was formally opened last Monday — just in time for St Patrick’s Day celebrations this Sunday — by the Republic of Ireland’s Health Minister, Stephen Donnelly, who was in Australia on an official visit.
The Sarah Sands Hotel, which has stood at the corner of Sydney Road and Brunswick Road since 1854, is itself steeped in Irish-Australian history.
It was at the Sarah Sands where a group of Irish immigrants, including prominent landowner Michael Dawson, met in 1860 to establish what would become Brunswick’s first Catholic church parish, St Ambrose’s.
Throughout the 20th century, Irish-Australians were one of Brunswick’s largest and most distinctive immigrant groups, with many of its streets and buildings named after people of Irish descent.
Present-day Brunswick residents with long memories will recall that an Irish-style pub, Bridie O’Reilly’s, operated from the same location in the 1990s and 2000s.
The chief executive of the Celtic Club, Robert Clifford, said he hoped the new venue would be embraced by the Brunswick community, whether of Irish descent or not.
“We know there’s only two types of people in the world – the Irish and those who want to be Irish,” he said.
“So anyone is welcome to join the club.”
The Sarah Sands building, which reopened in 2021 after a four-year hiatus, has had a full internal refit costing about $500,000.
The Celtic Club took over the lease following a five-year search for new premises. It was based on the corner of Queen and Latrobe streets in the city from 1959 to 2016, before selling that property to an apartment developer for a reported $25.6 million.
The sale of the Queen Street property prompted a period of bitter infighting and factionalism within the Celtic Club, and it was not until the establishment of a new committee, led by the renowned psychiatrist and former Australian of the Year Patrick McGorry, that peace was restored.
McGorry alluded to this conflict in remarks at the new venue’s opening on Monday when he described it as “a turning of the page” in the history of the club.
The profits from the Queen Street sale enabled the club to buy the Limerick Arms Hotel in South Melbourne, but Clifford said that building was never going to be large enough for the club’s requirements.
“We conducted a search over the last five years and got serious in the last year with a shortlist of four venues,” Clifford said.
“Two of them got seriously looked at and this was the best when you balanced the location and value for money.”
The Celtic Club will continue to own the South Melbourne venue as an investment property.
McGorry, who was born in Dublin, said the Celtic Club, like many cultural organisations, had suffered from a declining and ageing membership over the years. He said its heyday had been in the late-1960s, when his family had arrived in Australia from Ireland.
It had remained a focal point for Melbourne’s Irish community into this century before falling on hard times, he said.
Selling the iconic Queen Street building netted a handy profit but the cost in terms of lost identity was immense, feeding conflict and turmoil among the club’s membership.
“What slowly became clear was that after over a century and in the eye of this storm, a reimagining and reinvention of the club was needed so it could be sustainable and relevant to younger members of all genders well into the future. Otherwise, it would just simply wither and die,” McGorry said.
Despite the turmoil, Melbourne’s Celtic Club has outlasted similar organisations in Sydney and Brisbane.
McGorry said finding a new home for the club in Brunswick would provide the foundation for the Celtic Club to build on its loyal existing membership and reach out to a new generation of Irish-Australians.
There has been a wave of Irish immigration to Australia over the past decade, many of them doctors and nurses working in the public health system who the club hopes to attract.
The venue’s Wild Geese moniker is drawn from a contingent of Irish soldiers who chose to fight for Catholic armies in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries.
But it also refers to the global Irish diaspora – in McGorry’s words: “a flock that have had such a profound influence on the world, giving Ireland such a huge global footprint, respect and affection”.
One clear point of difference with the old Celtic Club in Queen Street is that The Wild Geese will have no poker machines – a conscious decision by the club’s committee.
And while its décor is proudly Irish with muted green carpets and a multitude of artworks and photos of Irish scenes, writers and musicians – plus the mandatory Guinness posters – it has sought to avoid “Gaelic kitsch”, which Clifford said many people of Irish descent found offensive.
The Wild Geese bistro will be open most days for lunch and dinner.
Belfast-born chef John-Paul Dargan has been hired to oversee what Clifford describes as “an elevated menu of contemporary Irish cuisine”.
Dishes include beetroot black pudding entrée, classic Irish lamb stew, and Dargan’s signature dish of venison with beetroot and a white pudding rosti.
Irish breakfast is served every Saturday and Sunday, and other feature nights include oysters and Guinness on Fridays. A stripped down menu is available in the downstairs and upstairs bars.
Clifford said the bar stocked 72 Irish whiskies – the largest selection in Australia – and a wide range of Irish gins, while Guinness, Kilkenny and O’Hara’s Pale Ale will be on tap.
Music and literature will be big drawcards to The Wild Geese, including an annual Bloomsday event to celebrate James Joyce’s groundbreaking novel, Ulysses, and regular craic sessions of traditional Irish folk music and dancing.
A pub choir will meet upstairs every couple of months to belt out Irish favourites. On Wednesday this week, about 80 people attended the first event where they learnt the Cranberries’ song ‘Zombie’.
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