Dress Code Oz

I'll describe a scene I saw on the streets of Brisbane just a few days ago; imagine a swaggering trio of lads out on the town at night, making their way down the street in good spirits, smartly dressed, destined for some sort of evening establishment.

Two of these lads look at the feet of the third and much discussion results, shaking of heads and and inevitably one of them says "we'll not get in with those." He's talking about the shoes his mate has on, a pair of sneakers where the other two are be-shod with some kind of less casual dress shoes. Their problem is dress code. It's an extremely peculiar thing which I've only ever really noticed in Australia.

It means, of course, that none of them will enter the bar of their choice. Said bar will be poorer for the custom but this is a choice that thousands upon thousands of bars just like this one make across Australia every evening. They turn people away for seemingly arbitrary dress codes, policed to the letter by bouncers positioned outside the doors, armed with a checklist of appropriate attire and a sharp eye for innappropriate clothing.

I find this extrodinarily strange, it wont surprise you to learn. Not the least because, quite frankly, these bars are rarely matching this kind of attention to detail with their internal accoutrements. In fact there's more as like to be a complete lack of decore, furnature or otherwise any such expense lavished on the profit margin irrelevancy of 'atmosphere'.

In virtually any other Western country if you head to anything that's a 'bar' then it's pretty much smart casual. You wont be inspected with a fine toothed comb but merely given a cursory glance that you're not unfeasibly inebriated. If you enter a night club, you'd be expected to wear a collared shirt, proper shoes and no jeans and really that's about it. These standards tend to get more lax the warmer the climbs. Not so for Brisbane though, I've seen people turned away for not wearing long sleeve shirts on a 33 degree evening, not to mention open shoes (which is fine for a lady entering just prior of course) and any manner of other absurdities.

In fact, I've even been refused entry to the 'Crown Pub' in the Crown Casino complex in Melbourne for essentially wearing clothes more in style, more classy, than the bouncers could quite get their head around. And that bar is a classic example of what is essentially a sports bar style counter and a largely empty room designed to pack to the gills with punters who have no better establishment in the immediate vicinity to frequent.

I'm not sure what it's all about. I think it's trying to deter a type of customer; We Don't Want Your Carlton Draft Swilling Sort in Here Mate! I'm guessing though, I don't really understand. So I'll need to give it the same sort of pitiful gaze as I gave said bouncers in the Crown Pub, and thank myself for a lucky save and a reminder to head up to the city proper and find a real bar.

Time zones

For a country with so low a population it always amazes me how there's seemingly enough resources to run each state as if it were a sovereign country. There are countless examples of this, particularly should you happen to get shafted interstate by some retailer and find that there's a juristictional quagmire of who you can complain to.

This situation is particularly strange when it comes to time zones. See Queensland basically doesn't do daylight savings. So what that means is that when you have daylight savings, like now for example, you have this absurd situation where Melbourne is one hour ahead of Brisbane, despite quite substantially demonstrably more West of Brisbane. Hell, even South Australia is half an hour ahead. Western parts of South Australia are several thousands kilometers West of Queensland.

None of which, I guess, causes any huge issues. However it is most definately strange.