Situated on the corner of Johnston and Wellington streets in the inner-city suburb of Collingwood, The Tote has been an integral part of Melbourne’s underground rock & roll scene for three decades; it may have never held more than a few hundred people, but several generations of leading Australian musicians have passed through (and in some cases, passed out in) the authentically ramshackle venue. For guitar aficionados, in a city that prides itself on being the music capital of the country, the pub is an institution, and that status forms both the momentum and the problem for Natalie van den Dungen’s documentary about The Tote’s fall and rise.
In January of 2010, having been catergorised as a 'high risk" venue as a matter of procedure not record (simply because it was licensed to serve alcohol and had live music) by Victoria’s Liquor Licensing Commission, The Tote suddenly announced that it was closing. The venue was trading at a loss because itneeded to have security personnel present, no matter who was playing and how small the audience might be. 'People don’t come to The Tote to fight," declares Bruce Milne, a licensee and pubic face for the pub, rightfully separating it from large commercial nightclubs that were beset by violence at the time.
Milne’s decision to close the venue with but 72 hours' notice, and the all-day gig put together by band booker Amanda Palmer to mark the passing, brought to a head a documentary that filmmaker Natalie van den Dungen had been intermittently working on. Her celebration of The Tote – possibly a hagiography where band after band offer praise, based on the few minutes used here to help set the scene – became an obituary, and she captures on the fly, the tears and feedback of that day, as well as a spontaneous demonstration by several thousand supporters on the street outside where the widely respected Milne addressed them from an upstairs window, like an opposition figure under house arrest.
That impromptu gathering sparked an official protest, which saw 20,000 people subsequently march to the steps of Parliament House, but while van den Dungen is in their midst, the documentary fails to provide more than cursory narrative. If you’re not familiar with what transpired, Persecution Blues would be both unclear and uneventful. It’s never clearly explained why the then-Victorian Labour government moved so quickly to engineer The Tote’s revival (with a close election looming they were scared of losing several inner-city seats to The Greens), or how an independent statutory authority had its course changed so suddenly.
Milne, a quietly passionate figure, is at the centre of the story, but the documentary never nails down his motives for stepping away from The Tote even as it was being resuscitated, or his feelings about new licensees taking over a venue that would once more be profitable while he was out of pocket. The documentary is so caught up in events that it lacks a deeper sense of inquiry, and it cries out for better interviews, with a wider range of subjects, to put the events in their social, political and musical context.
Persecution Blues would have actually benefited from being longer. That way the odd song could have been played in full, as opposed to snippets, to satisfy the faithful, and a dissenting voice might have challenged some of the assumptions about The Tote’s pre-eminence. Why, for example, is there barely a person under the age of 30 in the musicians interviewed? The fact that archival footage is undated suggests that the movie is too close to its subject – unless you were there it’s not readily apparent why any of this matters.
