No phones, women or business talk: What it’s like inside Melbourne’s most prestigious club

When I recently walked into the cavernous dining room at the Melbourne Club – as the guest of a member – the clock had struck 1pm. The maitre d’ smiled warmly, said “good morning” and allocated us a table.

I glanced at my wristwatch – phones are forbidden – and confirmed that it was, in fact, afternoon. “He must have made a mistake,” I chuckled to myself. Then a waitress came to our table. “Good morning,” she repeated. It seemed perhaps it was me who was mistaken.

Then my host explained. In some sectors of upper-crust English society, it’s not afternoon until after you’ve eaten your luncheon. Like many other traditions from the Mother Country, this one travelled directly from 19th-century England to live on unscathed in the wood-panelled rooms of the Melbourne Club at the top end of Collins Street.

This is the granddaddy of all Melbourne’s private clubs. When people complain about the exclusivity and privilege of clubland, it’s this all-male, old-world institution that first comes to mind.

Based in an imposing, purpose-built clubhouse on the Paris end of Collins Street, the Melbourne Club has existed since 1838 and at its current location since 1859. It emulated the grand gentlemen’s clubs of London such as the Carlton Club and the Garrick Club (where Oscar Wilde is said to have ordered champagne as he proffered his final words: “I am dying, as I have lived, beyond my means”).

For the squattocracy of western Victoria, in town to trade in their pastoral riches, the Melbourne Club offered (and still does) a respite from commerce. Talk of business is not permitted inside.

It provides accommodation – about 20 rooms at a reasonable cost to members – a dining room, library, private function rooms and a huge, beautifully shaded walled garden with a heritage-listed plane tree and a long veranda. On the day I was a guest for lunch, the chaps (elderly almost to a man) repaired to a sunny spot in the garden for a post-prandial drink or two.

It’s how things have been done here for almost two centuries. And as sure as afternoon is morning, all efforts to modernise it have so far been firmly rebuffed.

Members have reciprocal rights to many clubs around the world, and some report that, in Melbourne, the rules are more numerous and more strictly enforced even than the London establishments it’s modelled on.

One strictly observed rule is anonymity. Outside its quadruple-fronted exterior, there is no signage – no outward indication that this is the Melbourne Club. The media gets a similar blank response when it asks questions.

As the most prestigious of the Melbourne clubs, though, it sometimes becomes the subject of controversy. And last year, the attack came from within.

One of the club’s best-known and best-connected members, Allan Myers, KC – barrister, academic, businessman, landowner and philanthropist, and the previous chancellor of the University of Melbourne – quit his membership in spectacular style, firing broadsides on the way out the door.

Myers had hoped to see a friend, Jason Yeap – a property developer, lawyer, resident of Toorak, Liberal fundraiser and philanthropist – elected to membership. Yeap, though, is of Chinese-Malaysian background.

The application was made, as they all must be, by a club member of at least six years’ standing, and signed by five others – also of long standing. Among Yeap’s supporters were Melbourne business royalty, including Leigh Clifford, a former Rio Tinto chief executive and Qantas chairman, and Charles Goode, a Liberal Party blue-blood and fundraiser.

But despite their support, Yeap’s bid for admission fell at the first hurdle: the membership committee. The committee has never explained its reasons, even to those who proposed him.

Myers exploded. In a letter circulated to fellow members, and subsequently leaked, he alleged Yeap was rejected because of his race.

“Your committee well know that racists are mainly cowards who will dress up a decision based on race by suggesting reasons which are intended to be a plausible disguise,” Myers wrote.

“That is what has occurred in the case which led to my resignation, save that the reasons are wildly implausible, with the result that the stench of racism is the stronger.”

Myers also took aim at the enigmatic rites of the club’s membership committee.

Once proposed, the new man’s name sits on the books for several months to allow existing members to scrutinise him, before the membership sub-committee decides whether to put his name up for a wider vote of members.

“The method of determining membership empowers 20, or perhaps only eight or 10 persons, from about 1500 mostly decent people to exclude a person who would otherwise meet every criterion for election, save for race, to be excluded on that ground, as has recently happened,” he fumed.

“The membership committee has great influence,” said another member who had nothing to do with the Yeap controversy. “They are the guardians of the social structure of the club.”

Others within the club have rejected the charge of racism. “There are club members of diverse religious and ethnic origin who have every right to be aggrieved and upset [by the claims],” one defender of the club told the Australian Financial Review last year.

According to the internal scuttlebutt, Yeap’s high-profile backers had breached the club’s norms by being too pushy, trying to fast-track their candidate and not exposing him sufficiently to scrutiny by the other members.

Also, Myers had once done business with Yeap. It’s unclear if Myers was a proposer, or simply a supporter of Yeap. None of them has commented publicly. Under the club’s numerous rules, a nominated candidate is not permitted to have done business with any of his proposers.

It’s undeniable that the membership rules have kept the Melbourne club white – and old and rich. According to one member, the fact that each of the six proposers must have known the candidate for more than six years makes these things a “self-fulfilling prophecy”.

“There are not many non-whites of the right age and income bracket who went to private schools in Melbourne,” the member said. “There are a lot of Geelong Grammar ties.”

As the alumni of Melbourne’s private schools become more ethnically diverse, perhaps the club will prove that it does not filter its membership by race.

Even so, said one member, “To even get onto the nomination list is an achievement.”

A recent internal newsletter, seen by The Age, shows that 55 people were seeking to join the club’s 1500-strong membership late last year. They were horse breeders, agribusinessmen, lawyers, business executives, medicos, churchmen and real estate agents. One lone name among them suggested non-white ethnic origin.

Becoming a member can take at least a year and sometimes more like two or three. If the gentleman is successful, he’s up for $6000 to join and $3000 per year thereafter. He then pays for all his meals, drinks and accommodation separately.

In 2009, then Labor Attorney-General Rob Hulls took aim at all this exclusivity – but mainly at the club’s refusal to admit women as members. Ladies are allowed into the club as guests for dinner, but not for lunch. Hulls said 15 years ago that the clubs were “fast becoming an amusing relic”. He wanted to legislate that they open up to the opposite sex.

By the following year, he’d been forced to back down. A concerted campaign by the clubs was followed by a parliamentary committee that found it would be hard to regulate clubs’ memberships because they were allowed freedom of association.

The government of Jacinta Allan has confirmed it has no plans to attack the membership of the clubs. Hulls, though, has not resiled from his views.

“They think they’re captains of business,” he told The Age recently, “but they’re really a bunch of old fogeys who sit around contemplating their own importance.”

His attack might have been defeated, but it left scars. There has never been a push within the club to admit women but it still musters arguments against the move.

If forced to open up, members insist, the nearby women-only clubs, the Lyceum and Alexandra clubs, would empty out and go out of business because all their members would want to join.

It’s nobler, it seems – even chivalrous – for the Melbourne Club to remain male-only.

As for the actual activities of the club, they are innocuous and rather charming. The members have conversations. They join internal clubs and sub-committees. They play chess, bridge, billiards and snooker. There are book clubs. There is an annual battle of the rock bands (“The competition is vicious because the stakes are so small,” says one club document promoting the event).

The fact that phones are banned except for within the old-fashioned telephone booth off the hall, and laptops are allowed only in the library, is blissful. I did not hear an electronic beep, buzz or chime for the entire two hours I was inside.

As well as oil portraits of mutton-chopped former presidents in the stairwell, the club is a patron of modern Australian art. A bronze sculpture of the club’s emblem – a black swan – by artist Lucy McEachern, is currently on loan and on display, with members encouraged to vote on whether it should be acquired.

One member told me that, once inside: “Nobody talks about money. Nobody shouts a drink for anyone. It’s not against the rules, but it’s against the culture. If you have wine at dinner the cost is shared equally between those who consume it. Nobody pays for anybody else’s lunch.”

It’s exclusive. It’s for the upper crust. It’s very, very white. But once you close the doors to the rush and nervous haste of the city, it’s strangely egalitarian.

For these ageing chaps, the Melbourne Club is what sociologists call a third place – a space outside the home and the workplace. It’s said such places are important for good health: to combat loneliness, depression and even political polarisation. One of the definitions of such spaces is that “playful and happy conversation” is the main activity.

Which must be lovely for those privileged enough to get through the door.

Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.