When the Commercial Travellers’ Association in Harry Seidler’s “mushroom building” opens its doors to the public for the first time in 140 years this week, Sydney Festival goers will get a glimpse into a past as colourful as the club’s red and orange geometric patterned carpet.
As the 2023 festival hub from Thursday, the club’s red velvet banquettes and wall carpet, which look like something from the set of Mad Men, will be renamed the Weary Traveller.
The below-ground bar will host 16 nights of music from local and international acts including alt-pop’s Alice Skye and synth master Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith.
Above ground, the 28 bedrooms in “Seidler’s spaceship-on-a-stick” will feature The Lucid, a specially commissioned, eight-hour sonic trip created by classically trained cellist Kelsey Lu.
Guests will experience this gig which doubles as a sleepover, cocooned in the curves of the building from the comfort of their hotel bed.
For many, it promises to be the first peek inside one of Australia’s oldest clubs housed in this monument to modernism which sits at the base of the MLC Centre.
While the Seidler structure opened in 1977, the same year the Sydney Festival began, the NSW association for travelling salesmen (the bulk were blokes, though it has had one female president) dates to its formation in 1883.
In 1908, the club was wealthy enough to buy land in Martin Place (which it still owns) and build a sandstone clubhouse, in a prime downtown location next to the Australia Hotel and the Theatre Royal.
In its heyday, because of its proximity to Macquarie Street and the law courts, the Martin Place landmark was a watering hole for prime ministers, politicians, Supreme court judges, barristers, bankers, even Hollywood celebrities.
When US General Douglas MacArthur arrived in Australia during World War II in 1942, he met Australian prime minister John Curtin and New Zealand prime minister Peter Fraser in high-stakes talks at the CTA.
Comedian Bob Hope, who came to Australia in 1944 to entertain World War II troops, took refuge at the CTA with his wife Delores, when their plane from Papua New Guinea crashed near Laurieton on the NSW mid-north coast.
Every year until his 2003 death, Hope sent the staff Christmas cards, which are all still in the club’s archives.
Back in the day, the association of professionals who represented manufacturers and importers exerted considerable influence within non-metropolitan economies.
“We were the original influencers,” said CTA President Herlihy, a retired tyre salesman who used to travel throughout regional NSW.
“Before radio and TV, the only way that politicians could get their story out was through the commercial travellers who were very much part of the rural and regional communities bringing the news from Sydney about what to buy and where to get it,” said Herlihy, now based in Berry.
Its members were powerbrokers such as businessman Sir James Hardy and Sir Roden Cutler, who before his war service and becoming NSW’s longest-serving governor, like his father was a travelling salesman, for oil company Texaco.
From its peak membership of 14,000 in 1939, membership has dwindled to today’s 600.
“Because of technology, the commercial travellers have moved on. It’s time for new people to come in, and we’re particularly interested in younger people.
“Nothing has changed much here since the day we opened,” said Herlily, including the staff.
Like bistro manager Reta Lusher, who for 33 years has welcomed guests to CTA HQ with a “Hello sweet pea, I’ll be with you in a jiffy.”
In preparation to welcome its first non-members, Lusher is sprucing up the interiors for the crowds expected to attend the festival’s first “vertical precinct” which is undercover rather than outdoors, to cope with Sydney’s capricious summer weather.
“We are hoping that hosting this festival will mean more people will come in and become members - it used to be you had to be a commercial traveller, but now anyone can become a member,” said Lusher who over the decades has plated up $30 rib-eye and rump steaks for Supreme Court judges and governors of the state and the Reserve Bank.
“Nothing has changed much here since the day we opened.”
David Herlihy, CTA club president.
With annual fees for Sydneysiders at $66, and only $33 for those who live 80 kilometres outside the city radius, and one of the cheapest accommodation options in central Sydney popular with people from the bush (a single room for members costs $154, and doubles pay $170.50) a post-Sydney Festival membership surge is likely.
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Herlihy, a member of 50-years standing, hopes guests will be entranced by the club’s other-wordly appeal.
“I love the 1940s ambience, it is like something straight out of 42nd Street,” he said. “We only recently got wi-fi here. It’s not a leagues club, we’re not an exclusive club, we want to be more inclusive which is why we are embracing the festival.”
Sydney Festival music curator Chris Twite hopes this year’s festival, with gigs at the Weary Traveller, and other historic venues such as Strickland House, the Masonic Centre ballroom and the safe in the old Sydney Water Board building, now the Kimpton Hotel, will open our eyes to the beauty of some of Sydney’s old buildings.
“We scoured Sydney for architecture we could open for art for the first time,” Twite said.
“We hope people will engage with these buildings they’ve walked past their whole life and find a new side of the city that they have never seen before.”
The Weary Traveller and the Sydney Festival runs January 5-29.
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