The great mystery is: why on Earth women would want to join a club which didn't want women to join? And why would men want to join a club which only allows men as members?
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This male bonding thing (though no doubt the members of the Australian Club in Sydney are too grand to think of it in such low terms) is way past its time.
More to the point, it is tedious. What could be more boring than all-male company?
We learn from the club that its special general meeting "to consider a specific resolution for the purpose of amending the club's constitution to allow women to be members ... determined that the 75 per cent threshold to pass the resolution was not met".
The club is coy about anything as vulgar as communicating detail to the public, but it seems that the sea of dark suits voted not far off two-to-one against. The horror of horrors was averted.
Women are allowed in, but only if they are shepherded by a man.
This, of course, is completely contrary to the club's name. It should be called the Un-Australian Club. This country prides itself on a kind of classlessness. The Australian Club, with its crusty exclusiveness, shows this national pride in mateship is misplaced.
But full marks to it for moving its dress code with the times, albeit at glacier speed: these days, women as guests of men may wear trousers (though, one imagines, not the trousers in a marriage).
For those impressive women of stature (like Angela Merkel or Julie Bishop or Julia Gillard, all of whom wear trousers as "business attire"), this would no doubt be a relief.
The Australian Club has reciprocal arrangements with some of the fusty clubs in London and the United States.
I have been to some of them (by invitation and reluctantly, I add hastily) and they reek of snobbery. It's like dining among the living dead. Retired judges and surgeons slump in leather chairs after lunch. Staff can't quite know whether to call an ambulance (or a hearse). You leave and the air smells fresher. Getting to the chatter and banter in the pub around the corner is a relief.
Though no doubt not to the men who need a refuge from women.
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The blackballing of women feeds the unfortunate falsehood abroad that the Australian male is happiest among other Australian males. Sir Les Patterson epitomised the myth.
The strange thing is, the Australian Club is behind the times even in comparison with other male-only establishments.
The Carlton Club in London was founded in 1832. It was where men of property and power decided who the Tory prime minister would be. For more than a century, women were verboten.
But then along came Margaret Thatcher, who, the men realised, was different from them. She was made an honorary member. In 2008, women became full members.
Even this crustiest of male bastions allows women to become members these days, but the Australian Club doesn't!
The British prime minister Arthur Balfour called the Carlton Club "beastly", "but it must be suffered like long hours and constituents as a necessary though disagreeable accompaniment of a political career".
This may be the raison d'être for the Australian Club. The members feel they need it to network with the rich and powerful, untainted by the common people.
But networking has changed. The era of the rich and powerful arriving from their country properties to do the deals while their wives do the shopping has gone. We are in a more democratic age (or so you might foolishly have imagined).
It may be unwelcome news to the members, but women do occasionally have power - perhaps not as often as some of them might like, but now and again they do. It's a fact of the modern world.
It turns out women might be worth networking with in some place other than the bedroom and the kitchen.
- Steve Evans is a Canberra Times reporter.