Bar

The public bar at the Terminus Hotel runs along the John Street side of the building, a long narrow room with the bar itself on the right and a row of timber-framed windows on the left. The bar is timber, its top scratched and worn from decades of glasses being slid across it. Behind the bar, the back-bar shelving is empty. The mirrors on the back wall are still in their frames but dark with dust. The floor is tiled in pale ceramic, set in a checkerboard pattern that runs the length of the room. The ceiling is pressed-metal, painted cream, partly missing in places.

This was the room where most of Pyrmont's working population came after a shift on the docks or in the surrounding industries. The visible building is the 1917 Tooth and Co. demolition and rebuild of the earlier pub on the corner, with the public bar laid out to the standard inner-Sydney pub plan of the period. The Terminus served Pyrmont's industrial workforce through the 1920s and 1930s, the Depression, both world wars, and the postwar contraction of Sydney's working harbour. The McElwaine family closed the pub in 1983. The bar in this photograph has been empty for 33 years at the time of shooting. The 2018 reopening would change all of that, but the image is from 2016, before any of the work began.