...our money was still good enough to buy entrée to the cheap seats, which in those days meant the World by Night, a fabulously low-rent strip club with an even more skanky bordello riding bareback on the business one floor above.

The World should have been listed by the National Trust, had it not mysteriously burned down many years ago, leaving a raw, sandstone wound next to the Orient Hotel at the juncture of Ann and Queen Streets. Today it sits empty, weed choked and rubbish strewn, but back then it was the only place to be after ten in the evening. I was a regular, when poverty allowed, as were the off-duty detectives, the occasional Cabinet minister and even, on this occasion, one lone, lost, weepingly drunken left-wing academic at the table next to us.

I recall the shabbiness and down-at-heel Deadwood-like splendour of that dive with some fondness these days. Unlike the chrome-plated pokie palaces that have replaced it, the World was a strangely comfortable and inviting place. Unlike their ritzier colleagues at the casino, the World's staff took in all comers, and the bouncers were comparatively lightweight, the crowd comparatively well behaved, and the drinks only modestly watered down and relatively over-priced. It was possible to talk over the music and they didn't mind you nursing a drink for a while.

The food was basic – hot chips and gravy if memory serves – but, apart from the naked women working the pole on stage, the place had an atmosphere of a scruffy but well-mannered English pub, a style of venue now entirely absent from Brisbane.