The Tote

A live music venue in a 1911 corner pub at the top of Johnston Street in Collingwood, opened as The Tote in 1980, and one of the most important rooms in Australian independent music for forty-five years and counting. The room itself is small — four hundred and eight standing — but the bands list that's played it runs from the early 80s punk and post-punk scene through to whatever local act is breaking this week, and the walls, the carpet and the beer garden carry the trace of all of it. The venue closed in January 2010 when liquor regulations made it unviable; the protest rally in the streets of Melbourne brought twenty thousand people out and led directly to the state's Live Music Action Plan. It closed again, near, in March 2023, before Hilton Wilson and others raised three million dollars by crowdfund to buy the building and put it in a trust that legally prevents the site from ever being sold or used as anything other than a live music venue. On Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Country.