by Gregory Day
‘No, I daresay I haven’t. What plans are they?’
‘Well, it started off as a joke and that ... but then ... well, I dunno. Maybe I shouldn’t be the one to tell you. Old Kooka’s the one. He’s got all the goss. Go and see him. He’ll fill you in.’
Oscar started giggling, presumably thinking about these ‘funny plans’ to do with the hotel. Quickly he slurped down what was left of his tea and excused himself, saying he’d really only pulled in to the old house to pick up his wetsuit from the line.
I took his cup, clapped him on the back and said it was good to see him. He said, ‘Vice versa, Uncle Noel.’ At the back door I congratulated him again on finally getting his wheels.
Kooka’s Bright Idea
Kooka lived just a few doors down from me, in the house he’d built for himself and his wife, Mary, on the block where the original freshwater well was in the valley. The house still stands today but of course Kooka’s huge historical archive of photos, documents and sound recordings is now gone. Unlike a lot of those worthy collector types Kooka was no wowser. Oh no, Kooka loved his grog with a champion thirst. Traditionally he would begin his drinking day with a heartstarter every morning at 6am. He did this all through his working life as a builder and had never worked a day drunk. Of course he continued the habit after his retirement too, and when he purchased the old Grundig recorder and took to building his local history archive with such thoroughness after Mary died, he said the heartstarter – which usually consisted of a 7 oz glass of beer, or on holidays a flute of Mary’s old favourite, Bodega champagne – became more essential than ever, to ‘lubricate the mind and motivate the senses’. This was a phrase Kooka loved to roll off the tongue, having discovered it in a letter written by a labourer during the Depression who, when writing home to his brother in Beechworth about his search for work in the wintry southwest, had reserved all favourable comment for this eloquent praise of the effects of the coastal home brew. The phrase had stuck with Kooka and became a kind of mantra, not only of his pleasure in drinking but in his history-work as well. In both capers, he said, as long as the mind is lubricated and the senses are motivated, everything is well worth pursuing. But once you go beyond that point, he warned, once the mind starts to rust up or become sloppy, and the senses dulled or disorientated, it’s time to give it away, to pack up the archive, put down the pen, or simply turn your glass upside-down on the bar.
I found Kooka that day washing up in the kitchen after his lunch, his big bull kookaburra’s head bent over the sink with a typical look of intense concentration, as if he was perched on a gum branch watching for a worm. He yelled, ‘Hooray, Noel!’ as he saw me through the louvres around the side of the house, and welcomed me enthusiastically at the verandah’s sliding door, with a tea towel over his shoulder, shaking my hand with his undiminished tradesman’s grip.
From a moulting bit of lambswool behind him emerged Pippy, whom I’d left in Kooka’s safe hands while I’d been away, thinking they could both do with the company. The dog was happy enough to see me, but by the look of her swollen midriff it seemed I’d got there in the nick of time. She’d been surviving on Kooka’s famous cashew incentive scheme for sure.
After greeting the dog, and admonishing her dietician, I took the tea towel, dried as Kooka washed, and he told me I was just the man he’d been wanting to see. ‘Been looking for you everywhere. Where the bloody hell have you been?’ he said incredulously.
I told him a little of my exploits among the clefts and overhangs, though nothing of the reasons why I’d left to go out there in the first place, nor the reasons I’d come back in the end. He listened with his head aslant over the sink, his eyes fixed straight out the sink window, as if the worm he’d been watching had just turned into a tasty bush mouse. Then he asked me straight out if I’d seen the planning permit for the Wathaurong Heights development before I left. He said he’d been holding up the bar at the pub on the afternoon the permit was put up. Said he’d whipped straight out to photograph it.
I told him I had seen it and asked what he thought of the name. Kooka looked at me out the corner of his eye with a half washed china cup in his hands. Then without a word he opened his fingers and let the cup smash onto the tiled floor. It was an eloquent moment.
We finished the dishes and as he cleaned up the shattered cup with a brush and shovel he told me he’d had an idea about the Wathaurong Heights thing while I was away, an inspired idea, and he needed to run it by me. He said he was just about to head into his archive when I arrived, and that if I liked I could join him and we could talk the whole thing over.
When Mary died, Kooka had moved out of the conjugal bed in favour of sleeping on a narrow divan in the room that now housed the archive. Since her death the manilla folders, the cardboard concertina files, the metal filing cabinets, brown paper bags, yellow A4 envelopes, old fruit boxes and bookcases had accumulated around him like a new skin. We stepped off the floral lino of Mary’s kitchen and entered the brown-carpeted archive to find stuff everywhere: papers, books, tape reels, photographs, all stacked high to the ceiling. Blu-tacked to the walls, between the piles of shelves, were unframed prints of some of the photographic archive: old shots of the stockbitten riverflat and old shots of the stockbitten cliff; a picture of the supply boat that used to anchor offshore at Tupong Gully, with the kerosene and other essentials that kept the meteorological station going; comparative shots of the burnt slopes after both the 1939 and the 1983 bushfires; shots of the rivermouth at various stages of opening and closing. There was also a glass cabinet against the wall near the divan with his cherished collections inside. As a young boy from the city billeted out with his cousins the Conebushes, Kooka had collected souvenir teaspoons, tobacco pouches and beer coasters. He always said that in those collections could be found the seeds of his historical work that came later on.
Pride of place among the pictures on display in the archive was a framed photograph of Mary, which hung on the wall under the window near his massive red cedar desk. Kooka’s interest in collecting time, as he sometimes called it, his history-work, had actually begun just before Mary got sick in the early 1980s, but it wasn’t till after she’d taken her leave that it really picked up pace. Her death had rendered him speechless. They’d been a great couple, thick as thieves, a much admired dancing pair, always publicly affectionate, and there was no doubt the history-work was a way of coping with the grief. When our old council was incorporated into the Brinbeal shire and the draconian new building regs came in, Kooka took an early retirement, hung up his tool belt, and started scouting around, photographing, interviewing and documenting the history of Mangowak pretty much full-time. Since then the sight of his maroon Brumby ute choofing along in pursuit of living history, with its distinctive high timber canopy rigged up on the back to protect his photographic gear and the old Grundig recorder, had become a regular and reassuring sight around the place.
As we sat down at his desk, he pulled the cane blind up an inch or two to let a bit of light in. He also flicked on the orange standard lamp next to the desk and instantly a glowing pattern of swinging tassel reflections covered his chaos of documents and papers. Kooka casually picked up a black and white postcard from among the piles on the desk and handed it to me. It was a shot of the wooden bridge at Breheny Creek, just a couple of kilometres further along the coast.
‘Rose Postcard Series number 362,’ he said as I looked at it. ‘You know old George Rose was an artist for life, Noel. Travelled round the country in his truck, darkroom in the back, taking snaps, cataloguing the vistas. He published thousands of official Rose Series postcards before he was finished. And had a fair time doing it.’
Kooka dug further among his papers until he found a white paper bag. He pulled out a ten-by-eight glossy photo with a white border and handed it to me. It was a picture of a smiling man camped under bluegums by the Minapre River. He was sitting on a director’s chair beside a campfire, with a truck in the background. On the side of the t
ruck were the words ‘GEORGE ROSE PHOTOGRAPHIC ARTIST’.
‘Looks happy dun’ he?’ Kooka said. ‘That was 1951, as far as I can ascertain. He’d been on the road for years by then. Knew the country like a muso knows a score.’
‘Did you ever meet him?’ I asked, staring at the charismatic photo.
‘Well, no, not as such. But I remember him up at the pub here when I was a young tacker. He’d always stop in for a drink when passin’ through. His nickname was Beauty Spot. Used to get a lot of stick for havin’ such a great life. “Shouldn’t be allowed,” everyone’d say laughing. But he was well liked I’d say.’
Kooka leant over now and dug out another photo from among the chaos on his desk. This one wasn’t an old glossy, it was just an ordinary inkjet print on a piece of plain white paper. He handed it to me, smiling. It was his photo of the Wathaurong Heights planning permit.
‘I dunno where to begin really, Noel,’ Kooka began. ‘I suppose the problem is that the old town’s gonna need a pub. And, with my rates going up to billy-o coz of the value of the house, I’m already living well beyond my means.’
I looked at him quizzically, not quite sure where he was headed.
‘I talked it over with your brother Jim and he thought it was a great joke.’
‘Thought what was a great joke?’ I asked.
‘You running a pub.’
‘Me running a ... what?’
‘Yep, that’s right, son.’
I started laughing, out of pure confusion.
‘See?’ Kooka said.
‘See what?’ I replied.
‘Jim was right. It’s a funny idea. You running a pub. But, Noel, I’m deadly serious about it.’
‘You are?’
‘Yep, deadly.’
Kooka stood up in his singlet and jeans and began to fossick in one of the big filing cabinets on the opposite wall. I sat, staring straight ahead through the small gap of window I could see under the blinds. Before long he came back and spread a waxen old shire map of the valley across the desk. He pointed with his flattened carpenter’s finger at my family property. He began to tell me how because our land was on the site of the original hotel of the town, The Grand Hotel, as it was known, it still held a much sought-after commercial zoning. He described with his finger how the grounds of the old Grand Hotel had pretty much sprawled along the riverbank, from my place to his, until it closed for business in the late 1890s.
I’d always been told the old Grand had been flooded out along with the rest of the valley buildings and that’s why the town centre had been moved back up onto the higher ground of the ridge, but Kooka now corrected that misapprehension and assured me that although the butchery and the store and the other public buildings of the time had been flooded, The Grand Hotel itself had burnt down. In a welcome conflagration, the Methodist minister from Minapre had said, in his sermon of the following week. Kooka said there was ‘some kind of shenanigans’ involved in why the hotel had burnt down, and despite his research it seemed no one had ever told the story straight. That’s why it had come down to me via folklore that The Grand had been washed away with the rest of the original town.
‘It was a wild ol’ joint by all accounts,’ Kooka now told me, ‘and I believe the conditions are cherry ripe for it to be so again. You’ve got the premises, I’ve got the financials, and the town’s pretty soon gonna have its tongue literally hanging out for it.’
Perhaps it’s the destiny of the vocational artist in a small town not to be taken seriously, for people to think of him as an idler or a soak, and therefore as someone perpetually only half looking for, or otherwise outright shunning, serious work. That fact, combined with my well-cemented position in the family as the youngest child (and therefore as someone incapable of ever maturing to full adulthood), perhaps explains why Kooka, in cahoots with my elder brothers, had thought it possible that with one bright swoop of enthusiasm they could change the whole tone and calibre of my life by installing me as a novice publican in my own house. And that I would agree to this without so much as a harrumph or an objection.
Slowly but steadily as we sat there, Kooka began to outline his scheme, how he would sell his house, which was now a millstone around his neck because of its exaggerated worth on the coastal market, and with the money raised by the sale help me fit out my house to become the town’s hotel. He himself would happily become a permanent lodger in a room upstairs, from where he could continue his history-work and quite contentedly see out his autumn years in good company. I would gain much needed full employment as the licensee of the reawakened Grand Hotel, we would both make a few quid and perform a valuable community duty by doing so. Together we could ensure that the town still had a pub, and that the pub remained authentic, not tricked up with watered beer, inflated prices and shoddy gimmicks for the tourists, so that the good folk of Mangowak could continue to relax and drink in a manner they were accustomed to.
And so then, Kooka enquired, what did I think of the plan?
My first impulse of course was to laugh. But as my mouth opened, Kooka held up his hand and assured me again that it was no lark, that he was fair dinkum, absolutely serious. This only made me want to laugh even harder and in the chequered gloom of his fibro archive I proceeded to do so. I chuckled and guffawed, waxed sarcastic about the ease with which I could fill a publican’s shoes, joked about how seamless the transformation of my ramshackle rabbit warren of an eighty-year-old home into a modern hotel would be, and how I’d always secretly hankered to live under the same roof as Kooka and his archive. I spoofed how I was at a loose end anyway, having just strolled back into town, and how good it was of my brothers to be on the lookout for my welfare and how perceptive they’d been to intuit my true ‘mine host’ vocation. I spoke of my innate talents for pouring a drink, the relish with which I would toss giant bikies off the premises and how, above all, I would enjoy the night-after-night tranquillity, the slow easy pace and gentle inconsequential quiet of not only living in, but also running, a hotel.
Kooka listened to all this without batting an eyelid. He simply stared at me and waited for me to finish, almost as if I was having some kind of regular fit. When I finally stopped speaking and my chuckling dwindled away, he was still staring at me. His big brow was lowered and his eyes were doleful.
‘Jim said he thought you might get your back up a bit,’ he offered at last.
I gave him an exasperated look, which he straightaway returned with an irrepressibly broad kookaburra smile. Three hours later, due mostly to the fuel of home-made shandies and fistfuls of peanuts, we were still in there, discussing the idea.
The Freedom Virus
That first night back in town I went to sleep in the barn thinking of the brolga, but when I woke to Pippy’s familiar yapyap the next morning all I could think about was The Grand Hotel. Kooka had painted such a picture the day before in the archive that by the time I’d left his house just before midnight, I was almost considering his proposition plausible.
He’d told me all about The Grand Hotel of yore, how the bullock drays’d come down from Corrievale and Winchelsea, do their business on the old coast and range track, and then what? Have a few snorts of course. And then a few more. Kooka had concluded that his block must have been the site of the hotel bottle dump, due to all the nineteenth-century glass he’d found lying around over the years. In a tartan shortbread tin on his desk he kept his favourite shards of that curious time-smoothed glass, which he himself said was the catalyst for the hotel becoming his number one obsession among the larger interest he had in the town’s history in general.
He’d told me about Joan Sweeney, who was the last publican at the old Grand, and what a formidable person she was. As Kooka had said, to head out on your own to these parts as a young woman back in those days was a gutsy enough choice, but to take on the running of a salty frontier pub chocked with hard-hearted bullock drivers, lawless loggers and craymen, lonely-eyed swagmen and runaway saunterers was another thing enti
rely. Most of those men had blood of some kind or another on their hands, some of them native blood, but by all accounts Joan Sweeney ran a tight ship and was much respected, on both sides of the ledger.
Kooka had nothing but good words to say about her; in fact, on the strength of his research, he described her as nothing less than ‘a woman of grace’. When the hotel had burnt down and the colonial police had tried to get to the bottom of exactly why, she’d walked out from among the debris and refused to cooperate. She hadn’t even bothered to wind up the licence, which explained the strange fact of its still being current for the absurd option of my use. She’d taken a ship to America and settled briefly in Chicago, before returning to Victoria in 1906. Years later, in the heat of the anti-conscription debates during the First World War, she had been a well-known and outspoken participant for the case against. Kooka spoke of her with great animation and reverence, and the way he saw it the idea of being Joan Sweeney’s belated successor as publican of The Grand Hotel, Mangowak, was far from a mediocre prospect. He said I’d have to have my wits about me even just to measure up.
After lying in my loft that morning musing about all this, I climbed down the ironbark ladder and made my way across the yard and into the house for my first indoor breakfast in weeks. I found four eggs in the door of the fridge and broke three of them into a skillet. Miraculously the eggs hadn’t gone off, so I tossed in some herbs from the garden, a sprinkle of local forest pepper, and was just sitting down with great anticipation to the omelette and a pot of tea when Veronica Khouri appeared through the louvres at the sunroom door with my canary, Frankie.
She let herself in with Frankie in the bamboo cage. Veronica had cut off her usual long black ringlets and dyed what was left of them a vivid cinnamon colour. Her big brown eyes were shining. Frankie was dancing happily about on his perch and she was full of assurances about how comfortable and happy he’d been during his stay with her in the studio up on the cliff.
