Those Brisbane Romantics, page 1
OLD TIGER BOOKS
Those Brisbane Romantics
Danielle de Valera
Copyright © 2021 Danielle de Valera
All rights reserved
Smashwords Edition
Cover design by James T Egan of Bookfly Design
Cover art: Lamb House courtesy of State Library of Queensland
All rights reserved. This book was published by Old Tiger Books. No part of this book may be reproduced without permission from the publisher, except for reviewers who may quote brief passages in a review.
BISAC codes: FIC 019000/FIC 043000/FIC 014000
ISBN 978-0-9942745-9-5
Published in Australia by Old Tiger Books
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Epigraph
Praise for Those Brisbane Romantics
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Where are they now, all those Brisbane romantics?
Lyle Freeman
PRAISE FOR THOSE BRISBANE ROMANTICS
… de Valera has woven everything together with vivid, dynamic prose. A beautifully written tale about Australian dreamers that pointedly captures them at a crucial time.
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
It’s a lovely book. It really captures what being young was like. The writing about nature is sublime. It captures the atmosphere of Brisbane when it was a big, sub-tropical country town still scarred by the Second World War. It immortalises an unspoilt Stradbroke Island, Spring Hill as a multi-ethnic slum, a rural Samford, the dreaming suburbs …
Susan Geason, former Literary Editor, Sun Herald, Sydney.
Those Brisbane Romantics is as much about changing times as shifting hearts and minds. Danielle de Valera has crafted an engaging saga of 1960s Australia and affairs of the heart alike, as her characters enter the wider world and childhood is left behind.
Diane Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review
Descriptions of natural settings are eye catching. They paint vibrant images of the backgrounds …The characters in the novel are dynamic.
Readers’ Favorite
The work sports a delightfully lyrical narrative, and the author has what I’m tempted to call a genius for dialogue. An important Australian novel.
Emeritus Professor K L Goodwin
For Norman Victor Lonn
1
Autumn
The house crouched down and hid among the trees, an old house. Set away from the road with a long back yard that ran down to the banks of the Brisbane River, it must have been splendid once, but in 1961 it was in poor repair. A rose arbour lurched over the front gate. Cassias straggled around the flagstone patio. The paint had worn off the wrought-iron panels that ran around the first-floor verandas on three sides; here and there, an entire panel was missing.
An unsuspecting widow of means was renting “the young men” the tower house. It took up most of their allowances, but as Joe their unofficial leader said, it had eight bedrooms, a tree house and an obsolete fountain with an imitation frog on the rim, and they were content.
No one knew who’d built the tree house in the back yard. It was there in the ancient jacaranda tree when Joe and the Mates moved into the house. Well made, waterproof, though draughty—but that didn’t matter in the summer—it had a sturdy rope ladder Tara Mahoney could pull up after her and a view of the river. Sometimes little skiffs went by in the night. Their sails cut through the gloom. Their hurricane lamps shone a golden glow on the autumn air.
The floor space in Tara’s makeshift apartment was three metres by three. Just enough room for a single-width air mattress and the pine fruit box she used as a bedside table, where she kept books, candles, wax matches and a tiny transistor radio. Under the house was an old bathroom and toilet. There was even an antique wardrobe, a huge dark carved affair that no one used, in which she kept spare clothes. If she got bored (and that wasn’t often), she could climb up the loquat tree at the front of the house and watch Joe practise. It made a nice change from reading by candlelight or listening to the radio. She liked it best when Joe picked out jazz on the piano in the living room—a bit of Benny Goodman, maybe. Still, the violin would do, and mostly it was the violin.
She had everything she needed in her little home away from home. And, for a while, she was free of Jack Mahoney. Bastard at home, big hero on the Kokoda Trail. Searching through the backwoods of her childhood, Tara could remember her father teaching the local boys how to make billy carts and kites. And laughing.
No more.
Tara Mahoney had known Joe Gordon since they were children putting pennies on the tracks for trams to run over; hiding in the bushes from irate conductors; running out to retrieve their prizes after the tram had gone. Sometimes the coins were cut cleanly in half, sometimes they weren’t. There was a skill to the placing of them.
Now Joe and Tara were twenty-two, sprawled in squatters’ chairs in front of the tower house. Supposedly finalising plans for their faculty revue, they were basking like lizards in the beautiful day.
“I paid an unscheduled visit to the printer yesterday,” Joe said. “The programs for the revue still aren’t done.” He leapt to his feet and began pacing. “And do you now put on your best attire, and do you now strew flowers in his way, who comes in triumph over printer’s blood?”
Tara opened her eyes. Cassia petals were falling in flutters at the whim of the wind.
“You didn’t lose your temper, did you?”
He smiled at her. She was cute in those days, and she knew it. Skinny, though, the bane of her life, for skinny wasn’t fashionable. Still, she made the best of things.
“Want to come to the Hop with me?” he asked. “I’m between affairs.”
“What happened this time?” But she already knew. Sure, he’d have affairs, but where the siren song of emotional involvement was concerned, Joe Gordon had tied himself to the mast. No matter, Tara wasn’t interested in him. Not that way. “Are the Mates going to play during the scene changes?”
The Mates were seven young men doing honours in agricultural science. Four years at Gatton Agricultural College followed by four years at university had made them tight, like war buddies. Five of them had formed a jazz group with Joe on piano.
Joe dropped back into the squatters’ chair. “To answer your question. Depends how drunk we get.” He pulled a blade of grass from the overgrown lawn and began picking his teeth with it. “What are you looking for, Tara?”
She was looking for a “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” kind of love. She didn’t know how to explain that, so she said, “You don’t just marry the first man who asks you.”
Joe tossed the piece of grass away, lit a cigarette. “Some women do.”
Not Tara, she was a dreamer. All those ’40s torch songs were written for her. Besides, marriage meant children, and she was determined not to have any. Every day at her house until her mother disappeared had been like the gunfight at the OK Corral. Her father yelled. Her mother screamed. Objects flew as Tara hid under the kitchen table, that battleground of the working class. School friends complained because their parents weren’t demonstrative. Tara dreamed of having parents who repressed their emotions.
The washing machine started up in the laundry under the tower house. Over the noise, a male voice could be heard singing, “Ooh, Big Bad Bill is Sweeeet William now—” The voice broke off, followed by a crash and a smothered squawk. Then silence.
Bill. Joe’s faithful sidekick since Gatton College days.
Joe put a restraining hand on Tara’s arm. “Don’t go down. He’s probably got his foot caught in the wringer or something.”
Bill had the reputation of being unlucky. Even his closest friends advised against going anywhere with him. The car engine would blow up, they claimed. Failing that, it would rain.
“Did I tell you we’re having the cast party here after the revue?” Joe waved towards the old house behind them. “The Mates are making their famous punch.”
The Mates made the punch in their metal garbage bin. They’d started out making it in buckets. Eventually their parties had grown so large they’d resorted to the bin, applying their combined knowledge of chemistry to the task of sterilising it. Tara didn’t trust the punch and always avoided it.
There were sounds of pottering in the laundry below, some crashing of cans.
“He’s oiling it,” Joe said. “He always oils everything when anything goes wrong. It gives him time to think.”
Bill’s cat, a huge marmalade he’d named Wash House, was hunched over something near the fountain, his long, striped tail undulating over the ground behind him.
Tara said, “That cat has the longest tail I’ve ever seen.”
“
Bill came up the path from under the house, dripping blood from one finger, grease on his face and clothes. “Thanks for the help, Joe.” He greeted Tara, wrapped a handkerchief roughly around his bleeding finger, picked up the cat and held it over his head. “Hey, Wash House!” Then he sat down on the flagstones, pulled some unshelled macadamias from his shorts pocket and began breaking them open with a rock.
“Well,” Joe said. “What are you going to do now?”
“Re-sort some of m’ dirty washing, I guess.”
The beautiful day began to cloud over. Storm clouds the colour of Joe’s eyes drifted in and draped themselves around the shoulders of Mount Coot-tha.
“More rain coming,” Bill observed, pushing a strand of light brown hair off his forehead.
“Of course, there is, you bastard,” Joe said fondly. “Why didn’t you do us all a favour and stay inside?”
The Mates knew Tara used the tree house to escape from home, but no one knew she prowled at night, an early victim of insomnia. She had a bad moment one evening when they came back from squash unexpectedly. Bill had tuned his old car that day. There was none of the usual backfiring she’d come to rely on.
Buddy Holly was singing “That’ll Be the Day,” on the transistor radio in Bill’s car as it rounded the corner. Tara was high in the loquat tree at the front of the house, watching Joe practise. The Whippett pulled up at the kerb, and five Mates leaped out and loped up the path through the drizzle. They wore raincoats and army disposal ponchos. All carried squash rackets, three carried bottles of rum and none of them had a key to the front door. They beat on the solid oak panelling and banged the lion’s-head knocker.
“Open the door, Joe!”
“Come on, mate. We don’ wanta stand here all night!”
Tara was relieved to see Joe hurry downstairs to let them in. When the Mates forgot their keys, they’d use the tree, one branch of which ran on to the roof below the tower’s north window—Bill had already fallen once, breaking his collarbone. Not that Tara was concerned about Bill. She just didn’t want to be discovered, lurking out there in the dark like a stalker.
In the front hallway, the men were a mass of squash rackets and rain gear. They hung their dripping raiment on the antique hallstand and pushed past Joe into the huge living room. A stripped-down Harley Davidson lay on a tarp in the middle of the room. They moved carefully around it and threw themselves down in the worn Chesterfields.
Tara moved halfway down the loquat tree to give herself a better view of the living room. What a room it was, she realised years later, with its spiral staircase, mezzanine gallery and ornate fireplace with the art nouveau tiles: tulips, swirling down the panels. All the men were present except Alastair, the bank manager’s son, and Ling, the overseas student—who was probably out with her friend Cass again. Alastair’s absence from the group Tara viewed as no loss. She hadn’t cared much for him since he’d committed the cardinal sin of making a pass at her.
Joe went into the kitchen to get glasses for the rum. The Mates drank Beenleigh or Bundaberg rum when they could afford it, the rest of the time they drank Fourex. As he came back with the glasses they were making lists of what to take when they sailed to Papua New Guinea on a catamaran they were planning to buy at the end of the year.
Cluster said, “Don’ forget the grog. We’ve gotta have some grog.”
“Buy it in the ports, you idiot,” Tim Kalo said goodnaturedly. “No sense in taking it all with you at once. You’d sink!”
Tim was short, stocky and serious. His mother had died when he was twelve. His father had packed him off to Gatton Agricultural College at thirteen when the “new mother” arrived. In his first week there he tried to hang himself in the dorm one night after lights-out, but a late-prowling prefect named West cut him down. He was always saying in his soft slow drawl, “She’ll be right, you’ll find.” But this belied his feelings.
Now he asked Joe, “What’ll you do if the programs don’t arrive in time?”
Joe handed him one of the empty glasses and poured a hefty shot of rum into it. “I’ll probably murder the printer.”
Cluster spotted Joe with the glasses. “What’ve you been doing, hey, hey, hey?”
“Just practising.” Joe was working towards the inaugural under-25s’ national concerto competition to be held in Sydney the following year. His great hope was to win the violin section and get to study music in Europe.
Bill had his dreams too. He wanted to travel by motorbike to India. “Except for the water, of course,” he was saying. “When I come to an ocean, I’ll hop on a cargo boat.”
“What about the creeks, Bill—what about them?”
“I’ll just balance the bloody bike on m’ back and dog paddle.” Bill had the route all mapped out; he’d show anyone who’d listen. That night he said what he always said, “I’m going straight after I finish honours. You gotta go straight away. Otherwise you never get there.”
They stared into their glasses. They knew what he meant.
Women.
“You just gotta be careful, that’s all,” Cluster said.
“Careful,” they intoned like the chorus in a Greek tragedy.
Wash House sat on top of the piano. He seemed to smile.
A man in a business suit appeared at the open front door, and Rupert crawled behind the nearest sofa. Joe went out and misdirected the stranger.
“Poor bastard.” Bill poured the cat a rum and milk. There was always a saucer on the top of Joe’s upright piano. “Where’d y’ send him?”
“I’m not sure. But I don’t imagine he’ll find his way back.”
Rupert emerged from behind the sofa. He brushed the dust from his chinos, sat down on the edge of the coffee table and began cleaning his horn-rimmed spectacles with a well-ironed handkerchief. He was always meticulously turned out. “It’s about money.”
There were moans all round at the mention of the word.
“Speaking of money …” Meticulous, yes. But Rupert knew how the game was played. “Did I tell you about this girl I took out the other night? It cost me a fortune.”
They leaned forward. “Y’ get anywhere?”
Rupert ducked his head. For an instant, his perfectly combed blond hair shone gold in the weak electric light.
“Nah.”
Their faces fell. Rupert was still a virgin. They were beginning to worry about him.
Alastair came in from the back veranda, scrubbed and polished, on his way out.
“DayO! Da-ay-ayO!” Bill began to sing. “Dere de light an’ I wanna go home.”
Alastair made a habit of coming in just on dawn.
“Gotcha Jupiter deodorant?”
They hooted derisively, various things.
Alastair said, “Fellers, this is the night. I can feel it in my bones.” He went out through the front door, spinning his car keys around one finger. Soon the sound of his red MG starting up in the broken-down garage at the side of the house rose up to Tara.
Bill went into the kitchen to investigate the alcohol situation. Standing in the archway between the living room and the kitchen, he held the empty bottles up to the light.
Tara put a foot wrong in the loquat tree causing one of the smaller branches to snap. Joe rose, frowning, from his chair to pull the curtains and walked into a corner of the coffee table.
“Scheisse! I’ve knocked my shin. I’ll get cancer of the bone.”
“Never mind, Joe fella,” Bill said, “you’ve got mates. We’ll walk in front of you ringing a bell.”
“Unclean … unclean …” they all chanted.
The last voice Tara heard as she scrambled down the tree was Cluster’s.
“Hey Tim, your father still got that place at Booval? What a place t’ live. I can just imagine Timbo home on holidays at sixteen. Belonging to the Booval Push. Derailing the weekly rail motor. Did you stand to at dawn an’ fight off the natives?”
Tara got out of there and went to bed in her tree house.
She had a good thing going. She didn’t want to ruin it.
