The Grand Hotel

by Gregory Day

  ‘But who’s gonna work it?’ asked Nan, rolling a smoke with a sceptical look on her weatherbeaten face. ‘It’s all very well to have all these crazy things going on but who’s gonna pour the beer? Who’s gonna do the hard yards? You’re not a publican, Noel.’

  I smiled. ‘Well, technically I’m about to become one. But I was thinking we could all help out. Like in a co-op. And for a wage of course. And remember, we don’t have to open till three in the afternoon if we don’t want to.’

  ‘Well that’ll piss people off,’ said Darren Traherne. ‘What about counter lunches?’

  ‘Look,’ I began, ‘I’m not doin’ this to become head of the Hoteliers Association. Kooka’s told me some stories over the last few days about the original Grand Hotel. I think we should follow that spirit. We mightn’t have spotted quoll on the menu and we won’t be amputating fingers on the bar, hey, Kooka, and there won’t be goats kipping beside exhausted prostitutes by the fire, or crayfish races on the verandah, but we’ll do it our own way nevertheless. How does live-streaming Vatican Radio in Happy Hour sound?’

  Outside the window a cockatoo screeched. The group all looked at each other, confused. Eventually Gene Sutherland started laughing again and said, ‘Well, no weirder than an indoor creek.’ His humour was farmy and infectious, and pretty soon he was gasping for air, with tears running down his cheeks, as we discussed my idea of the talking urinal. Kooka kept nodding and said that was all very well but that Nan was right, we’d have to know what we were doing with the grog, that someone’d have to take a real interest.

  Big Gene thought this was stupendously funny. ‘Don’t think we’ll have any trouble finding someone with a “real interest” in the grog, Kooka. There’d be more volunteers for that than ants on a lolly.’

  ‘Well, actually, Gene,’ I said, ‘I was thinking that you’d make a pretty fine head barman. You could go on a full-time wage and keep the whole grog side ticking over.’

  Gene Sutherland’s family had run a dairy farm on the slopes of the Barroworn River for five generations. It was only recently that he’d given up the ghost and leased the place out to a bloke who wanted to try olives. He had come over to the coast to live in Mangowak with his wife, Jen, and their two boys, with a hint of despair in those friendly eyes of his. There just hadn’t been enough rain, and the big milk consortiums weren’t looking after the small suppliers. I knew he’d been scratching around for work since he came to town. I also knew his expansive good cheer would be perfect behind the bar. He’d been a bit like a bull in a china shop in Mangowak so far – a lot of the new suburban blood just couldn’t handle the sheer volume of him – but the freedom of The Grand Hotel would suit him just fine. It’d be like hand in glove.

  For the first time that day Gene’s features went blank. I think he was more shocked by the job offer than by any of the other ideas I’d presented during the meeting. His broad wind-bitten face settled still. Then he gradually started nodding his head, pushing his bottom lip up against his top lip in affirmation, until Nan Burns confirmed it. ‘That’s a great idea, Noel,’ she said. ‘You’d make a purler barman, Gene.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Kooka, solemnly. ‘Gene’d be a natural mine host.’

  ‘You’d have to watch your tipple, though,’ Jim said with a wink.

  A smile broke back out on Gene’s face and he nodded in agreement at Jim. Then he said, ‘Yeah. Why not, Noel? I’ll give it a go. Never worked in a pub before. Especially not one with a talking pissoir.’

  I was rapt. I might have been the publican but with Gene Sutherland’s agreement The Grand Hotel had found its lynchpin and anchor, and there’d be no going back.

  Fourteen Good Luck Spoons

  Kooka came good with the money. His beautiful old shack, which he’d built with his own hands, sold within two weeks of going on the market. He packed it all up, cup by cup, sock by sock, and went through the heartbreaking task of finally taking Mary’s mothballed dresses and cardigans, slacks and shoes, to the Minapre op shop. Big Gene, Darren Traherne and I helped him move on a Tuesday, and despite the distance between his place and mine being no more than a couple of hundred metres we didn’t finish hauling the boxes containing the historical archive up to The Sewing Room until lunchtime on the Wednesday. Completely buggered by then the three of us and Kooka agreed that we should leave everything in the boxes until he could muster enough energy to sort it out and set it all back up.

  Downstairs we hired friends to fit out the bar in the kitchen and the toilets in the bathroom, all to health-andsafety-inspector guidelines. The old kitchen was just big enough to work with as the bar; we could squeeze enough of us in there to cook the meals and pour the drinks once the taps and drains had been installed in the hardwood benches. And our old L-shaped living room, which the benches gave onto, and which had been quite a modern feature when Papa had built it all those years ago, could fit enough of a crowd to warrant the moniker and mythical status of ‘the public bar’.

  Gene Sutherland was keen, happy to be employed again, and worked with the chippies, the refrigerator mechanics, the electricians and the plumbers on all the jobs. After each day’s work he would sit with me and Kooka, Darren and Nan, among the tools and construction, where we would drink through a range of beers all micro-brewed in Australia to work out which one was gonna become our Grand Hotel Recommended Loosener – in other words, the beer on tap.

  It was a strange form of connoisseurship we were developing, from hearsay, from internet notes, from our untrained local palates, and from our enjoyment of each other’s company. We were sitting right in the lap of the riverflat of our home town, where the winds had blown the spring pollens about for thousands of years, constantly renewing the landscape, and with our new project we had a sense of something similarly fresh.

  By the end of August the bulldozers had made short work of the gutted shell of the Mangowak Hotel back up on the hill above the valley, clearing the path for the eco-cluster that was to be Wathaurong Heights. Watching our old town living room being wiped from the landscape in a fury of mustard-coloured machinery and shrill reverse beeping was surreal. Meanwhile, down on the riverflat, my new found appreciation for the chief staple of the publican’s trade, i.e. beer, was already blossoming. On many a night with big Gene and the others I sang old-timey drinking songs I had never up until then properly understood. Now, of course, after my weeks out in the clefts and overhangs, I knew that the famous old attitude ‘Tonight we drink for tomorrow we may die’ was just another way of acknowledging the power of a cackling deity.

  Both Jim and Ash Bowen had worked in hotels when they were young, and before Nan had moved out to the farm with her kids and her ex-husband, Miles, she had worked part-time in restaurants in Minapre. They all now offered valuable advice. We decided, for instance, that there’d be no dinner menu but rather a different set dish every night that we’d serve as ballast against the booze. That way we’d be able to get by with just the small kitchen, as well as quashing any expectations the clientele might otherwise have had that they were gonna get some stylised epicurean/lifestyle experience.

  The beers we tried were both good and bad, but because the general store still ran a small liquor section we felt free of any responsibility to provide the mainstream alcoholic necessities of the town and could keep our range small. All we wanted to supply was the meeting place. We cast a wide net around the new wave of micro-brewers. We drank paw-paw and coconut beer from Queensland, chocolate and cardamom stout from Western Australia, something called ‘Crocodile Juice’ from Borroloola in the Top End, Cloudy Sky Coriander Cider from Tasmania, Billy Tea Beer from the Flinders Ranges (which you drank hot with milk and which tasted so medicinal that Kooka ended up bathing his sun-cracked feet in it), and lots more. We had a couple of local contenders too: Darren Traherne’s home brew, which was pretty much straight out of a Coopers Pale Ale kit but for some added boobialla currants, and another one that an intimidating fella by the name of Rennie Vigata, a retired
bodyguard for one of Melbourne’s underground figures, brewed out on the Poorool saddles and that seemed to benefit from the quality of the mountain water out there.

  It was a great delight to me to learn that Rennie had called his beer ‘The Dancing Brolga Ale’, and as we tasted it I began to tell everyone about the performance I’d witnessed in the old camp out in the bush. To my surprise Nan assured me that the local brolga breeding program I’d presumed the bird was a product of had been called off. ‘It couldn’t have been,’ I protested. ‘I saw the bird with my own eyes.’

  But Nan was adamant. ‘Come off it, Noely,’ she said. ‘I was talkin’ to a fella from the DSE just last week about it. He reckons they weren’t ready in time for this season but might get their shit together next year. I dunno what you saw out there but it wasn’t what you thought it was.’

  I shook my head slowly and went silent. There was nothing I could say in reply. What I’d seen while sitting beside that campfire in the bush, real or imagined, was deep inside me now. It had reanimated me, perhaps even saved my life, and as I brought the glass of Rennie Vigata’s beer to my lips I was for the time being too grateful to question it further. Plus, The Dancing Brolga Ale had an unmistakably lovely crispness and tang. It was no surprise to me, therefore, when it eventually became the unanimous choice as our Grand Hotel Recommended Loosener. For a while there in the ensuing months it was so popular in the hotel that Rennie Vigata joked with Gene that his life would be more relaxing if he was back working for the Mob.

  In an unbelievable show of confidence at the final meeting before our opening day, Kooka brought fourteen of his souvenir teaspoons downstairs as good luck donations for the life of The Grand Hotel. I’d like to record here the full list of the teaspoons Kooka laid out that day on the bar, as a tribute to his friendship and also, I suppose, to boast that up until the fateful last night of the hotel’s shenanigans not a single spoon of Kooka’s was stolen, lost, or bent for the purposes of a seance. I’d also like to reiterate his logic as to why, even though he was the financial mainstay of the whole affair, he specifically donated the teaspoons rather than part of his locally famous beer-coaster collection. Simply enough it was because the spoons could be used without ruination. And as Kooka sagely said, ‘People don’t mind a tea or coffee in a pub these days.’

  The fourteen spoons were as follows:

  PLATYPUS SPOON – silver spoon with double-struck shell pattern engraved in bowl. The badge depicts a platypus swimming over a white wooden bridge under flood. Purchased at Gellibrand General Store, 1966.

  WATERTANK SPOON – silver/nickel spoon, wattle embossed. Badge depicts a watertank standing alone in the middle of a sheep station at Wilcannia. Purchased by Kooka’s brother-in-law Vin, at Hay, where he briefly settled after leaving the priesthood.

  BIGGEST BABY IN VICTORIA SPOON – pewter and nickel-plated spoon depicting baby Willy Cooper, born weighing fourteen pounds on 13 April 1927 at St George’s Hospital, Kew. Donated to Kooka’s collection by the publican of the Inverleigh Hotel, who unwittingly offered Kooka the spoon to stir his tea after a very pleasant meal with Mary in the autumn of ’61.

  NED KELLY GOLD SPOON – gold-plated spoon purchased from Euroa Newsagency in 1994. The badge depicts a wistful Ned on the train journey south to the Melbourne Gaol, in the full beard of his captivity.

  SYDNEY HARBOUR BRIDGE SPOON – electroplated nickel and silver spoon. Badge commemorates the opening of the bridge in 1932 with a picture taken on that momentous day. Purchased at Manly Beach in 1960 after a weekend with Mary visiting her brother Vin in the Catholic seminary there.

  DES FOTHERGILL & HERBIE MATTHEWS 1940 BROWNLOW MEDAL SPOON – gold-plated spoon with elaborate scrolling and ornamentation around the badge. Depicts the only tied Victorian Football League Brownlow Medallists unable to be separated on a countback. Purchased by Kooka’s father, Gil, at the Cathedral College fete in 1942. According to Kooka this spoon was one of the few mementos of his dead father in his mother’s possession when Kooka was growing up, and was the spoon that first sparked his interest.

  OLD PIECE OF CLOTH SPOON – silver spoon depicting a ‘very old piece of cloth’, a historical exhibit from Kryal Castle, Ballarat, where it was purchased on a school excursion by Horny Conebush’s grandson Joe in 1976.

  GUNSYND THE GOONDIWINDI GREY SPOON – gold-plated spoon struck in Goondiwindi, Queensland, to celebrate the champion racehorse. Picture on the spoon depicts the local marble monument to Gunsynd. Purchased in Kuarka Dorla op shop, 1988.

  PYRAMID HILL SPOON – blue-tinted silver-plated spoon depicting the Pyramid Hill west of Echuca. Delicate embossing of rock wallabies in the bowl. Purchased at Grassy, on King Island, 4 January 1968.

  CEDAR OF LEBANON SPOON – brass-plated spoon featuring the trident shape of a lone cedar at the end of a half length filigreed handle. Purchased at the Queen Victoria Market, 1955. One of the first international spoons in Kooka’s collection.

  SEAGULL MONUMENT SPOON – silver/white opal spoon depicting the Seagull Monument on Temple Square in Salt Lake City, erected as a memorial to the seagulls that saved the Mormon crops from locusts during the swarms of 1848. Purchased by Mary at the Apollo Bay op shop in 1972.

  YEHUDI AND HEPHZIBAH SPOON – electroplated nickel and silver spoon commemorating the Australian concert tour of Yehudi and Hephzibah Menuhin in 1940, Kooka’s tenth year and his third with the Conebushes in Mangowak. Purchased in a second-hand shop in Rainbow, Southern Mallee, 1997.

  TALLEST TREE IN GIPPSLAND SPOON – a metal spoon depicting a memorial pole erected after the tallest mountain ash in Gippsland was felled. Bartered for a cocker spaniel pup in Lang Lang, 1979.

  ‘TRUCK ON’ SPOON – silver spoon featuring an exhibition road rig on the badge. Kooka has no recollection of how he came by this very colourful spoon.

  Our patron explained in his usual fastidious fashion that he’d given exactly fourteen spoons because the original Grand Hotel had burnt down after thirteen years’ trading and he hoped that this time we would at least go one better. I had my doubts about the longevity of the kind of hotel I had planned but said nothing, of course, so touched was I by Kooka’s gift from one of his most cherished collections.

  Duchamp the Talking Urinal

  Once the bar was fitted out and a coolroom added in the loamy old space between the side wall of the house and the Dray Road hedge, it was time for Veronica and me to instigate our first creative flourish: Duchamp the Talking Urinal.

  All those years ago when we were studying in Melbourne, Marcel Duchamp and the rest of the Dada gang had represented a creative spark that could defy the fads and fashions and never fade. Their attitude to making art had been so free and radical, so anti-everything and yet at the same time so inspired and full of life, that it remained fresh nearly a hundred years later. Despite their signature air of abundance and colour their great trick was actually one of renunciation and as such had something in common with the sages and hermits of old. By renouncing not only the world of capitalism but also the world of ‘Art’, the Dadaists had refreshed all the channels by which creative inspiration could come to them. They had made their spirits receptive again by casting all outmoded categories to the wind. In the end, rather than dusting off the furniture in the galleries and parlours of Europe they actually set fire to it and kept themselves warm by the blaze.

  Relishing our time in the college studios as much as we did, like a lot of art students Veronica and I shared a particular dread of the written component of our course. Apart from anything else it seemed like such a waste of time to be writing cold sentences when we could be getting down to tin tacks with our own tactile inspirations in the studio itself.

  So one day, near the end of our second year, when a deadline was looming for an essay concerning twentieth-century art movements, we had the brainwave to combine the writing of a piece on Dada with the creation of an actual readymade work of art. On an old chest of drawers we found abandoned in the back lane behind a C
ollingwood terrace house, we applied a thick layer of cadmium-red paint and then proceeded to write a joint essay all over it, about the different ways Dada had evolved in the various cities of Europe, and New York, during the years of the First World War and immediately afterwards. We covered the top, back, sides, and even the underneath of this chest of drawers with our colourful script, inserting tiny portraits of some of our favourite Dada artists in among the text, as well as miniature renditions of some of the most famous Dada readymades, including the most notorious of them all, Duchamp’s Fountain, which famously consisted of a toilet bowl turned on its end, exhibited in the 1917 Society of Independent Artists show in New York under the name R. Mutt.

  In the centre of each of the five drawers of the chest, between the simple art-deco steel handles, we constructed the name of five different Dada cities of significance from a mixture of rusty garden-rake teeth, old paint-brush handles, broken-up scissors, bird feathers and pipe cleaners. The cities we selected were Zurich, Hanover, Cologne, New York and Paris.