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:
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.