Published Messenger Newspapers, Adelaide, August 28, 2002
NOSTALGIA A DISH BEST SERVED OLD
CHILDHOOD memories are so wispy and vague for me that I have almost no sense of nostalgia, as if that part of my brain has been lobotomised. A case of repressed memory, maybe, or just that nothing out of the ordinary ever happened to me as a kid that I can remember. Imagine my surprise then, between the fourth and fifth courses at The Grange restaurant, at having a flashback to the first time I dined out with my parents - a Golden Fleece restaurant in the early '60s. Golden Fleece service stations - ``Active 8's Great Mate'' - opened their own restaurants long before Big Macs hit town. Remember Stanley, the cutout driveway attendant? And the fibro cement motel next door? I must have been about 10 and whatever I had to eat - probably fish and chips - was not as important as the occasion of actually going out as a family to dine in public for the first time. Plastic tableclothes, paper serviettes, aluminium ashtrays ... and you had to wait for a table on busy nights! Other people have other first-time memories. A friend of mine clearly recalls as a toddler going to the Warradale Hotel and eating oysters in a high chair. Dining out was such a rare treat then, usually a special occasion like a birthday for which money had to be carefully saved up. Mind, you still have to budget for The Grange - at least I do - to taste the fare of Cheong Liew, whose exotic and complex recipes are more admired than attempted by home cooks. First, take four sea urchins ... that sort of thing. Cheong used to teach at the Regency Park Hotel School, which had trained 80,000 people at last count, so the graduates are everywhere. Which reminds me of Tom, the Czech barman at the Excelsior Hotel, Balmain, who last time I was there had a black eye and skinned knuckles from having fought off a couple of louts while walking a girl home the previous night. Never having been south of Sydney and proud of it, Tom said he knew nothing about Adelaide except the damsel in distress was a Regency Park graduate. See? These days Regency Park is known as the Regency International Centre for Hospitality, Leisure and Food Studies, phew, and it expects to have 10,000 students by 2005. It even runs a cooking course for corporate team building, for which I hope a blood rule applies. More nostalgia: On my last trip to Geelong, I visited the Tien Wah Cafe for the first time in, oh, 40 years. Nothing had changed: the same dark wood panelling, same rosette wallpaper and the same bottles of soy sauce. My dad used to bring in empty billies and have them filled with takeaway food. Does Cheong do his ragout of possum as takeaway? On this night, the Tien Wah was empty except for a bewildered woman in a mustard coloured tracksuit, who ordered fried rice, gagged and gasped for water, went outside and returned 10 minutes later demanding to know why her rice was not ready? Sad and depressing - nothing like I remember - and the steamed dim sims were soggy and disappointing. Much like nostalgia.
Monday, August 19, 2002
Published Messenger Newspapers, Adelaide, August 21, 2002
SCRATCHING AT THE SURFACE OF THE HILL
BY THE time I drove into Broken Hill in the topaz light, the late sun glinting off the gravestones on the left, the cyst was draining poison across my shoulders and up the sides of my neck. Even my earlobes hurt. Typical. Take a few days off to relax and travel, and a cyst the size of a cricket ball erupts on the back of your neck. Thanks. That first night, seeking pain relief, I drank beer in the nearest pub and chatted footy with the nuggety old blokes with Brylcreemed hair and saltbush sprouting from their ears. Broken Hill worries about itself: The day's Barrier Daily Truth had stories about its ageing and declining population; of government benefits being the most common form of local income; of one of the highest youth suicide rates in the country; and of having to import ``Adelaide DJs'' as headline acts at the local clubs. Thank God for footy. By chance, the NSW Governor Marie Bashir was visiting Broken Hill at the same time, and staying in the same hotel. She said she liked the hotel's four grain bread. I would like to have challenged her to a game of billiards except I could not raise my sore neck high enough to get a line of sight at the balls. The next morning, feeling worse if possible, I drove to Silverton and peered across the arid Mundi Mundi plain, the edge of the world, which is supposed to mean ``a place where there is much permanent water''. A joke, surely? The winter flies were a pest, constantly having to wave them away until I absent-mindedly slapped at one on my neck. The scream must have reached Arkaroola. Something had to be done, so I went to the Broken Hill Hospital in search of drugs, for which I would have killed by that stage. ``This hospital will not tolerate AGGRESSIVE BEHAVIOUR and supports police intervention,'' said the emergency department sign. Thanks for the warning. The woman doctor at Reception said: ``Yes, oh, I see, it's your eye.'' ... ``Huh?'' ... ``Your right eye is inflamed.'' ... ``As impressed as I am by your quick diagnosis, the problem is my neck. I can live with a terrigium but not a cyst." A different doctor eventually saw me and we had a chat about Magnoplasm and molasses and other home remedies, and whether or not the cyst should be lanced. He thought not, and sent me along to the hospital pharmacy for antibiotics where the girl asked: ``Do you have a pensioner card?'' No, I bloody well do not, and she quickly gave me the drug for $15.40, which was cheaper than the all-you-can-eat buffet at the Musicians' Club that night. Later in my hotel room, standing up from the toilet faster than my stiff neck allowed my head to rise, I banged my skull on the towel rail and took a piece out of my scalp. Owowow. Taking extra painkillers and the two antibiotics as prescribed and, not wishing to risk any further injury, I went early to bed. On Central TV at 8.22pm, a giant bilby was being tucked into bed, just like Fat Cat did on Channel 10 in the '70s, and the voice-over said: ``Goodnight Boys and Girls.'' ``Goodnight Mr Bandicoot,'' I murmured, and fell into a drugged dream of hard desert rain on corrugated iron houses.
SCRATCHING AT THE SURFACE OF THE HILL
BY THE time I drove into Broken Hill in the topaz light, the late sun glinting off the gravestones on the left, the cyst was draining poison across my shoulders and up the sides of my neck. Even my earlobes hurt. Typical. Take a few days off to relax and travel, and a cyst the size of a cricket ball erupts on the back of your neck. Thanks. That first night, seeking pain relief, I drank beer in the nearest pub and chatted footy with the nuggety old blokes with Brylcreemed hair and saltbush sprouting from their ears. Broken Hill worries about itself: The day's Barrier Daily Truth had stories about its ageing and declining population; of government benefits being the most common form of local income; of one of the highest youth suicide rates in the country; and of having to import ``Adelaide DJs'' as headline acts at the local clubs. Thank God for footy. By chance, the NSW Governor Marie Bashir was visiting Broken Hill at the same time, and staying in the same hotel. She said she liked the hotel's four grain bread. I would like to have challenged her to a game of billiards except I could not raise my sore neck high enough to get a line of sight at the balls. The next morning, feeling worse if possible, I drove to Silverton and peered across the arid Mundi Mundi plain, the edge of the world, which is supposed to mean ``a place where there is much permanent water''. A joke, surely? The winter flies were a pest, constantly having to wave them away until I absent-mindedly slapped at one on my neck. The scream must have reached Arkaroola. Something had to be done, so I went to the Broken Hill Hospital in search of drugs, for which I would have killed by that stage. ``This hospital will not tolerate AGGRESSIVE BEHAVIOUR and supports police intervention,'' said the emergency department sign. Thanks for the warning. The woman doctor at Reception said: ``Yes, oh, I see, it's your eye.'' ... ``Huh?'' ... ``Your right eye is inflamed.'' ... ``As impressed as I am by your quick diagnosis, the problem is my neck. I can live with a terrigium but not a cyst." A different doctor eventually saw me and we had a chat about Magnoplasm and molasses and other home remedies, and whether or not the cyst should be lanced. He thought not, and sent me along to the hospital pharmacy for antibiotics where the girl asked: ``Do you have a pensioner card?'' No, I bloody well do not, and she quickly gave me the drug for $15.40, which was cheaper than the all-you-can-eat buffet at the Musicians' Club that night. Later in my hotel room, standing up from the toilet faster than my stiff neck allowed my head to rise, I banged my skull on the towel rail and took a piece out of my scalp. Owowow. Taking extra painkillers and the two antibiotics as prescribed and, not wishing to risk any further injury, I went early to bed. On Central TV at 8.22pm, a giant bilby was being tucked into bed, just like Fat Cat did on Channel 10 in the '70s, and the voice-over said: ``Goodnight Boys and Girls.'' ``Goodnight Mr Bandicoot,'' I murmured, and fell into a drugged dream of hard desert rain on corrugated iron houses.
