The Grand Hotel Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    â€˜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