The Grand Hotel Read Online Free PDF

with a white border and handed it to me. It was a picture of a smiling man camped under bluegums by the Minapre River. He was sitting on a director’s chair beside a campfire, with a truck in the background. On the side of the truck were the words ‘GEORGE ROSE PHOTOGRAPHIC ARTIST’.
    â€˜Looks happy dun’ he?’ Kooka said. ‘That was 1951, as far as I can ascertain. He’d been on the road for years by then. Knew the country like a muso knows a score.’
    â€˜Did you ever meet him?’ I asked, staring at the charismatic photo.
    â€˜Well, no, not as such. But I remember him up at the pub here when I was a young tacker. He’d always stop in for a drink when passin’ through. His nickname was Beauty Spot. Used to get a lot of stick for havin’ such a great life. “Shouldn’t be allowed,” everyone’d say laughing. But he was well liked I’d say.’
    Kooka leant over now and dug out another photo from among the chaos on his desk. This one wasn’t an old glossy, it was just an ordinary inkjet print on a piece of plain white paper. He handed it to me, smiling. It was his photo of the Wathaurong Heights planning permit.
    â€˜I dunno where to begin really, Noel,’ Kooka began. ‘I suppose the problem is that the old town’s gonna need a pub. And, with my rates going up to billy-o coz of the value of the house, I’m already living well beyond my means.’
    I looked at him quizzically, not quite sure where he was headed.
    â€˜I talked it over with your brother Jim and he thought it was a great joke.’
    â€˜Thought what was a great joke?’ I asked.
    â€˜You running a pub.’
    â€˜Me running a ... what ?’
    â€˜Yep, that’s right, son.’
    I started laughing, out of pure confusion.
    â€˜See?’ Kooka said.
    â€˜See what?’ I replied.
    â€˜Jim was right. It’s a funny idea. You running a pub. But, Noel, I’m deadly serious about it.’
    â€˜You are?’
    â€˜Yep, deadly.’
    Kooka stood up in his singlet and jeans and began to fossick in one of the big filing cabinets on the opposite wall. I sat, staring straight ahead through the small gap of window I could see under the blinds. Before long he came back and spread a waxen old shire map of the valley across the desk. He pointed with his flattened carpenter’s finger at my family property. He began to tell me how because our land was on the site of the original hotel of the town, The Grand Hotel, as it was known, it still held a much sought-after commercial zoning. He described with his finger how the grounds of the old Grand Hotel had pretty much sprawled along the riverbank, from my place to his, until it closed for business in the late 1890s.
    I’d always been told the old Grand had been flooded out along with the rest of the valley buildings and that’s why the town centre had been moved back up onto the higher ground of the ridge, but Kooka now corrected that misapprehension and assured me that although the butchery and the store and the other public buildings of the time had been flooded, The Grand Hotel itself had burnt down. In a welcome conflagration , the Methodist minister from Minapre had said, in his sermon of the following week. Kooka said there was ‘some kind of shenanigans’ involved in why the hotel had burnt down, and despite his research it seemed no one had ever told the story straight. That’s why it had come down to me via folklore that The Grand had been washed away with the rest of the original town.
    â€˜It was a wild ol’ joint by all accounts,’ Kooka now told me, ‘and I believe the conditions are cherry ripe for it to be so again. You’ve got the premises, I’ve got the financials, and the town’s pretty soon gonna have its tongue literally hanging out for it.’
    Perhaps it’s the destiny of the vocational artist in a small town not to be