The Portland Memorial Hall - by Rachel Edwards
ISLAND | ISSUE 161In a collaboration between Island and the ‘Ten Days on the Island’ festival called ‘If These Halls Could Talk’, ten selected Tasmanian writers were paired with ten halls or notable buildings around the state, responding to place through creative literary works. This piece is one of the ten, which are all published in full on this site.
The town once shook and rumbled from activity at the mine up the hill, but the Portland Memorial Hall sits remarkably firm and squat, and a little back from the main road that runs alongside. Wrought-iron curlicues from the old bridge, repurposed to act as handrails, lead into the hall. Then it’s a wood-panelled tardis of an entry, deceptive for what is revealed next. Turn left only into the hangar-like high-ceilinged hall where red curtains hang, luminous alongside the tall white-framed windows.
Quiet, and closed many days, it is a hall that bursts open for music, for fires, for municipal fury. For flower shows, art shows and rock bands returning home. And the market, choirs, meetings, sport.
The curtains are new – this is proudly commented on – but the stage, which has been curtailed and screwed shut, is hissed about. There is a clean, clean kitchen to the side. Dirt, though, and a controlling ballerina, the silk parachutes that hung from the ceiling, and the dances, are what locals remember – even though the hall is overlooked most days. Nearly 70 years in, everyone has been there at least once, to dance or shout, or play badminton, to watch.
It is a memorial hall, constructed quickly post war and named after a lost municipality, Portland, now merged into the bigger entity of Break O’Day.
Outside, a single gaudy mural covers one side of the hall. It is a clichéd attempt to sum up the town’s history; boats, traditional owners, the somnambulant poppies of war. The muralled wall sits alongside a memorial park, and is buttressed by a field artillery gun on wheels and two tumescent date palms.
These are memorial trees, to remember only two of the many beautiful boys killed at war. Those boys lost at sea, lost to drugs, lost to spindling roads as they travelled too fast and too wild are remembered at home, at the pub.
“These are memorial trees, to remember only two of the many beautiful boys killed at war. Those boys lost at sea, lost to drugs, lost to spindling roads as they travelled too fast and too wild are remembered at home, at the pub.”
The thumping great date palms appear as at home here as if they were on a grand boulevard, which the main street in St Helens is not. An end-of-road tourist town, it has its own logic. Shops with faded window stock, takeaways. One pub is left, and a providore with a reasonable turnover. The fresh and the fermented are all here, as in any Tasmanian town adjusting to a life more informed by the outsiders, the tourists, than ever before.
The date palms near the field gun were once accompanied by fleshy, pale flowers on old magnolia trees. The trees were removed in the dead of night, under lights, one now adorning an old folks home.
Inside the hall, you can probably see them, students sitting on the silty floor, cross-legged, watching rehearsals of concerts, their classmates on stage, exhilarated. The silk parachutes, two of them draping the ceiling, massaging sounds around them, spilling clarity to all corners. Lanky boys, and curving girls, triangled knees.
Proud song
The Suncoast Jazz Festival ran for 21 years. Occasionally at the hall, but mostly at the pub that burnt down. That was the top pub; it was wooden and it went in one go.
The Mahogany Hall Choir, the Cecilia Singers, the 1980s performances of Show Boat and South Pacific. The Suncoast Singers, St Helens Players.
Did they know, when they sang and played, about the accidentally immaculate acoustics of the hall? A sound adored by musicians and mixers alike?
Each ball, each dance, each performance, each badminton game, each meeting, each fire.
Shoes, from sandshoes to boots, thongs scuffling onto the wooden boards that run long and lengthways down the hall. Each bare foot fall rings clear.
Each curtain fall, each jarring cough and sussuration of a breathing, entranced audience, audible.
“Each curtain fall, each jarring cough and sussuration of a breathing, entranced audience, audible.”
Each orchestral division summonsed in the hall, each rock band and even the soundchecks – the reports are in – the acoustics are the best of any small hall on the island, they are.
A Clear Gospel Presentation
A4 printed and blutacked to the outside of the hall, then removed by a council worker. A full page of extortion, ending with a small prayer.
For no one is good enough to make it to Heaven on his or her own merit.
The closest church is a squat Church of England red brick but these are not the words of that gentle interp. 1.) Admit you are a sinner it begins.
A digression
The oysters in St Helens were bulbous and they quivered. Carrying still the meniscus of the sea, just down the road. On mouthfall they burst fresh and salty.
Debutantes were presented
Dresses to the ankles, gloves to the elbow, there were 15 young women whose grace and charm was, as reported in the local rag, a tribute to their keenness.
They were presented to one of the island’s barely remembered governors, who was visiting to open the hall, with his wife. It was Friday 3 October in 1952. The young women were trained both in poise and keenness by Mrs Willoughby C Smith who wore, to the opening of the hall, ivory satin with a bolero embroidered with silver beads. It was she who presented the women to the governor.
The debutante balls and community song-and-dance troupes have been hosted in the graceful building with its tall windows for all of these years, drawing the community’s strata into acute relief.
An unofficial demarcation, two sides of the hall. One side with the landholders, the boat owners, the gentry whose names resonate in the region still. The other side for the fishermen and their children, and the town’s merchants and the farm workers.
It took them, regardless of the side of the hall where they resided, all afternoon to prepare.
Gwen, over a cuppa at the local, becomes gleeful with her memories of the hall. Her father played the squeezebox. He was a fisherman and that is why they were living at the end of the road in a coastal town.
He told her never to refuse a dance, the boys awkward enough making a long approach down the hall, a rare fellow who can take the indignity of a dance refused, he said.
“He told her never to refuse a dance, the boys awkward enough making a long approach down the hall, a rare fellow who can take the indignity of a dance refused, he said.”
The dirt
The town’s history room is laden with resources, stories and documents. Clippings and folders, and order. In the folders, the indignation about the hall is heavy because, the writers of letters said again and again, the hall is dirty, never clean, covered in dust, an embarrassment. The football club left it dirty; it seems most groups did.
‘The football club is anxious to book the hall every Thursday evening. Sincerely, St Helens Football club.’
1964 ‘The general condition of the hall over the past few months has been deplorable.’
1965 ‘At the moment dust is quite thick on all the walls and on the floor.’
The camellia that stole a show
Joy’s place is on the hill above the town. A broad vista, a laden and colourful garden, kaffir lime scenting the entrance. She has been there for many years, most of them with her beloved husband. The shack they moved to is her home now, but the garden to begin had nothing, nothing at all. She picked the first ever flower to open in her garden, a camellia – they grow well in the region – to enter into a flower show in the hall and, with no blooms remaining in her garden, it won, amid trestle tables and tablecloths, and all the bouquets of the region.
Badminton and volleyball
The harbour master, Peter, once made a fake beach on the foreshore of the bay.
There were taped lines of a badminton court on the hall’s wooden floors for many years. Gluggy-edged tape, but they contended. Then volleyball became the thing, then beach volleyball. This beautiful fishing town on great swathes of bay, and despite its proximity to some of Tasmania’s flashiest, most iridescent, orange-rocked beaches nearby, had no beach.
Sticky tidal plains with oysters jutting from them were enough to motivate more sand to be hauled in, deep enough so no feet could be slashed by the seaside shells, and the volleyball moved to the new beach.
The stage and the angry ballerina
The local dance teacher has left town now and by all accounts she was a good one. She’s not missed, and one of her legacies is that the stage can now not be moved. So many musicals, so many singing concerts, so many visiting bands, musicians, and years and years of a jazz festival occasionally touched this hall.
The heyday of musicals relied on a swinging stage, an extra area on the side to create more space to perform, and it was utilised, with purposefully created props, and performers in purposefully stitched costumes.
But, for dancers, the stage, which was not rigid by dint of its very flexibility, jarred their knees, took the surety from their footfall, and the angry ballerina had the stage locked so her dancers’ knees are protected, but the singing troupes are furious.
Community
‘We gather for tragedy, fires. This is where we would come.’ When the fires went through in 2006, the hall became an evacuation centre. No space for animals. Bleary, tired people fleeing their homes camped on the wooden floors.
The hall hosted a community forum when this warm coastal town, full of elderly, needed more doctors. They got their doctors.
Inside
The hall wears the memories of this seaside town. It is caressed by thoughts and sighs and applause, and dancing. Although there are scattered, faded photos in sleeves around town, and even though there are folders in the history room, these recollections are draped inside the hall’s wings, and its walls now. Backstage pashing; someone else’s bottle of tomato sauce still in the fridge. ▼
This article appeared in Island 161 in 2021. Order a print issue here.
If you liked this piece, please share it. And please consider donating or subscribing so that we can keep supporting writers and artists.