Music for the Walls that Watch Us Grow - by Stephanie Eslake
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.
Serendipity
I’m commissioned to write this memoir by way of serendipity: a phone call on my 30th birthday.
In the days leading up to the milestone, I’d been busy preparing to abandon my youth for a grand transition into an adulthood I saw in my mind: I’d finally made it. But when I’m tasked with sharing this coming-of-age story, I spiral backwards again. As I piece together these snapshots from my childhood in Tasmania, I’m quickly forced to understand that growing up is not synonymous with letting go.
So I return to the Stanley Town Hall – a pillar of its remote community on the north-west coast, and a pillar of my memory as a young Tasmanian growing a connection to our heart-shaped island. This hall has long welcomed and nurtured music, family, friendship, art and love between its art deco walls; for a small moment in its history, it welcomed and nurtured me, too.
One-woman play
It’s the first time I’ve seen a one-woman play. The Stanley Town Hall is filled with patrons as Grandma, Dad and I take our seats by a candle-topped table. On stage, the actress weaves her narrative, comfortably and beguilingly alone. I don’t understand why she makes the grown-ups laugh like teenagers. From the way she shares words through crimson lipstick, I know these are stories I’ll understand when I’m older.
But when I’m older, I can’t remember her lines. All I recall is the buzz of the crowded hall, dark-lit and warm; being the only child in the room but feeling welcome. Being in a place that binds community as family; finding a second home in this faraway town. I remember a bewitching grown-up world with secrets and vibrance that, one day, I would join. And it would be magic.
After, when the townsfolk have settled into their beds, I return. The night-time street is wide and, with nobody around, I begin to dance, my own audience nothing more than the starry sky and the hall. The cold is exhilarating as I jump and twirl in the street, no sound but my breath and the wind rustling my hair. Exhausting myself, I bid farewell to the hall and make a final dash towards the house, feeling like I’m flying.
Adventure
I creep into the hall, my father alongside me, sharing his sense of adventure like an heirloom. I’m holding tightly to my saxophone as the walls stretch out before me, the stage looking higher than I’d thought. I climb up and my heart races, though only the two of us are here. I ready the mouthpiece of my saxophone, and with back straight and fingers in place, I play. A one-woman show.
Every corner of the hall returns the music to my ears. When I finish, the sound continues to swirl for a moment, gifting me with an encore, the reverberation uniting me with the Stanley Town Hall. We made this music together.
In a couple of decades, I will look back and feel the rebellious thrill of having snuck into a place I wasn’t allowed. In reality, it’s more likely that the door to the hall was always unlocked, like many other doors in this town where the biggest threat is the unrelenting wind from the Bass Strait.
“In reality, it’s more likely that the door to the hall was always unlocked, like many other doors in this town where the biggest threat is the unrelenting wind from the Bass Strait.”
Family
David Parsons has his back to the audience, so we can appreciate how wildly his hands and legs are flying across the instrument on stage. I’m mesmerised as his feet intuitively know which organ pedals to strike, despite his arms and fingers working to convey an entirely different physical language of music. The fabric of his suit, leather of his shoes, and wood of the pedals are in continuous flight. It sounds effortless, but his exertion is visible: I imagine he’s broken into a sweat. The hall is full for this performance by Grandma’s brother. After the community cheers for him, he is quiet, calm and smiling.
In a number of years, he will pass away, and my aunt will send me an article in the Sydney Morning Herald honouring his lifelong contribution to music; how he’d packed out the Sydney Opera House. But all I will remember was the life he brought to the Stanley Town Hall, and how proud I felt to have his musical blood coursing through me.
Home
Grandma lives in the Commercial Hotel, a corner away from the Stanley Town Hall. In her foyer sits an old organ Dad restored before I was born. Unlike David’s, this one has only two pedals, and they both pump air through the bellows. With my small fingers, I pull out all the stops, and for hours I play the same four bars of a lullaby I once heard. Every now and again, I raise my head to look at the decorative shelves built into the frame of this wooden instrument. They house family photographs so impossibly old I can’t fathom my inherited connection. But their faces acknowledge my imperfect music, year after year, without judgment.
When I become a teenager, this organ is sold. Hundreds of items from Grandma’s home are placed in the Stanley Town Hall for auction. She is moving, though not far. I am hurt because I don’t yet understand decisions made by adults. I look at her possessions sitting on tables in the centre of the hall. Here, these objects look small and unfamiliar. The walls distort their magic. I don’t want to be in the hall today, surrounded by memories with a price attached.
“Here, these objects look small and unfamiliar. The walls distort their magic. I don’t want to be in the hall today, surrounded by memories with a price attached.”
Discovery
Grandma has made herself a new home, still just a breath away from the Stanley Town Hall. I visit with my cousin on a windy summer’s day. The hall is shaded and cool. Nobody is around so we wander up the stairs, away from the stage.
When we reach the top, we find a black-and-white photo hanging on the wall: in the frame, Grandpa faces the camera, smiling at us with a gentle warmth. My cousin and I hurry back to the house to grab Dad. He waltzes into the hall, and when he sees the photo, he smiles back at the face of his late father behind the glass.
My connection to Stanley is not particularly old or unique. But it occupies a corner of my heart that nothing could come close to replacing. My grandparents made their home here before I was born. They worked hard to put life back into a rundown old house and town – Grandpa once a Circular Head councillor on the Stanley Town Hall restoration committee, and Grandma involved in more community initiatives than it’s possible to remember. Eventually, my parents followed them. Then I came along, and memories of the hall started to scatter themselves throughout the timeline of my own life.
It’s been about a decade since I last visited this town – since Grandma left to make a new home elsewhere. When she moved away, the community threw her a big celebration in the hall, family and friends beaming and clapping to honour her commitment to the village. She too had her moment to shine brightly on the stage; her one-woman show.
Growth
Thirty years old and with a notebook in my bag, I drive into Stanley. I pass the same houses that have always been here; the same quiet, the same wind and sky. This road will lead me directly to the Stanley Town Hall. My eyes want to close, keeping their old perspective of this town locked away, unable to be challenged, unable to change or grow. Still, I drive.
“I pass the same houses that have always been here; the same quiet, the same wind and sky.”
The town itself feels a little bit like a dream, entirely removed from the realities of living – living in the era of Trump, the era of millennial burnout, the era of Zoom meetings and technology fatigue. This village, which stands still in time, is too serene, too beautiful, and too welcoming with open arms, that one might imagine nothing bad could ever happen in this world.
I take a turn around the streets I know well. Every garden seems to have its own Peter Rabbit hopping under a hedge or over freshly mown grass. Heritage homes and buildings are immaculately restored and preserved.
Though it’s been formally recognised by the Tidy Town awards for a number of years, Stanley isn’t just tidy of litter on the streets or paint peeling off buildings. It’s tidy of unfriendliness; tidy of mistrust, of bustle, of ego.
I take an evening stroll to soak up the sounds of bird and beach. I haven’t yet visited the hall of my childhood, but as I near the venue, a sort of pilgrimage appears. Members of the community make their way up its front steps, drawn to the hall as naturally as waves to the shore. I feel like I’m intruding. Curious, I follow them in.
Nursing plates of homemade cookies, townsfolk amble one by one from foyer to hall. I finally glance inside, expecting the hall to look the same as it did all those years ago. Instead, its art deco walls are bursting with fresh, vibrant colours. A screen is set up to show a film. Seats are distanced due to the pandemic, but even this gives the impression of a luxurious amount of space for the community to enjoy.
I don’t stay for the screening. Overwhelmed by the unexpected energy of the crowd, I hurry away to the beach, a haze over the horizon. Rabbits hop freely over the soft padding of the grass nearby.
Community
The day after the screening, I am gifted with a tour of the Stanley Town Hall courtesy of Danny, a Circular Head Council officer who takes care of buildings and facilities and is on the hall’s committee. He lives just down the road, and walks through rain and wind in his shorts and thongs to meet me. He asks if I attended the screening; like a child, I admit I was too shy. We enter the hall together. Backstage, he finds a ticket stub lying about from an old talkie screened decades ago, which he gives to me to keep.
The hall was immaculately restored for its 100th anniversary, having opened in 1911 and fallen into disrepair as time went on. Sue, a fourth-generation resident of the town, will later tell me the hall was once at risk of being sold and lost to the community. The townsfolk wouldn’t have it, so they hosted bake sales, raising a few hundred dollars here or there, until the state government announced a few hundred thousand dollars would be granted to the hall for repairs and upgrades. ‘It’s always been a very strong and tight-knit community – always stepped up to the mark to do things,’ Sue says of her town. She attaches her own memories to the hall, too: in her earliest, she attends a film screening, running down the road at interval to grab some hot chips before returning.
The hall was restored mostly by the hands of the local community, continuing what Grandpa had started closer to the year of my birth. When I venture upstairs with Danny to see if the old photo still hangs on the wall – it does – I learn that it’s Danny’s own father-in-law who sits alongside Grandpa. They’d understood the value and meaning of the hall to this coastal community. And back then, when the roof had been leaking and the walls had been stained, together they picked up the tools, grabbed a tin of paint, and got to work.
Danny carries in a box filled with news clippings, posters and snapshots, spanning decades of events and gatherings. I flick through them – on one page, I see Grandma; on another, David. My family is embedded in the beauty of the Stanley Town Hall, and as I sit within its walls and leaf through its memorabilia, I feel a little bit like I’ve come home.
Thirty
At some point, when I think of the Stanley Town Hall, all memories blend into one. It’s an abstract painting; a hint of the past in a burst of colour. It begs my eyes to linger in a daydream. I need to wake before I become trapped; before it all turns into longing or sadness. Or before it turns into nothing at all.
These snapshots are unreliable. They’re mostly fact, and partly fiction, though I couldn’t tell you where. Still, I will protect them. Because whether or not I danced under a starry sky or snuck into a forbidden hall is irrelevant.
“These snapshots are unreliable. They’re mostly fact, and partly fiction, though I couldn’t tell you where. Still, I will protect them. Because whether or not I danced under a starry sky or snuck into a forbidden hall is irrelevant.”
Memory is a snapshot of the way you feel in the moment. It’s how you stay present with your past – your true self, underneath everything that comes next to push it further away. The reality is that, as I grew, the hall gave me moments in which I could feel. It made me feel young and old, free and rebellious, loved and embraced in community. And the hall continues to draw generations of family and friends into its heart, so they can find moments of feeling, too.
Leaving the hall, I walk to the shore. The sunset blends water with sky in an endless layering of colour – lilac, pink, gold. The waxing moon watches over, shining the brightest I’ve ever seen. I take a snapshot, but I hope I’ll remember. ▼
This article appeared in Island 161 in 2021. Order a print issue here.
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