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  • Twin Towns Services Club Entrance.

 

  • The article about TwinTowns Services Club was written for the magazine, 'Club Management in Australia by the author after a visit to the Harbour Lounge Dance Venue within the club. 
  • Walter Willans  manages  this dance, acts as 'master of ceremonies'  and provides the music every Monday afternoon from 1pm until 4 pm.  The spontaneous fun making and enjoyment amongst the dancers, most of whom are long acquaintances and friends, delights the casual onlookers from other parts of the club.

Please read on:


From December 2004 Issue of  ‘Club Management in Australia’, Vol. 50, No. 155.

Quick-stepping back to your youth - By Andrew Dettre

They had a glint in their eyes as they moved gracefully on the dance floor. A dreamy, almost flirtatious glint. These women and their male partners were twenty­ something again, the music and the magic of the moment having transformed them into belles and beaus of yesteryear's balls.

These women - no: these ladies - were mainly in their 60s, a few even older, one or two perhaps a bit younger, most of them grandmothers. And their male partners were not a day younger.

One couple, dancing with enormous concentration, could have been even 80 or so: their movements were restricted though precise.

The pairs, some 50 of them, all moved in total unison, all in the same direction, their arms, legs and feet lifting and swinging together, as required by the rules of Sequence Dancing, within the framework of a 16-bar or 32-bar rule.

It looked like a corps de ballet from the Kirov, with the dying swan to appear in a moment or two. They would have even caused a sensation at the old Trocadero in Sydney's George Street, back in the 1940s and 1950s.

Grace, elegance, sophistication, charm: they moved back a few decades, forgetting their age and possibly some ailments, aches and pains that arrive with the years.

Neither the women nor the men were particularly well dressed. Indeed, most of the men wore open neck shirts, one or two even had shorts on. This dancing was for joy and fun, not for show.

I stumbled on this happy scene by chance, up in the Twin Towns Services club right on the border between NSW and Queensland, on a weekday afternoon. The circular dance floor was not tucked away discreetly somewhere on a deserted upper floor but was in a spacious corner of a lounge-cum-pokie room-cum bar area.

 

Walter Willans, the dance master, stood on a little stage, playing the keyboard, singing, providing the music for the foxtrot, the slow waltz and the quickstep, for an hour and a half, with much shorter breaks between the numbers than you'd feel would be demanded.

Alas, he is just one of the dance masters at Twin Towns, appearing perhaps twice a week. But the dancers are there every weekday, right throughout the year, performing with gusto to Mr Willans or one of the other entertainers.

Walter Willans has been at this club for 13 years and now runs similar events in other clubs in the Brisbane and Gold Coast area.

The dancers don't pay a cent for their fun: it's the club which engages the dance masters and pays their fees.

All this in a club which, according to some government ministers, senior bureaucrats and narrow-minded church elders, are money-grabbing enterprises turning everyone into a hard-drinking, chain-smoking pokie addict hellbent to destroy himself and his family.

I would have loved to have Bob Carr or Michael Egan or the Reverend Costello stand there with me, in a quiet corner, taking in this wondrous, romantic, very moving scene where men and women who could have been their parents were doing the quickstep and enjoying every moment of it. Not sitting at home, brooding, or in a retirement village, waiting for a busy son to visit them.

I am sure hundreds of clubs throughout our major states stage similar programs, even if not on the same marvellous scale.

And I am sure the government bean counters advising their political masters on policy, even taxes, have never seen such happy scenes with such happy seniors.

They ought to be careful not to stumble on such happy, unselfish activities in clubs: it could ruin their preconceived, prejudiced notions about clubs...

-oOo-

 


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