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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.
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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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