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Airport, which had recently been dignified with 'international' status. But none of the Super
Constellations that Qantas now flew ever landed there.
Though retired from the railways, Sugar continued to augment his pension by doing odd jobs for
people around the town. For a few months he worked in the Cloncurry Stores and lived in a
room in His Majesty's Hotel, now generally known as Guerin's, after its long-lasting licensee,
Annie Guerin. Gwen Black visited him there once when he was sick. It was 'a horrible old
room', she said.
After that, he camped out under the house at the back of the jewellers and tobacconist shop in
Scarr Street run by a Lebanese immigrant, Joe Bakhash, and paid for his lodging and earned
some spending money by cleaning up and helping out. The space under the house, as with other
Queensland houses built on stilts, was known as a 'granny flat', where elderly relatives were
parked in partially enclosed and somewhat primitive conditions, among discarded household
junk.
It seems that Joe Bakhash and Lawrie were old friends. They played cards together, drank
together, smoked cigarettes together, and compared the bad new world with the old days of
their youth and manhood. A white cockatoo in Joe's house used to comment on another aspect
of a failing they shared. It sang: 'Joe the Khash done his cash, done his cash. Sugar Honey done
his money.'
So Lawrie aged, a wizening spectator of what took place in the town and at the outdoor sports
that the young men continued to enjoy.
Anzac Days came and went: children and ex-servicemen paraded; the Last Post and Reveille
were sounded by a bugler at the war memorial; wreaths were laid and the National Anthem
sung. In Melbourne, in 1956, the Olympic Games were held, for the first time in the southern
hemisphere, and shown on the latest novelty, black-and-white TV. In Sydney, a play, Summer
of the Seventeenth Doll, was a smash-hit and would be made into an American film. The
following year, The Pub with no Beer, sung by Slim Dusty, went to Number One and became
Australia's first gold record. In 1959, work started on Stage One of an Opera House in
Sydney; Jack Brabham became the first Australian to
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win a motor-racing Grand Prix; Herb Elliott won one of the eight Australian gold medals at the
Rome Olympics; and Rod Laver was on his way to becoming the first Australian to win the
Grand Slam in tennis. Qantas now encircled the world, and the last tram ran in Sydney.
Australia, thanks in part to the post-war flood of migrants from Europe, was becoming more
self-aware and prosperous. Over a million migrants, many from Italy, Greece and east
European countries, chose the Australian way of life and pushed the population over the 10
million mark. In Queensland, and in other states the aborigines were given the right to vote.
That was in May 1962. A war had just ended in far-off Algeria, and another war was about to
begin somewhat nearer, in Vietnam.
In Cloncurry, Lawrie, now 74, was dying.
In January 1988 I flew in a small Beechcraft plane owned by Flight West Airlines to this hot
little town in the middle of nowhere, to the barren airfield that had witnessed the dawning of
Australian aviation nearly 70 years ago; and all on a summer's afternoon I met Gwen Black,
Harry Charles, Joe Bakhash's son, Joe, Rose Williams, and Colin Dawes; and at the Wagon
Wheel Motel found that the licensee, Warren Robinson, had listed all his predecessors in every
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