The Year My Heart Broke

And the Gold Coast Got Its Name

How schoolgirl artist Meredith Barry imagined my red-headed girlfriend after reading Over the Top with Jim. I found it a spooky likeness

At the end of my childhood memoir my red-headed girlfriend and I were kissing in her mother’s Ford Consul, parked between the house stumps under her parents’ bedroom.

“Pashing” was what older boys called it in the 1950s.

As I told readers of Over the Top with Jim, it was so exciting that I felt I had fallen off the City Hall tower and was floating.

I lost balance and put the palm of my right hand out to steady myself and was startled by a loud explosion which would not stop.

It was the car horn.

I had my full weight on this horn … and I couldn’t get it off.

Her mother shouted her name down through the timber floorboards and we leapt out of the car.

The world was rapidly catching up with us.

THE END

No wonder the most persistent question I faced after that book came out and was serialized nationally on ABC Radio was “What happened next? Did you marry your red-headed girlfriend?”

In fact, what happened next was that for ten years after publication every person mentioned in the book, even my brother’s first girlfriend, turned up on the doorstep.

Dimitri (Jim) Egoroff flew in from England demanding: “Open the door Lunn, you bastard boy, so I can punish you for your sins!”

Brother Basher rang to say he was going to come around and “rock your roof” – a Queensland thing when house roofs were all galvanized iron.

Everyone turned up, that is, except my red-headed girlfriend.

She, alone, continued to steadfastly ignore my existence.

But, that does not mean those around her didn’t turn up … one way or the other (even though I have always deliberately never named her).

One reviewer in Adelaide criticised “the often nameless women” in my books. But my thinking was that they wouldn’t want people to know they once went out with me!

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To start at the beginning:

I wasn’t prepared to fall in love in 1959 when I was 17 because – although the Christian Brothers taught us plenty of Latin, Maths, Shakespeare, Physics and Chemistry – we learnt nothing about girls.

The Brothers, in their long black cassocks with their custom-made stitched, stained, stiffened leather straps, knew nothing about girls – or if they did, they weren’t going to tell us.

But, give them their due, they did tell us of one saint’s warning: Look not upon a maiden lest her beauty be a stumbling block to thee.

And of the Knight of the Round Table who proclaimed: I hold my sword with a steady hand, my lance it thrusteth sure; my strength is as the strength of ten – because my heart is pure.

(Purity was so important back in the 1950s that even “impure thoughts” were a sin.)

Unfortunately, the redhead was a girl from an Anglican all-girls school, whose hair was the colour of ginger-ale … and I was a boy from an all-boys Catholic College who lived on the working-class southside.

We’d meet before school in the city in Adelaide Street outside the long set of stairs leading up to 4BH and, sometimes, after school at the State Library, or at Hubbards Academy in Elizabeth Street where we were supposed to study Maths together.

Once, we took our lives in our hands by getting changed in City Hall and wagging school to spend the day together in the Botanic Gardens

My short life had become complete.

1959 at the Mermaid Beach Picture Theatre on the Gold Coast together

We went to school sports days, dances in church halls, and the Saturday night pictures at Toowong’s Elite Theatre. We even saw Johnny O’Keefe shake up the crowd at Milton Tennis Stadium before The Platters appeared on stage.  

I hitched rides to the South Coast and slept in the sand dunes near her family’s beach house, just so I could see her during school holidays.

But not during the August holidays. These were taken up by Army Cadet Camp at Greenbank where we learned to shoot our .303 rifles, fire machine guns, Bren guns, and mortars … and clean latrines.

However all was not lost.

A thick letter arrived for me at Greenbank from her at Mermaid Beach, signed “fondest regards”, which I have kept for the 65 years since.

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However, five months after we left school and went out into the world … on Wednesday May 18 … 1960 … at eight minutes to three in the afternoon … she rang me at work to say: “I don’t feel the same way about you. I don’t want to see you anymore.”

I panicked.

I thought sweethearts stayed together forever, like my parents, and my uncles and aunties, and my grandparents.

I slept by the phone in the lounge room in case she called to say it was all a mistake.

I didn’t want to miss the call.

When the call didn’t come, I took my favourite photo of her and wrote on the back: “Where the treasure is, there the heart lies” and put it in an envelope and sealed it.

I’ve still got that too.

In two weeks’ time it will be the 64^th anniversary of when she gave me up  … but don’t worry … I’m over it.

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Anyway, getting back to normal – as my father Fred would often say – 35 years later I was signing books in a Noosa bookshop.

Most of my readers were either my age or schoolkids, so among the crowd one person stood out: a rather attractive young woman in short shorts which showed off her long legs.

I wondered what her interest might be in hearing me speak.

After the last book was signed, the manager, a woman, came over, sat down opposite and asked whether the girl in shorts had spoken to me?

No, she hadn’t. Why do you ask?

“Oh, well, that’s a surprise because she was very, very interested in you,” the manager replied. “She was asking all sorts of questions before you arrived … she said something about you having been her mother’s boyfriend at school. She’d come to have look at you.”

I suppose she wanted to see the man her mother had once been in love with.

Which was some sort of contact.

As was the time when the brother-in-law of my red-headed girlfriend and his wife turned up at a literary event for Over the Top with Jim to get their copy signed.

Then, twenty years after publication, in 2009 the redhead’s only sibling, her younger brother, Colin, wrote a letter to Macca’s Australia All Over radio programme, headed in bold type:

Hugh Lunn, a Bag of Gold, and his red-haired sweetheart.

Colin wrote:

Hugh was right that the South Coast from Southport to Coolangatta changed its name to the Gold Coast in the 1950s.

Just before the name change in 1959 an advertisement urges people to “holiday on the sunny South Coast”. Standing on the left is my red-headed girlfriend dressed for the Gold Coast

The official history of the Gold Coast, as distributed to tourists, now records that “a journalist called it the Gold Coast because of the miles of beautiful golden sands”.

But the real story is completely different.

That journalist wrote in Brisbane’s Sunday Mail: “The prices traders on the South Coast charge during holidays are so high you need a bag of gold to pay – they should call the South Coast the Gold Coast!”

Colin pointed out that he knew the facts …

… because that journalist was my father who wrote under the nom de plume of Colin Bryce “At Our Place” which ran for more than 20 years.

The South Coast Chamber of Commerce issued a stopper writ from the Supreme Court to try to silence my father. But the Editor acted in typical style and told him: “Dave, this story is selling papers, publish it again and be damned.”

In 1959, the traders realised they couldn’t stop the tide and adopted the name Gold Coast … but at the same time decided to sanitise the origin of the name.

Young Colin enclosed for Macca’s edification a story The Courier-Mail published on Colin’s father’s death “giving him full credit for having named the Gold Coast”.

But Colin was by no means finished yet:

In a strange twist of fate, a young Hugh Lunn fell for a blue-eyed red-headed St Margaret’s high school student: Big Trouble.

Hugh was a Catholic and she was a forbidden Protestant … and also my big sister.

I thought Hugh was the best thing since sliced bread because Hugh played cricket with me in the back yard; my big sister was always too busy for that.

But, much to my disappointment, Hugh was parted from my sister.

In his books, Hugh exposes the bigotry of the times, especially the priests on the Catholic side in Over the Top with Jim and my Protestant mother in the sequel Head Over Heels.

Hugh saw through the chauvinism and bigotry of the older generations and was brave enough to steer his own path.

Thank you Colin, I needed that ... even 50 years too late.

Then he continued:

In another twist of fate, Hugh ended up working at The Courier-Mail with my father, his ex-sweetheart’s father.

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When my red-headed girlfriend and I both passed what was then called “the Senior University Examination” at the end of 1959, her mother allowed a joint celebration at their Toowong home.

But during that afternoon the mother called me aside next to their tennis court and said she was sorry but the family would not be seeing me again. I was a nice boy, but this was her decision.

I said this was “because I’m a Catholic”.

The mother – who was tough enough to have kept wickets for New Zealand – had pointedly always called me a “Roman Catholic”, saying Anglicans were the true Catholics, and that we were “run by Italians”.

She said Catholics always “gave themselves away” by saying “haitch” for H instead of “aitch”.

With ash falling from the end of her constant cigarette, she would take down a book from her shelf and read bits out to me to prove that the Miracles at Lourdes since the apparition of Our Lady there a century before, in 1858, were not miracles at all.

She denied her decision was because I was Catholic, saying: “I made a rule when my daughter was born that she would not be allowed to go out with men who rode motorbikes … or journalists.”

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