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Printed: 2jan13 9:37
Pub: BCM
Edition: DU
Page No:110
Pub Date: 3jan13
110 SUMMER READING
SUMMER READING ????PAGE NUMBER????
OH, WHAT A
BEAUTIFUL
MURDER
All Hopalong Gates wanted to be was an all-singing, all-dancing cowboy in Brisbane. But as
Matthew Condon records, when he started drifting into hell far from the fields of
Oklahoma, there could only be one result at the last-chance saloon
A
LL this was punishment, of
course, for my disgraceful
behaviour at the opening
night of Oklahoma! on the
occasion of my 65th
birthday.
I’d acted half my age.
No. I’d acted less than a third of my
age. When you get too old to even say
you acted half your age, things are
looking grim.
So higher forces had quite
deliberately, blowing a cosmic raspberry
in the process, thrown me into not just
the brittle and volatile world of musical
theatre, but the very history of it.
Who knew it would be so dark?
And deadly?
To try to find Hopalong Harold
Gates’ killer 45 years on, I had to trawl
back through this industry that so
thoroughly stuck in my craw.
Even in these early stages of the
investigation it felt like I’d been hit on
the head by a golf ball and a portion of
my brain had malfunctioned, suddenly
running a permanent spool of There’s
No Business Like Show Business inside
the old noggin.
Forget waterboarding at Abu Ghraib.
I could think of only one singular
example of even greater torture – having
to listen to broadcaster John Laws’
poetry put to music on the early 1970s’
album The John Laws Experience, and in
particular, the track Does Anybody Have
a Tissue?.
If you want to understand hell, then
this is the way to go.
Nothing Peg could do to me could
hurt quite as much as this.
Nevertheless, I took in Dannie
Oakley’s story that day in his faux log
cabin on the third floor of a New Farm
block of flats with a liberal dose of
scepticism.
How could you take seriously a man
in his 70s who dressed like Woody in
Toy Story? Right down to the
neckerchief?
Oakley was not who he said he was –
CHAPTER FOUR
all that weeping little cowboy palaver –
and I was determined to get to the
bottom of it.
Of him.
As you’d understand, getting to the
bottom of an old Brisbane amateur
musical performer was not everyone’s
idea of fun.
Especially one with dirty chaps.
Then there was the actual murder of
Hoppy Gates, which was inescapably
what it was – a cruel, violent, brutal and
callous killing.
His demise, I would later learn in the
most graphic of detail, involved an
appalling combination of a fence paling
with exposed nails, fists, blows to the
head with steel-capped work boots and a
bottle of Blue Nun.
I won’t reveal the use of the Blue Nun;
needless to say in those days it should
have been a crime to even classify Blue
Nun as a wine, let alone how a couple of
villainous reprobates might make use of
the bottle (though I do seem to
remember my late friend and bon vivant
Westchester Zim was adamant Blue
Nun had made great strides in quality
and bouquet since those primitive days
in the 1960s).
Hoppy, it turned out, had a
spectacular double life.
He was born and raised by his mother
(father unknown) in Kangaroo Point,
just across the river from the Brisbane
CBD, and from an early age showed a
talent for singing.
As a result, young Hoppy performed
regularly at St Mary’s on the Cliffs, a
beautiful local Anglican church that
happened to house Queensland’s oldest
pipe organ.
He was even noted in the local press
during the 1940s as one of the town’s
prodigy sopranos.
You can almost see an innocent
110 The Courier-Mail Thursday, January 3, 2013
Hoppy, his wondrous pipes dancing with
the music from the Lincoln organ out of
London, later being congratulated by
the congregation on the lawns of the
church yard high up on the Kangaroo
Point cliffs.
Taking in the view of the sinister
Brisbane River, across to the city and
down further to New Farm, how could
the lad know this forever brown and
malodorous stretch of water would take
his life just a couple of decades later?
(Excuse my jaundiced view of the
river. I am from Sydney with its worldclass harbour, and I saw the carnage the
Brisbane River wreaked just a couple of
summers ago, how it bared its teeth out
of nowhere. Romantic about it I am not.)
Hoppy didn’t take his vocal talents
into the cathedrals or the opera houses
of the city but, alas, into grubby local
musical theatre.
You see, the effeminate Hoppy, from
the start, was attracted to the bawdy.
His retinue of dirty jokes was the
only thing that kept him from being
regularly tarred and feathered by the
toughs at the now defunct Kangaroo
Point State School.
They called poor Hoppy a ‘‘pansy’’,
with his pale skin and floppy fringe (his
surrey apparently had a spectacularly
girlish fringe on top) but his knowledge
of female reproductive organs left the
bullies and thugs agape and dizzy.
Apart from harmless filth, Hoppy had
another obsession, and that was the
American western.
Oh, he couldn’t get enough of it,
could Hoppy.
He haunted the city’s picture theatres,
taking in everything from Bury Me Not
on the Lone Prairie, Sierra Sue, Boss of
Hangtown Mesa and Hoppy Serves a
Writ (one of his personal favourites) to
Throw a Saddle on a Star, The Strawberry
Roan and Rim of the Canyon.
And he only drank sarsaparilla, just
like his hero, Hopalong Cassidy.
Then his passion morphed into
something more intricate when
Oklahoma! the musical came to Brisbane
Town in late October 1949.
Of course Harold Gates was there at
the premiere at His Majesty’s Theatre in
Queen St. He clung tightly to the railing
in the upper stalls and thrilled at
the performances of the American
principals Robert Reeves and
Carolyn Adair.
The Courier-Mail reviewed the
musical as ‘‘a movie yarn transferred
from screen to stage’’; saying that the
plot was ‘‘pure sagebrush’’; and that
there was ‘‘warm romantic melody’’
in such songs as Oh, What a
Beautiful Morning.
Hoppy Gates almost fainted with
unadulterated joy on several occasions
that night.
And nobody thought his cowboy
outfit out of place among the ladies’ fine
gowns and the gentlemen’s evening
suits. In fact, he was deemed quaint and
congratulated by theatre-goers for
getting into the spirit of the event. What
a dear little boy, they said of Hoppy.
And it was that night, transfixed by
Oklahoma!, that changed Hoppy’s life.
Just as Oklahoma! 63 years later had put
me into a deep slumber, it had ignited
little Hoppy.
He had found his vocation.
I know this because Dannie Oakley,
Hoppy’s best (and only) school chum,
was there with him that night at His
Majesty’s. Dannie and Harold were
inseparable. It was Harold who infected
Dannie with a passion for sagebrush,
banjo twang and imported western hats.
He was Laurie to Harold’s Curley.
And so began the pair’s adventure in
local musical theatre.
There wasn’t much work on offer
back then for two teenage boys who
specialised in cowboy-oriented stage
extravaganzas. (Who’d have thought it?)
So they formed the Brisbane City
Cowboy Guild, hoping to give
themselves a little corporate heft and
legitimacy (and to mask their tender
ages), and canvassed backers for their
Illustration: Lethbridge
own productions. It took more than two
years, but they eventually raised enough
money to stage their own production of
Oklahoma! in the Foresters’ Hall on
Given Tce in Paddington.
Hoppy, of course, cast himself as
Curley. Dannie Oakley was relegated to
the second-rate Jud.
And despite the poorly attended
opening night (it was to be the only
night for Hoppy’s great musical theatre
event), and the casting sleight on
Dannie, the two remained friends.
Of sorts.
As Dannie blubbered to me and Tex
at his kitchen table all those years later,
he felt something came between them
after that evening.
Something intangible.
Dannie felt Hoppy, on the strength of
DU
that single performance (witnessed by
12 people, the bulk of them relatives of
the boys and the other cast members, and
a full-sized stuffed horse that was too
cumbersome to haul on stage and would
have taken up too much performance
space anyway, so it remained in the side
aisle, staring at the amateur performers
with its amber glass eyes as big as
boiled eggs), was galvanised in his belief
that he was destined for great things. He
would always be Curley, and Dannie the
lowly Jud.
Through the 1950s and 1960s they
crossed paths in the great amateur
calendar of theatrical events in Brisbane,
yarning in the dull bulb lights of School
of Arts halls across the city.
And on a few occasions they were in
the same production.
couriermail.com.au
This was his
complicated life,
measured in glasses
of wine, shots of
whisky, and half a
kilometre of bars
and clubs
But their friendship was never truly
the same.
By 1967, according to police reports,
Harold Gates was a well-known man
about town. Just turned 30, he worked
as a travel agent for a respectable
company with its head office in Queen
St. He had visited New York and
London, and brought back to drab
Brisbane some of their savoir faire.
In a city awash in beer, Harold fancied
wine and cocktails. It made him as
conspicuous, and suspicious, as a man
who didn’t wear a hat. And heaven
forbid, he also wore cologne which
raised not just eyebrows but not an
insubstantial number of fists in his
direction in the city’s drinking holes.
When he was sober, Harold was the
life of the party, surrounded by beautiful
young women wherever he went, feted
by the city’s old socialite dames. He was
invited to countless soirees and could be
relied upon to saddle up a piano stool
and play cheeky musical numbers and
songs on request.
As these nights progressed, and
Hoppy grew steadily inebriated, he
turned into someone else. He would
disappear into the night, and find
himself on a familiar bar hop from
George St down Queen towards the
notorious Petrie Bight with the all-night
National Hotel and the final stop, the
last-chance saloon, the Playboy Club
not far from the river. It was literally
Hoppy’s microscopic descent into hell.
By the time he got to the National,
bursting at the seams with prostitutes
and crooked cops and petty criminals
and lonely out-of-towners, Hoppy was
on the lookout, not for women, but
for men. This was his complicated life,
measured in glasses of wine, shots of
whisky, and half a kilometre of bars
and clubs.
One late night in 1967, Hoppy took
the descent one time too many. With a
case as cold as this, I needed to find
some cold old retired coppers. I needed
to see some yellowing files. I needed to
know exactly why someone would send
Dannie Oakley the stained, musty jacket
of a murder victim almost half a century
after that singular, grisly event.
TOMORROW: First the descent into one old
cowboy’s deadly hell . . . so it can only get
better, can’t it?
MISSED PART 3? Find it at
couriermail.com.au/summerreading
Thursday, January 3, 2013 The Courier-Mail 111