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Lunch with Gladys at Cairns RSL Club: Dinner with Out:    |
Around Cairns
Another exquisite, soft and sunlit morning! After breakfast, I left eagerly
for another walk around the back blocks, enjoying the myriad screeching and
colourful lorikeets flashing through the trees, the glorious blue of the sky
and the amazing variety of palms: tall, elegant and stately coconut palms
giving a sense of structure and stability, masses of golden canes adding
lush rainforest shadows, beautifully full-foliaged foxtail palms, their
rounded branches immaculate and swaying softly in the gentle breeze,
reflecting shimmering light and lower to the ground, date palms, crotons,
ferns, stags, elks and aspleniums all adding the kind of exuberant sense of
life that only the tropics can offer. I was in a kind of private paradise
and I did not want it to stop. . .
While my delightful reverie was going on, I had put another load of washing
on as it was going to be the last opportunity for a while. Eventually both
I and the washing were back in the van. Bruce and I were now due to lunch
with a relative of Bruce’s with whom he had been in ‘family-tree’ connection
in recent years. We soon found her very neatly kept home set in an equally
neat garden and I was not at all surprised to find Gladys, its 80 year old
and very gracious owner, equally neat and beautifully groomed. Ruefully, I
noted my own very relaxed and casual holiday appearance and resigned myself
to that.
Gladys, a very lively lady despite her years, drove us to Cairns RSL for a
simple lunch. We could look out onto Cairns Esplanade and beyond that to the
promenade, busy with weekend ‘exercisers’ and to the bay beyond. It made a
pleasant backdrop to our meal together during which there was the inevitable
family tree sort of conversation of illnesses and deaths, family upheavals
and general gossip. Gladys has been one of Bruce’s more interested
correspondents and was the driving force behind a recent Royes family reunion.
I could only congratulate her, especially as she has some very difficult
relatives.
After returning from our time with Gladys, we took a short break. I used
the time to take a final stroll past the private garden that had so
entranced me and was surprised and rewarded to see the resident herself, a
woman in her ‘50’s, watering her garden. Boldly, I entered her property,
told her how delighted I was with her garden and conplimented her efforts.
After recovering from her own surprise, the woman and I engaged in a
delightful conversation on our mutual interest. She showed me an
extraordinary black lily with long, trailing petals, the like of which I’d
not seen before and said it was a pity I’d not been there a few days earlier
as she’d had a similar white one flowering and it had been magnificent. I
said perhaps her garden should appear on ABC TV’s garden program and thanked
her for her courtesy before hurrying on.
Soon after, Bruce and I were collected at the park gate by Ut (pronounced as in 'put'). This very
lively lady took us to ‘Charlie’s’ an equally lively buffet-style
serve-yourself but high quality restaurant and insisted we have whatever we
wanted to eat and drink and that we were to be her guests. Considering her
very difficult personal history as a ‘boat refugee’ from Vietnam in the
light of her enormous business success, I could only marvel at her and ask
about her story.