HOTEL COOLGARDIE
Australia, 2016, 83 minutes, Colour.
Directed by Pete Gleeson.
A number of commentators on this documentary have mentioned that its treatment is the fly-on-the-wall kind, close observation of situations and characters.
One of the problems with responding to the film is that this is not particularly the kind of wall that one would like to be a fly on!
Coolgardie is a small town in Western Australia, right in the outback, in the desert, distance from Perth but not far from the larger town, Kalgoorlie. It is an old mining town with a rough kind of heritage, some modern amenities, but old pubs and old drinking traditions. In fact, at times audiences who know the novel and the film, Wake in Fright, will be alert to some of the similarities.
This is the story of two young women from Finland who holiday in Bali and are robbed, finishing up in Perth, deciding that they will get some temporary work and build up their money reserves. In the meantime, we have seen the owner of a pub in Coolgardie, pretty rough and ready himself, who has a system of employing young women for a couple of months as temporary barmaids, putting them up at the hotel, seeing them as something of an attraction for the mainly male customers at the pub and there are some female customers as rough and ready as any of the locals.
The girls, Steph and Lina, accept the job, travel by train, meet the owner, and are set to learn the ropes with the friendly girls who are finishing up as barmaids and a very helpful. Actually, Steph and Lina are not very good at their work to the impatience of the owner who has outbursts about their inefficiency and lack of listed their work. When they arrive, they are advertised as new girls which means that the men will turn up, drink and flirt, be openly crass in their comments. There are some young men who water know and be better but virtually in an apprenticeship to be coming older sex obsessives. However, there are some sympathetic customers, especially in old vagrant who lives with his dog in a very unhygienic van but who offers to take them out on local trips.
The girls live in accommodation in the hotel, find they have covered the sites of Coolgardie in about five minutes, and find whole situation boring and alien (something which is probably shared by quite a number of the audience). It is a world of isolation and, despite the open spaces, claustrophobia.
The owner goes away and there are several temporary managers of the hotel who are more sympathetic and more helpful to the girls. One of the difficulties is that Lina has severe diabetes and goes into a severe turn and has to be hospitalised.
It probably seems best that the girls be terminated with their work, which happens, and back they go to Finland with a strange, very partial, experience of Australia.
Many of the reviewers have praise the film as being fascinating. Maybe. Another reviewer referred to the whole thing as being fascinating and appalling. Fascinating in a bizarre kind of way and a reminder that there are many appalling aspects of Australian culture, of the attitudes and behaviours of Australian males, especially in a pub context.
Dramatised in Kitty Green's The Royal Hotel in 2023,
