atourtable

bellissima!

The place to be

Out here they call it Poppa’s Place or Harry’s place. Its official name, however, is the Hotel Corones. It is named after its proprietor, Harry Corones, one of the richest men in the west. The number one hotel in Western Queensland with a State-wide reputation for pleasant living, it is at the same time the most western and the least western of any hotel beyond the Great Divide. It is most western in its spaciousness — not the length and breadth of its rooms, but the atmosphere brought to them by the outback people who make it their town headquarters. It is made un-western by the other people who come to it — a wide variety of people who are classifiable only by the fact that they are not westerners. Some of their names in the hotel register make it read like an extract from Who’s Who? THE hotel itself is a long white, double storied building in Charleville’s main street, built in 1929 at a cost of £50,000. Its main feature is the big green summer lounge with the marble floor which you enter as soon as you pass through the doors of Corones. This is where the westerners and the non-westerners meet and mingle and talk things over. This lounge is the hub of social life in the Warrego for eight months of the year. For the other four — the cold months — it moves up to the top floor where the same thing occurs before a log fire. At the back of the hotel there is a sun porch and a piazza. THE story of Harry Corones is the old success story. As a young man of Greek parentage he came to the town 40 years ago, and started a small cafe. A fire set him back, but after he became established in the hotel Charleville, and after that the present Corones. In all the present hustle of his guests celebrating the district’s centenary he’s undisturbed. Grey-haired, with a towel over his shoulder, he shuffled through his hotel on errands of supervision. Assisting him is gentle Mrs. Corones, also grey-haired. His trade connections extend beyond Corones. If you sit down in the dining room you may use a serviette marked Hotel Charleville, or at night you may sleep on a pillow with a label from one of two hotels at Quilpie. These are all operated by his family. If you go dancing in Charleville he will probably dance in Corones’ Hall, next door to the hotel. Outside of business, he takes a prominent part in town affairs, being on the fire brigade, ambulance, and hospital boards. The up-to-date Charleville hospital is his special interest. He is interested in golf but says he is now growing too old to play it and extends benevolent patronage over other sports. But Corones is his chief interest. And he is confident that one day in the distant future Corones itself will celebrate a centenary. – Courier-Mail (Brisbane, Qld), Thursday 6 November 1947. Source: timegents.com/2017/11/13/hotel-corones-charleville/

We've been searching for the name of this girl for a number of years. We'd love someone with a "never say die" approach to take on trying to find out who she is. There's so much more online content available that in 2003 when we featured this photo in our first digitisation project.

Home » Dreaming » Imagination The Pineapple Girl by Francesca Rendle-Short.. Sometime in 1924 in London, a little girl, of no more than five years old, I fancy, sat down in a crate of Queensland pineapples and smiled. Her legs were tucked up under the largest and spikiest of all pineapple specimens, and she held a slice in her hand. The occasion was a Queensland fruit promotion at the Empire Exhibition at Wembley. King George V opened the exhibit, and vast numbers of visitors took part—millions, records say, through the turnstiles. One pineapple girl always leads to another; this original 1924 PictureAustralia girl leads me to all the other pineapple girls I have known and discovered. There’s Kath and Dulcie from Atthow’s pineapple farm at Lindum in Brisbane; the littlest of all Pineapple Girls hiding as ‘a charming study’ in the land of sunshine; ‘country beauty’ Bronwyn Moorehouse posing among the ripe pineapples on her father’s plantation in the Maroochy district on the Sunshine Coast; and Dutch-born Mrs E Buikstra, of Stavoren, Friesland, checking slices of pineapple for faults at the famous Northgate—with a smile. Pineapple Girl takes me back to my own childhood, too, to the smell of my own Queensland through my hair and up the nose, here, tucked into the frangipani corner in St Lucia, in a photograph my father took when I was four or five years old. I fancy pineapple excess on my tongue, the taste of warmth and fecundity: possibility. You can imagine this Pineapple Girl in an agricultural display too, can’t you? She’s got the right smile. A perfect fringe. She takes me back to the sickly stench of pineapple juice stuck in my sister’s hair long after shifts in the cannery, to tales of excoriated skin and the sting of cuts. To disbelief, that the punch my mother offered guests at Christian barbeques on Saturday evenings was the same pineapple juice swept off the cannery concrete floor and ladled into two-gallon tins to sell. So my sister says. Just look at the shape and line this Pineapple Girl makes with her body and skirt, her fancy pineapple crown, and something of a curl across the moon of her countenance. She suggests a way to live—making up story as she goes—ignites our imagination, offers a future. She emits light through the phosphorescence, plants a crowd of flowers in us all, and gives breath a chance. Source: www.qhatlas.com.au/content/pineapple-girl