A first trip ‘round the world, part 30

Kooroora was the kind of place where anyone would be guaranteed to find us at night. At first, we didn’t know Kooroora for its hotel rooms, but rather for its rowdy, ear-piercing, noisy bar.

The establishment was a stone’s throw from our place and we were sent there at first to “meet the people”, in other words to accomplish some good PR work in order to lure folks into the Blue Lifts and the French Ski School. 

Our essential assets were our French accent, our youth and natural beauty, not necessarily in that order. 

Originally, Kooroora was an Aboriginal word meaning a place for happy gatherings. The name was suggested by a Melbourne ski shop owner to Ernest Forras, its founder way back in 1953. The Kooroora was the liveliest and loudest après-ski venue in the Victorian Alps, saturated from cigarette smoke, slippery from spilled beer and liquors and exploding with loud music.

The place’s reputation as “The party place” had been built on decades of boozy late nights where Victorian skiers would dance away on the sticky wooden floorboards where half of the alcohol consumed was dripping and most of them would awake terribly hung over the next morning if not completely dead. 

This is the place where I got my first fundamental education on cocktails of all kind. Patrons must have paid for most of what some of us drank, because if they hadn’t, I’d still be washing dishes to pay my bar bills today! 

Doctors might tell us that this wasn’t too good for our dwindling brain-cells, but educator were saying that it was excellent for improving our English as booze was eliminating the last ramparts of inhibition from our psyche. 

We all believed we made much more sense after a series of warm-up drinks at the bar. Following a night a Koorora, which for me was a daily ritual, we walked on auto-pilot back to our building, somehow, levitated into the staircase and woke up minutes before breakfast was served. 

Just like a second Mom, Kooroora was always there for us and never left us idle or thirsty for one second. Kooroora, ski instructing and bedtime – in descending order - where how we spent most of our time at Mt. Buller...