It unified generations of Queenslanders with a collective memory of youthful romance – of slicked back brylcreemed hair, pencil skirts and the infinite possibilities of a new world where prosperity beckoned, banishing the horrors of war.
Cloudland – that great palace in the sky in Bowen Hills – provided a Saturday night magic carpet ride for the young, whisking them from dull suburbia all the way to the summit of Montpelier Heights to be transformed, for a few hours at least, into dazzling Hollywood stars.
The Mater Hospital Dance at Cloudland in 1960.
On a 1100sq m dance floor of sprung timber up to 2000 people could simultaneously dance the “Twist’’ in a ballroom of sweeping curtains and towering decorative columns, all glowing under chandeliers and domed skylights.
Dancers participating in a ballroom dancing festival at Cloudland in 1952. Digital altered using AI.
When it was torn down by the Deen Brothers in 1982, despite its National Trust listing, it left a collective heart ache in a baby boomer generation only beginning to realise that the extraordinarily optimistic and prosperous age which lasted for a couple of decades following World War II was rapidly fading.
It was an era when all you needed to earn a berth in the top echelons of Queensland’s own version of the Gilded Age was a house on a quarter acre block, an HD Holden with Powerglide Automatic Transmission and a Victa lawnmower.
According to Dr James Lergessner, an author and historian who extensively chronicled the venue’s history and wrote the book “Cloudland: Queen of the Dancehalls” published in 2013, Cloudland was more than just a building.
New Year revellers cheer and wave as balloons and confetti welcome 1949 at the Cloudland Ballroom. Digitally altered using AI.
It was a social hub for at least three generations of Brisbane residents, surviving early abandonment, requisition by the American military during World War II, and decades of shifting musical tastes to remain Brisbane’s premier entertainment attraction.
It also became a form of Shorthand for an entire era shared by a majority of Queenslanders now in their more senior years.
“Cloudland actually became a language meme,’’ Jim says.
“And by that I mean it was a word which symbolises a great deal – a word repeated constantly in our language which passes through society and which people know the meaning of.’’
An associated symbol was Rock ‘n’ Roll George.
Ballroom dancing festival at Cloudland in 1952. Digitally altered using AI.
George Kyprios, born of Greek immigrant parents in the West End in 1927, was a beloved symbol of the post war era, driving a 1952 FX Holden up and down Queen Street for decades and often attending events at Cloudland where he impressed the crowds with his colourful stove pipe trousers.
Cloudland started life in the late 1930s when Thomas Henry Eslick bought the site for 50,000 pounds and attempted to turn it into a Brisbane version of Luna Park.
Eslick was determined to create the best dance floor in the Southern Hemisphere and used 2.5 centimetre Queensland Spotted Gum floorboards, believed to be laid in a configuration used on the dance floor at the La Monica ballroom in Santa Monica which was alleged to create a certain “bounce’’ appreciated by the more accomplished dancers.
A ballroom dancing festival at Cloudland in August 1952. Digitally altered using AI.
The attraction, complete with a tiny railway running up the hill from the Breakfast Creek tram stop, was opened in August 1940, but war had already begun, and its impact on Queensland was about to hit hard.
Eslick seems to have gone under the radar during those years, possibly because he was pursuing ambitious dreams of establishing a utopian commune in the South Pacific, and Cloudland fell into disrepair.
Ballroom dancing at Cloudland in 1980. Digitally altered using AI.
By 1942 it had been requisitioned by the American military which was invading Brisbane as General Douglas MacArthur, who commanded the South West Pacific, moved his headquarters from Melbourne to Brisbane in July 1942.
The site was purchased by sisters Mya Winters and Francis Rouch for 16,000 pounds in 1947 and reopened on April 24 of that year where it became something of a forerunner for the new Festival Hall which opened in 1959.
International acts were often on the billboards, and continued appearing through changing musical tastes and cultural fashions to the point the rock group AC/DC played there in November 1975 during the T. N. T tour.
Yet Cloudland’s greatest claim to fame must rest with the appearance of one of the pioneer of rock n roll – the Texas-born Charles Hardin Holly – in February 1958.
Buddy Holly performed three concerts at Cloudland in that month and died exactly one year later in a plane crash in the United States on February 3 1959 in a tragedy immortalised as “the day the music died’’ in Don McLean’s American Pie.
The enchantment surrounding this venue is difficult to comprehend in an age where entertainment is piped into living rooms 24 hours a day and cities are crowded with night-life attractions.
Then “fun’’ required an effort.
And hundreds of thousands of ageing Queenslanders would agree there was simply no better way to expend youthful energy than to get up to Montpelier Heights on a Saturday night, with the rising skyline of Brisbane city glittering a few kilometres to the south, do the Twist and the Go-Go until past midnight, and convince yourself, with some justification, that all the world was about to unfurl before you.