Sally Baxter
Richard Hughes
Battle for a mixed Grill at the Hongkong Hilton 1973
A postcard from Hong Kong commemorating that time when women were kept on a pedestal and honoured by the gentlemen of The Grill. It was the 70s and the style at the time.
Australian journalist Richard Hughes was a lunchtime fixture at the Hongkong Hilton’s Grill bar right up until his last days in 1985.
In the 1970s it was men only at The Grill for those famously long lunches of the era and that’s the way Hughes liked it.
When a couple of Girl Reporters from the China Mail stormed the barricades, he rang their boss and demanded their sacking. The boss was Norman Barrymaine, another heavyweight in China Watching circles. Continue reading
Livin’ La Vida Local in class-conscious Hong Kong
The Spackman residence in Hong Kong didn’t get hot running water in the kitchen until the late 1970s. From 1967, when we first rented the flat in Macdonnell Road, until 1978, when I was packed off to Brisbane, Australia to endure the final years of my education, we would have to boil water for all our cooking and cleaning needs. And drinking water too, of course, in the early years. Traditionally, only servants would have used the kitchen, so hot running water was presumably deemed an unnecessary luxury.
When I returned to Hong Kong for Christmas 1978 the hot water fairy had arrived in my absence. I have no idea what prompted the long overdue upgrade, but it says something about the world of my parents’ Australia that neither of them regarded a lack of hot running water as a deal breaker.
For your young Girl Reporter it was just another glaring neon announcement of the Spackman Family Failure to fit into any of the rigid strata of Hong Kong’s colonial society. As if being Australian wasn’t enough, we were not expatriates in the accepted sense of the word. We were in Hong Kong on local terms. Continue reading
My spies through my little eyes
I spent a good chunk of my childhood reading trashy spy novels in the reading room of Hong Kong’s Foreign Correspondents Club, oblivious to the real spies who may… or may not… have been drinking in the bar one floor below.
The dawning realisation that I probably knew some spies was a glamorous notion that has never really lost its allure.
Growing up in distinguished company
With Tony and Irmgard Lawrence above us and Dick Hughes and his wife Ann below, the Baxters were in fine company
At one time Grosvenor House, our block of flats at the end of Macdonnell Road in Hong Kong’s Mid-Levels, was home to BBC correspondent Tony Lawrence, who died on 24 September 2013, and Dick Hughes, the legendary Australian journalist who covered the Asia beat for half a century.
Sally Baxter 