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ON a busy part of Parramatta Road in Sydney’s inner west is an old, large corner building called the Albert Palais, its 89-year-old faded yellow facade showing the telltale signs of its vintage. Today the building’s frontage houses several bridalwear shops, quite appropriately so because the main part of “The Albert” is a function centre providing for wedding receptions for up to 600 guests as well as catering for other large gatherings. The Albert in its earlier incarnation has been described as “a wildly popular jive joint in the Fifties and Sixties“ (www.vanishingsydney.tumblr.com), a hive of night-time dance activity just like dance halls all over Australia.
Through the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s dance halls were all the go! While the styles of dance and dance music changed during this era—Swing and Jazz, Ballroom, Waltz, Foxtrot, Jitterbug, Square dancing, Rock and Roll—patronage of the halls remained high, notwithstanding the arrival of television in 1956 which altered entertainment patterns forever.
So Sydney had its Albert Palais and numerous others in the suburbs and the Trocadero in town. Likewise Melbourne had its own thriving dance hall scene in these halcyon days. Among the most popular venues was the VRI Ballroom in the city above Flinders Street Railway and the Orana Club in Footscray. The VRI (Victoria Rail Institute) venue was one of Melbourne’s biggest, offering 50/50 dances, a mix of real old time and modern styles. Orama Club’s forte was square dancing.
Brisbane had its legendary Cloudland ballroom in Bowen Hills, from 1940 for 40 years a venue for old time/pop/rock concerts and dances with a mix of 40% old time and 60% modern. In Perth and Adelaide, the ballrooms to frequent in the day included respectively the Embassy Ballroom and the Palais de Danse (later Palais Royal). Unhappily the waning of the popularity of these dance venues in the 1970s led, as it did with Cloudland in Brisbane, to their being irrevocably demolished.
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