With Valentine’s Day approaching, I started researching how Adelaideans courted during the early 1900s, and that’s when I discovered we had a floating palais on the River Torrens.
The Floating Palais de Danse, also known as the Taj Mahal of the Torrens, was a surreal, white-domed barge that served as the heartbeat of “Roaring Twenties” Adelaide from 1924 to 1929.
From the outside it looks garish to my eye, with its Neo-Moorish style featuring five painted domes. However, it was anchored near the Elder Park Rotunda and inside the very modern electric lights were dimmed to amber or blue for a moonlight glow as couples danced together very closely.
To get to it, you would hire a row boat. However, further upstream, where Jolley’s Boathouse stands today, Benjamin Ernest Jolley was hiring out heavy, clinker-built wooden skiffs, enabling couples to row away from the city’s noise and hide between weeping willow trees (which were much more overgrown and plentiful back then).
There was some tension between the floating palais and the Jolleys because music would leak through and disturb his patrons. However, many patrons enjoyed the free jazz.
However, before you could take someone rowing, you had to meet them and that was where the Rundle Street Parade had a role. Every Saturday night, the main thoroughfare became a theatre of flirtation where young men and women would walk in opposite directions under the glow of the shopfronts. This practice, often condemned in local newspapers as “window-winking” or “eye-lighting”, allowed for a brazen, split-second connection. It was here that “Missed Connections” were born, leading to the frantic personal ads in the paper the following Monday, where a “Lonely Digger” might reach out to the “Young Lady in the Blue Picture Hat” who had caught his eye near the Arcade.
If you did have a date, how do you signal your ongoing love and intentions? By postcard. However, this was an era in which love letters were often intercepted by prying landladies or strict parents, so Adelaideans developed a clandestine code using the positioning of postage stamps. Placing a stamp upside down or at a specific tilt was a silent signal; an inverted stamp was a shorthand for “I am longing for you” or “I love you.” This allowed a postcard with a banal message about the weather to carry a hidden weight of passion.
The 1920s South Australian vocabulary was a mix of sweet sentiment and peculiar localisms. To go “Dandynong” was a quintessentially old-school Adelaide term for heading to the hills or the parklands to “park” and make out. Meanwhile, in reports of “Breach of Promise” court cases, we learn how lovers spoke to each other, thanks to their letters being read out. Hence, in the song, we here “my own darling” and “cosy little house”, commonly used at the time. The former showed interest, the latter sent a strong signal that I am building for our future.
I hope you enjoy this song, which also uses simple, direct rhyming, to match the style of the day. This was not an era for the “slant” rhyme. Rhymes were typically simple and direct.
My Jolley Valentine Lyrics
[Verse 1]
When I strolled in the Rundle Street, parade
Time stopped when you stepped out of, the shade
We started to walk, with no need to talk
My Jolley Valentine
[Verse 2]
Now I’m right where I want to be, tonight
A row boat on the Torrens in, moonlight
I’m happy to row, where you want to go
My Jolley Valentine
[Verse 3]
We’ll find a quiet willow tree, that’s ours
And moor away from prying eyes, for hours
We’ll hum and we’ll sway, tunes from the Palais
My Jolly Valentine
[Bridge]
Tomorrow I’ll send you a postcard
With the stamp placed upside down
I hope you will be my own darling
In our cosy little home on the other side of town
[Verse 4]
No longer will we need to find, willows
We’ll soon be sharing dreams upon, pillows
And our dandynong, can be in a song
My Jolley Valentine
Yes, our dandynong, can be in a song
My Jolley Valentine
Listen To My Jolley Valentine
My Jolley Valentine Raw Scratchings
Here are the pages where I wrote the lyrics.
