Telling Tales – BOOK REVIEW

Many will remember Hugh O’Keefe as the piano man at the Albury Hotel back bar.

From his position on his piano stool O’Keefe saw the Oxford Street gay scene  grow from a few bars into becoming one of the gay and lesbian hot spots around the world.

“I wasn’t there consistently but I came and went, so there were seasons of me,” O’Keefe, author said.

Just before Covid, O’Keefe self published his first book, Palely Loitering, consisting of stories growing up gay from the sixties and beyond that saw him slowly emerge from country NSW into gay culture in major city centres around the world.

It is a tale of how the world reacted to and later accepted gay culture, and one that O’Keefe embarked on wholeheartedly.

During Covid, O’Keefe found that along with the rest of the world he had time on his hands and set about putting that to use.

Telling Tales is the result. It is not a tell all but the reflections of his early life on a farm in Northern NSW through to his early forays to the States, London and beyond.

“I wrote it because I was locked up during Covid and I had a lot of stories that didn’t make my first book,” O’Keefe said.

“I thought that they were interesting and entertaining and I would put them together and see what happens.

Travel writing is one of the world’s earliest forms of writing on subjects beyond philosophy and the structures of state.

Possibly one of the earliest examples is that of Pausanias’ Description of Greece from some time in the 2nd century AD.

Around the beginning of the second millennium, travel writing was popular in China’s Song dynasty that included a 13th century account of life in the Cambodian city of Angkor.

A century later we have Marco Polo’s accounts of his travels and interactions with court officials as he recalls his journey from Italy to China and back again.

In the Romantic age, the Grand Tour of Europe inspired many accounts of the journeys, including Robert Louis Stevenson’s Cevennes, which became a popular tome.

Later in the 20th century writers such as Graham Greene, Paul Theroux, Bruce Chatwin and Jan Morris would keep the form on the best seller lists.

“Patrick Leigh Fermor was certainly an influence, especially his wonderfull book A Time of Gifts,” O’Keefe said.

Asked if he has maintained contact with any of the many people who are subjects in encounters he recalls in Telling Tales O’Keefe replies “Not to any great extent as many live out of Australia and they have lots of money, and I might see something on Facebook where they are partying in Rio or somewhere, but I am not a part of that.”

Telling Tales takes a gentle approach to the perambulations of an old poof, and by the end of the book the reader may come away with an understanding of the arc of a life that covers the time when to be gay was unacceptable, as it was to be a non-white person of English heritage.

“My understanding of travel and my appreciation of it is that you discover that other people, other races and other nationalities aren’t wrong, they are just different,” Hugh O’Keefe said.

Telling Tales is available at:

The Bookshop, 207 Oxford Street, Darlinghurst

Potts Point Bookshop, 14 Macleay Street, Potts Point