Welcome to Redcliffe, QLD. It’s a beautiful seaside town just over the bridge from the hustle and bustle of big city Brisbane. They have a team in the National Rugby League now. You can go down to Scarborough and sit in the brewery and watch the fishing trawlers come in and out. Redcliffe is – this is true – the birthplace of the Bee Gees. They played their first ever gig on the back of a truck at Redcliffe Speedway, and now there’s a bronze statue of the Gibb brothers in town. We’re serious, look it up!
Redcliffe’s latest claim to fame is that they have their very own chapter of Tough Guy Book Club.
“I had my eye on TGBC for years…” says Chapter Prez Joseph Daniels, “My brother in law and his relatives attend the Sydney and Newcastle chapters and love it, so I finally made the effort to attend the Wilston Chapter.”
After six months, Joseph decided to form his own chapter for a few sensible reasons – he’d just moved to the area, he wanted to get involved in his local community, and most importantly, ‘it’s easier to have beers when you don’t have to drive 45 minutes afterwards’.
Anyone who has started a new TGBC chapter knows that those first few meetings can be lonely. It takes a while to get the word out and assemble your crew. No such problems in Redcliffe. They had some of the Wilston crew show up in support, which made for a group of 6 or 7 on their very first night. The book was our extra-long December-January read, the darkly mysterious campus novel The Secret History, by Donna Tartt. How did it go?
“Really well! (I’m biased),” says Joseph, “It was great because half of the guys had read the book and half were last minute walk-ins. None of us who read it seemed to love it, but by the time we had finished recounting the story for the other goons we’d all convinced ourselves it was actually a decent book.”
Never underestimate the power of beer, conversation and self-belief. Here at TGBC we like to find redeeming qualities in books we think are shit, and shit things in books most think are classics. Being right isn’t as much fun as listening to a wildly different opinion and maybe learning how to change your own. Joseph’s advice for choosing a venue is also pretty good life advice – find somewhere everyone can meet in the middle, and don’t overthink it.
“[Redcliffe] has a pretty interesting reputation… It’s certainly gentrifying but my experience here is that it’s like stepping back in time in the best way possible. And on a personal note, the venue [Sunny’s Margate Beach] is the place my wife and I had a drink when we were house hunting. It was here that we realised how good Redcliffe would be to live and committed to moving here.”
See? Sit down, have a drink together, and suddenly a life-changing conversation is the easiest thing in the world. That’s what Tough Guy Book Club is about. If you live in Redcliffe, come down to Sunny’s and say hello to Joseph. If not, find your nearest chapter on the first Wednesday of the month at 7pm. We’d love to have you.
