How Margie and Daniel met (Daniel's version)
1971
We met was January 1971, at a party at 82 Minamurra Rd, Northbridge, the home of my best friend from high school days, Mark Hourigan.
[Correction: Having compared my version of our meeting with Margie's I now realise she's right and I'm wrong about our first meeting place --- we did meet at the Scout Hall at Northridge as Margie stated, not at the Hourigan garage. In my memory the two venues have merged.]
The Hourigan parties were a constant feature of my teenage years. They were always held in an old wooden garage behind the main house.
The usual crowd—a mixture of friends of Mark and his two older brothers as well as his younger sister—was there. I went alone as only a few months earlier I had finally broken up with my previous long-term girlfriend, Christine. That relationship had been getting increasingly rocky since we both left school a year earlier and I was definitely still very wary of giving my heart to anyone else too quickly (let’s be honest, Christine dumped me, no vice versa, and it hurt).
The Hourigan garage that night was as it always was for these parties: hot, sweaty, loud and dingy. Someone (Mark’s brother, Peter?) introduced me to this girl, Margie Robinson, who had come to the party with a friend of his -- a big, burly guy who I had known for some years, but never more than casually as he was part of Peter Hourigan’s set and a couple of years older.
Smile, blonde hair (Another correction: Margie did not blonde her hair until several years later). That’s what I remember as my first physical impressions of Margie. And she was so easy to talk to.
I seem to recall we joked with each other for some time. Maybe we had a dance or two together. Margie definitely left an immediate impression on me, but my sense at the time was that she and her date that night seemed to be an “item” and so she was not “available”.
As boys from St Aloysius at Milsons Point, Mark Hourigan and I tended to focus on girls from Loreto Convent, just around the corner. But in 1971 there were always also a few girls from Monte St Angelo at North Sydney in the wider group of friends that I still hung out with, even though I was now at university. One of those Monte girls was Colleen Cogan. Colleen was very outgoing and bubbly—fun company and she never seemed to be tied to any one guy. As I recall I had invited her out a couple of times already.
Thus Colleen came to mind again when I was invited (through the Hourigan’s again) to a big group dinner at the Hofbrauhaus, a German-style restaurant in Kings Cross about March or April 1971. I needed a date for the dinner and Colleen accepted. But not long before the night Colleen was “grounded” by her parents for staying out past curfew. She rang me up to tell me she could no longer go to the Hofbrauhaus dinner and suggested that I might like to invite her friend, Margie Robinson, instead. Colleen seemed confident that Margie would accept the invitation. Nervously, I rang her. I never mentioned that I had previously asked Colleen to the dinner and Margie didn’t give me any sign that she was expecting the call or had spoken to Colleen. But Margie said “yes” without fuss.
I’m not sure whether I really remember anything about the Hofbrauhaus, or whether my “memories” are just implanted via the two photographs we have of the night.
I have always thought how special it is to have mementos of that first date. We look happy and we even staged an exaggerated kiss for the photographer. I know we had a good time. Margie was great company and it was relaxing to be with her. Nothing ever felt strained and conversation flowed easily.
Things seem to have moved along pretty quickly thereafter. Conscious that Christine’s main complaint against me as our relationship spiralled down was that I pushed too hard, I didn’t want to wreck a budding romance. But (via Colleen?) when I learnt that Margie’s birthday was coming up in May I was already involved enough that I bought her costume jewellery and went over to her house to surprise her with it. I was the one surprised because it turned out to be Margie’s 17th, not 18th birthday as I had assumed. I was a cradle snatcher!
The rest of 1971 and into 1972 saw a steady increase in the tempo of our relationship.
We soon fell into a set of favourite dates: trying to commit pizza suicide at Pizza Hut in Manly, champagne and roast chicken on Harbord Beach and, best of all, picnicking in the Blue Mountains (usually at Govett’s Leap). Meanwhile, I offered to help Margie with her higher school certificate maths, which was just an excuse to spend more time with her…..and this generous offer got me into her mother’s good books as well.
I can’t remember exactly the last time I went out with any other girl, but Margie was the only one on my mind from sometime in late 1971. I can remember missing her badly when she went up to the Gold Coast with her school friends to celebrate the end of school. She wrote me a card telling me she missed me too.
By the middle of 1972 we were definitely a steady couple and a few months later, in January 1973 we travelled on our first big trip together, a cruise around the Pacific.
Marriage was not yet on my mind. That came in the second half of 1973 when a job with the Department of Foreign Affairs was confirmed meaning that an early overseas diplomatic posting was also likely. I could not imagine going overseas without Margie and shortly thereafter we became engaged.
You can also read Margie version of how she and Daniel met here.