I first went to The Wild Goose Folk Club in February 1964 in my first year at Uni, and it had not been operating for very long.

The main room was long and narrow, with hard benches for the audience and a rock for the artists on the tiny stage at the foot of the stairs. The kitchen was at the back, but there was no bathroom, just some sort of tub (keg) that could be filled as a bath. Don Adolfo was the first live-in caretaker and he resided upstairs. When Bill Hicks was the resident musician, my bathroom at 12 Cromwell Street became the Wild Goose bathroom!

Between performances, we would offer Turkish coffee which always had a sludge at the bottom of the mug and should have been left in the mug. Newbies soon found out!

There was a pot-bellied stove to the right of the stage. When on the stage, the stove and the kitchen were to the right, audience to the left, front and all around when it got packed. The place was freezing in winter, and everyone tried to get a spot near the tiny stove. Many guideposts ended up in the stove as fuel. Once we put a big limb of a tree into the stove and audience members were sitting on the end of the limb. Every so often we’d stand up, shove the limb a bit further into the stove, and the person at the end of the limb would have to find another seat.

Roddy Glendinning was another artist in residence, and possibly Gerry Baulding – a sheep shearer at Colebrook, great blues singer and guitarist. Ken Wade also resident at one time.

Singers I remember playing there were: Don Adolfo, Ken Wade, Malcolm Brooks, David Voigt, Maeve Chick, Patsy Biscoe and Neil Chick. Tim Thorne and Bunny Lambert read poetry. Other performers included Little Beth Wilson (to distinguish her from me, Big Beth), Terry Eastman, Howard Eynon, Alan Chong (who introduced me to the world of folk music by being my guitarist), Bill Hicks (who taught me syncopated finger picking), Ian Young, Dave Puffer from Queensland, Jill from England who married Tony Rayner and Ken James from the Isle of Man. There would be heaps more and Mal Brooks with his elephant memory would remember them.

Chongy was the one who took me under his wing when I first arrived at the Goose. We would go to his house on the Sunday afternoon, I’d learn three songs (Peter Paul and Mary, Kingston Trio, etc.) and we would go on stage that night with the three songs. One Sunday afternoon, he said ‘I have an exam for my architecture course tomorrow so I can’t play for you tonight. Here’s my guitar: this is the chord of C, this is D, this is G and you’ll need C7 if you’re doing Banks of the Ohio.’

So, I learned the chords, went onstage that night, played Banks of the Ohio and when I got to the C7 bit I couldn’t remember which chord it was. Fortunately, a voice from the back of the room yelled ‘C7’ and away I went again! The Goose had the most forgiving audience, especially as the seats were hard, the place was freezing and the Turkish coffee was a trick or treat. I remember that when the walls of the building were stripped back to the brick work, they found a bullet embedded in a brick.

One time The Goose put on a production of Under Milkwood, I think it was, or A Streetcar Named Desire – maybe both – in that tiny space up near the kitchen.

In the end, the semi-attached houses in Hampden Rd were later demolished to make the current Prince of Wales car park.

These were iconic days of folk, with a lot of American songs by Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, and Tom Paxton. I did the Judy Collins, Joan Baez stuff and so did Patsy Biscoe, but there were also a lot of great blues singers. Maeve sang acapella Irish songs; however, I don’t remember much Aussie folk being done. The cringe factor was in place I think, yet we had singers in Oz like Gary Shearston, Tina Lawton who were great but I didn’t appreciate them until later.

I just LOVED the atmosphere of the Wild Goose, and at the Uni Revue in about 1965, they did a fabulous send up of it as the Dead Duck! They had Naive Sick strumming one chord of a zither and singing two verses on the one chord. I can’t remember what they called me, but I was depicted as a long-haired blonde who sang songs about murder, death, prison, etc. We just laughed and laughed at ourselves, but Patsy Biscoe was not amused when they did her as Pastry Biscuit!

You can watch Beth singing in the 1960s by clicking About a Mile From Hobart Town to go to that story, opening the video and scrubbing through to 11.17. Beth sings Coal Tattoo, then Alan Chong sings his own song, Down at Battery Point.