Like Home and Away on crack: will Aussies bristle at toxic beach Ockers?
"I hope everyone has tough enough skin to know that it's only a bit of craic."
Irish director Lorcan Finnegan smiles as he ponders the possibility that Australians will baulk, and maybe even bristle, at his unflattering depiction of tribal and toxic Ocker Aussies in his trippy psychological thriller The Surfer starring Nicolas Cage.
Filmed in Yallingup, the home of surf champ Taj Burrow near Busselton in Western Australia, The Surfer sets Cage on a sun-baked slow boil as a returning expat who's made an offer on a big house overlooking the idyllic beach where he grew up.
He dreams that coming home to Luna Bay will bring him closer to his son and maybe save his marriage.
But the thuggish gang of local surfers here won't let "outsiders" like him ride the waves, so bonding with his boy on their surfboards isn't looking likely. "Locals only", the beach signs warn.
"Don't live here, don't surf here" the menacing Bay Boys growl to his face.
But as the abuse of the louts escalates - beating him up, stealing his surfboard, vandalising his Lexus - Cage, desperately driven by ego, alienation and an aching sense of nostalgia, won't let it go and sets up camp in the carpark above the beach.
It's a sweaty, chafing, dementedly macho scenario of sometimes surreal savagery cooked up with fiendish glee by Finnegan and scriptwriter (and fellow Irishman) Thomas Martin to push Cage to breaking point.
As the hallucinogenic effects of blistering sun and extreme heat and the humiliations meted out by alpha male Julian McMahon's cult of bogan bullies pile up, he loses his fancy watch, his phone charger, his shoes and, inevitably, his mind.
Those strange distortions staring back at him in the metal mirror in the carpark toilet block begin to feel frighteningly real.
Partially inspired by the aggressively territorial Lunada Bay Boys, a surf gang that notoriously claimed a stretch of Californian coast as their own, the film's more recognisable reference is a retro B-movie visual style and gonzo tone that evokes Australian New Wave films of the 1970s. Think Wake in Fright (1971), The Last Wave (1977) and Long Weekend (1978).
Finnegan calls The Surfer's vibe "strange and dreamy" but there's a riptide of horror running through the cinematography of Radek Ladczuk (The Babadook, The Nightingale) and the eerily off-kilter score by Franois Tétaz (Wolf Creek).
Wake In Fright, Ted Kotcheff's skin-crawling portrait of an ugly Australia (notorious for its kangaroo hunt sequence and notable for being Chips Rafferty's final film and Jack Thompson's first), is an unmistakable influence. With its own animalistic grotesquery, The Surfer plays like Wake in Fright in wetsuits.
"When I started filmmaking, Australian New Wave and Ozploitation films were a massive inspiration," Finnegan says. "My very first film Without Name was inspired by Picnic At Hanging Rock, the Peter Weir film, and Colin Eggleston's Long Weekend.
"So for this film, yeah, we were watching a lot of Wake in Fright and also Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout. Those films have the tradition of the outsider. Not only the outsider as a character, but the outsider as the filmmaker going to Australia and making a very Australian film - with Nic Roeg being British and Ted Kotcheff being Canadian."
But Finnegan insists he didn't set out to hold up a warped public toilet mirror to Australians.
"This isn't a critique of Australia," he says.
"It's about a very specific group of people on this beach. To me, these guys are almost part of the Jungian journey that Nic Cage's character has to go on ... they are representative of some sort of shadow self within him. What he believes he wants at the beginning of the film is just this materialist goal of owning this house and that will fix all of his problems and his relationships. They have to be mean to him because, as they say, before you can surf you must suffer. To me these characters are almost caricatures [and] ... poking fun at that sort of hypermasculinity and the male ego in crisis."
Cage, the Oscar-winner for 1995's Leaving Las Vegas who relished playing a version of his kooky self in 2022's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, leans hard into The Surfer's Kafkaesque absurdity.
The film's ending comes without his character exacting the ultimate revenge we might have expected and without one of those head-bursts-into-Ghost Rider-flames explosions of Cage rage that have become the actor's trademark.
But, like Wake in Fright's outsider driven to madness by the locals, Cage takes his descent into some very unsavoury places.
At one point in his disintegration into delirium he flirts with eating a dead rat, then he uses it as a weapon (Look out for the line "Eat the rat!" coming to a Cage meme near you). There's also a scene involving a nest of bird eggs that takes you all the way back to 1989 and his cockroach-eating scene in Vampire's Kiss.
Like Walkabout, Finnegan lays on deliberately discomforting cutaway close-ups to cackling kookaburras, shrieking cicadas and echidnas clawing at the earth. The flies - drawn to Cage's sunburn and sweat make-up ("there was a lot of fake sweat") - were an authentic bonus.
"We were just lucky with the flies," he laughs. "I thought we were lucky. I don't think the actors thought that."
Like many in Ireland and the UK, the filmmaker (whose previous films include Jesse Eisenberg sci-fi horror Vivarium and Eva Green thriller Nocebo) grew up with sunshine-filled Aussie soaps like Home & Away and Neighbours.
He seems to relish the suggestion his pulpy psychodrama flips that image on its ugly edge and plays like Home & Away on crack.
"Yes, the score for the film by Franois Tetaz, for the scene where Nic is walking around drinking out of puddles and eating bird eggs, has a piece of music called Clam's Casino that actually has flavours of Skippy in it."
What's that, Skip? The outsiders have stolen your banjo-and-harmonica innocence and turned it into a demented riff on dinkum tribalism? Tsk tsk!
"I hope everyone has tough enough skin to know that it's only a bit of craic."
Irish director Lorcan Finnegan smiles as he ponders the possibility that Australians will baulk, and maybe even bristle, at his unflattering depiction of tribal and toxic Ocker Aussies in his trippy psychological thriller The Surfer starring Nicolas Cage.
Filmed in Yallingup, the home of surf champ Taj Burrow near Busselton in Western Australia, The Surfer sets Cage on a sun-baked slow boil as a returning expat who's made an offer on a big house overlooking the idyllic beach where he grew up.
He dreams that coming home to Luna Bay will bring him closer to his son and maybe save his marriage.
But the thuggish gang of local surfers here won't let "outsiders" like him ride the waves, so bonding with his boy on their surfboards isn't looking likely. "Locals only", the beach signs warn.
"Don't live here, don't surf here" the menacing Bay Boys growl to his face.
But as the abuse of the louts escalates - beating him up, stealing his surfboard, vandalising his Lexus - Cage, desperately driven by ego, alienation and an aching sense of nostalgia, won't let it go and sets up camp in the carpark above the beach.
It's a sweaty, chafing, dementedly macho scenario of sometimes surreal savagery cooked up with fiendish glee by Finnegan and scriptwriter (and fellow Irishman) Thomas Martin to push Cage to breaking point.
As the hallucinogenic effects of blistering sun and extreme heat and the humiliations meted out by alpha male Julian McMahon's cult of bogan bullies pile up, he loses his fancy watch, his phone charger, his shoes and, inevitably, his mind.
Those strange distortions staring back at him in the metal mirror in the carpark toilet block begin to feel frighteningly real.
Partially inspired by the aggressively territorial Lunada Bay Boys, a surf gang that notoriously claimed a stretch of Californian coast as their own, the film's more recognisable reference is a retro B-movie visual style and gonzo tone that evokes Australian New Wave films of the 1970s. Think Wake in Fright (1971), The Last Wave (1977) and Long Weekend (1978).
Finnegan calls The Surfer's vibe "strange and dreamy" but there's a riptide of horror running through the cinematography of Radek Ladczuk (The Babadook, The Nightingale) and the eerily off-kilter score by Franois Tétaz (Wolf Creek).
Wake In Fright, Ted Kotcheff's skin-crawling portrait of an ugly Australia (notorious for its kangaroo hunt sequence and notable for being Chips Rafferty's final film and Jack Thompson's first), is an unmistakable influence. With its own animalistic grotesquery, The Surfer plays like Wake in Fright in wetsuits.
"When I started filmmaking, Australian New Wave and Ozploitation films were a massive inspiration," Finnegan says. "My very first film Without Name was inspired by Picnic At Hanging Rock, the Peter Weir film, and Colin Eggleston's Long Weekend.
"So for this film, yeah, we were watching a lot of Wake in Fright and also Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout. Those films have the tradition of the outsider. Not only the outsider as a character, but the outsider as the filmmaker going to Australia and making a very Australian film - with Nic Roeg being British and Ted Kotcheff being Canadian."
But Finnegan insists he didn't set out to hold up a warped public toilet mirror to Australians.
"This isn't a critique of Australia," he says.
"It's about a very specific group of people on this beach. To me, these guys are almost part of the Jungian journey that Nic Cage's character has to go on ... they are representative of some sort of shadow self within him. What he believes he wants at the beginning of the film is just this materialist goal of owning this house and that will fix all of his problems and his relationships. They have to be mean to him because, as they say, before you can surf you must suffer. To me these characters are almost caricatures [and] ... poking fun at that sort of hypermasculinity and the male ego in crisis."
Cage, the Oscar-winner for 1995's Leaving Las Vegas who relished playing a version of his kooky self in 2022's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, leans hard into The Surfer's Kafkaesque absurdity.
The film's ending comes without his character exacting the ultimate revenge we might have expected and without one of those head-bursts-into-Ghost Rider-flames explosions of Cage rage that have become the actor's trademark.
But, like Wake in Fright's outsider driven to madness by the locals, Cage takes his descent into some very unsavoury places.
At one point in his disintegration into delirium he flirts with eating a dead rat, then he uses it as a weapon (Look out for the line "Eat the rat!" coming to a Cage meme near you). There's also a scene involving a nest of bird eggs that takes you all the way back to 1989 and his cockroach-eating scene in Vampire's Kiss.
Like Walkabout, Finnegan lays on deliberately discomforting cutaway close-ups to cackling kookaburras, shrieking cicadas and echidnas clawing at the earth. The flies - drawn to Cage's sunburn and sweat make-up ("there was a lot of fake sweat") - were an authentic bonus.
"We were just lucky with the flies," he laughs. "I thought we were lucky. I don't think the actors thought that."
Like many in Ireland and the UK, the filmmaker (whose previous films include Jesse Eisenberg sci-fi horror Vivarium and Eva Green thriller Nocebo) grew up with sunshine-filled Aussie soaps like Home & Away and Neighbours.
He seems to relish the suggestion his pulpy psychodrama flips that image on its ugly edge and plays like Home & Away on crack.
"Yes, the score for the film by Franois Tetaz, for the scene where Nic is walking around drinking out of puddles and eating bird eggs, has a piece of music called Clam's Casino that actually has flavours of Skippy in it."
What's that, Skip? The outsiders have stolen your banjo-and-harmonica innocence and turned it into a demented riff on dinkum tribalism? Tsk tsk!
"I hope everyone has tough enough skin to know that it's only a bit of craic."
Irish director Lorcan Finnegan smiles as he ponders the possibility that Australians will baulk, and maybe even bristle, at his unflattering depiction of tribal and toxic Ocker Aussies in his trippy psychological thriller The Surfer starring Nicolas Cage.
Filmed in Yallingup, the home of surf champ Taj Burrow near Busselton in Western Australia, The Surfer sets Cage on a sun-baked slow boil as a returning expat who's made an offer on a big house overlooking the idyllic beach where he grew up.
He dreams that coming home to Luna Bay will bring him closer to his son and maybe save his marriage.
But the thuggish gang of local surfers here won't let "outsiders" like him ride the waves, so bonding with his boy on their surfboards isn't looking likely. "Locals only", the beach signs warn.
"Don't live here, don't surf here" the menacing Bay Boys growl to his face.
But as the abuse of the louts escalates - beating him up, stealing his surfboard, vandalising his Lexus - Cage, desperately driven by ego, alienation and an aching sense of nostalgia, won't let it go and sets up camp in the carpark above the beach.
It's a sweaty, chafing, dementedly macho scenario of sometimes surreal savagery cooked up with fiendish glee by Finnegan and scriptwriter (and fellow Irishman) Thomas Martin to push Cage to breaking point.
As the hallucinogenic effects of blistering sun and extreme heat and the humiliations meted out by alpha male Julian McMahon's cult of bogan bullies pile up, he loses his fancy watch, his phone charger, his shoes and, inevitably, his mind.
Those strange distortions staring back at him in the metal mirror in the carpark toilet block begin to feel frighteningly real.
Partially inspired by the aggressively territorial Lunada Bay Boys, a surf gang that notoriously claimed a stretch of Californian coast as their own, the film's more recognisable reference is a retro B-movie visual style and gonzo tone that evokes Australian New Wave films of the 1970s. Think Wake in Fright (1971), The Last Wave (1977) and Long Weekend (1978).
Finnegan calls The Surfer's vibe "strange and dreamy" but there's a riptide of horror running through the cinematography of Radek Ladczuk (The Babadook, The Nightingale) and the eerily off-kilter score by Franois Tétaz (Wolf Creek).
Wake In Fright, Ted Kotcheff's skin-crawling portrait of an ugly Australia (notorious for its kangaroo hunt sequence and notable for being Chips Rafferty's final film and Jack Thompson's first), is an unmistakable influence. With its own animalistic grotesquery, The Surfer plays like Wake in Fright in wetsuits.
"When I started filmmaking, Australian New Wave and Ozploitation films were a massive inspiration," Finnegan says. "My very first film Without Name was inspired by Picnic At Hanging Rock, the Peter Weir film, and Colin Eggleston's Long Weekend.
"So for this film, yeah, we were watching a lot of Wake in Fright and also Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout. Those films have the tradition of the outsider. Not only the outsider as a character, but the outsider as the filmmaker going to Australia and making a very Australian film - with Nic Roeg being British and Ted Kotcheff being Canadian."
But Finnegan insists he didn't set out to hold up a warped public toilet mirror to Australians.
"This isn't a critique of Australia," he says.
"It's about a very specific group of people on this beach. To me, these guys are almost part of the Jungian journey that Nic Cage's character has to go on ... they are representative of some sort of shadow self within him. What he believes he wants at the beginning of the film is just this materialist goal of owning this house and that will fix all of his problems and his relationships. They have to be mean to him because, as they say, before you can surf you must suffer. To me these characters are almost caricatures [and] ... poking fun at that sort of hypermasculinity and the male ego in crisis."
Cage, the Oscar-winner for 1995's Leaving Las Vegas who relished playing a version of his kooky self in 2022's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, leans hard into The Surfer's Kafkaesque absurdity.
The film's ending comes without his character exacting the ultimate revenge we might have expected and without one of those head-bursts-into-Ghost Rider-flames explosions of Cage rage that have become the actor's trademark.
But, like Wake in Fright's outsider driven to madness by the locals, Cage takes his descent into some very unsavoury places.
At one point in his disintegration into delirium he flirts with eating a dead rat, then he uses it as a weapon (Look out for the line "Eat the rat!" coming to a Cage meme near you). There's also a scene involving a nest of bird eggs that takes you all the way back to 1989 and his cockroach-eating scene in Vampire's Kiss.
Like Walkabout, Finnegan lays on deliberately discomforting cutaway close-ups to cackling kookaburras, shrieking cicadas and echidnas clawing at the earth. The flies - drawn to Cage's sunburn and sweat make-up ("there was a lot of fake sweat") - were an authentic bonus.
"We were just lucky with the flies," he laughs. "I thought we were lucky. I don't think the actors thought that."
Like many in Ireland and the UK, the filmmaker (whose previous films include Jesse Eisenberg sci-fi horror Vivarium and Eva Green thriller Nocebo) grew up with sunshine-filled Aussie soaps like Home & Away and Neighbours.
He seems to relish the suggestion his pulpy psychodrama flips that image on its ugly edge and plays like Home & Away on crack.
"Yes, the score for the film by Franois Tetaz, for the scene where Nic is walking around drinking out of puddles and eating bird eggs, has a piece of music called Clam's Casino that actually has flavours of Skippy in it."
What's that, Skip? The outsiders have stolen your banjo-and-harmonica innocence and turned it into a demented riff on dinkum tribalism? Tsk tsk!
"I hope everyone has tough enough skin to know that it's only a bit of craic."
Irish director Lorcan Finnegan smiles as he ponders the possibility that Australians will baulk, and maybe even bristle, at his unflattering depiction of tribal and toxic Ocker Aussies in his trippy psychological thriller The Surfer starring Nicolas Cage.
Filmed in Yallingup, the home of surf champ Taj Burrow near Busselton in Western Australia, The Surfer sets Cage on a sun-baked slow boil as a returning expat who's made an offer on a big house overlooking the idyllic beach where he grew up.
He dreams that coming home to Luna Bay will bring him closer to his son and maybe save his marriage.
But the thuggish gang of local surfers here won't let "outsiders" like him ride the waves, so bonding with his boy on their surfboards isn't looking likely. "Locals only", the beach signs warn.
"Don't live here, don't surf here" the menacing Bay Boys growl to his face.
But as the abuse of the louts escalates - beating him up, stealing his surfboard, vandalising his Lexus - Cage, desperately driven by ego, alienation and an aching sense of nostalgia, won't let it go and sets up camp in the carpark above the beach.
It's a sweaty, chafing, dementedly macho scenario of sometimes surreal savagery cooked up with fiendish glee by Finnegan and scriptwriter (and fellow Irishman) Thomas Martin to push Cage to breaking point.
As the hallucinogenic effects of blistering sun and extreme heat and the humiliations meted out by alpha male Julian McMahon's cult of bogan bullies pile up, he loses his fancy watch, his phone charger, his shoes and, inevitably, his mind.
Those strange distortions staring back at him in the metal mirror in the carpark toilet block begin to feel frighteningly real.
Partially inspired by the aggressively territorial Lunada Bay Boys, a surf gang that notoriously claimed a stretch of Californian coast as their own, the film's more recognisable reference is a retro B-movie visual style and gonzo tone that evokes Australian New Wave films of the 1970s. Think Wake in Fright (1971), The Last Wave (1977) and Long Weekend (1978).
Finnegan calls The Surfer's vibe "strange and dreamy" but there's a riptide of horror running through the cinematography of Radek Ladczuk (The Babadook, The Nightingale) and the eerily off-kilter score by Franois Tétaz (Wolf Creek).
Wake In Fright, Ted Kotcheff's skin-crawling portrait of an ugly Australia (notorious for its kangaroo hunt sequence and notable for being Chips Rafferty's final film and Jack Thompson's first), is an unmistakable influence. With its own animalistic grotesquery, The Surfer plays like Wake in Fright in wetsuits.
"When I started filmmaking, Australian New Wave and Ozploitation films were a massive inspiration," Finnegan says. "My very first film Without Name was inspired by Picnic At Hanging Rock, the Peter Weir film, and Colin Eggleston's Long Weekend.
"So for this film, yeah, we were watching a lot of Wake in Fright and also Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout. Those films have the tradition of the outsider. Not only the outsider as a character, but the outsider as the filmmaker going to Australia and making a very Australian film - with Nic Roeg being British and Ted Kotcheff being Canadian."
But Finnegan insists he didn't set out to hold up a warped public toilet mirror to Australians.
"This isn't a critique of Australia," he says.
"It's about a very specific group of people on this beach. To me, these guys are almost part of the Jungian journey that Nic Cage's character has to go on ... they are representative of some sort of shadow self within him. What he believes he wants at the beginning of the film is just this materialist goal of owning this house and that will fix all of his problems and his relationships. They have to be mean to him because, as they say, before you can surf you must suffer. To me these characters are almost caricatures [and] ... poking fun at that sort of hypermasculinity and the male ego in crisis."
Cage, the Oscar-winner for 1995's Leaving Las Vegas who relished playing a version of his kooky self in 2022's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, leans hard into The Surfer's Kafkaesque absurdity.
The film's ending comes without his character exacting the ultimate revenge we might have expected and without one of those head-bursts-into-Ghost Rider-flames explosions of Cage rage that have become the actor's trademark.
But, like Wake in Fright's outsider driven to madness by the locals, Cage takes his descent into some very unsavoury places.
At one point in his disintegration into delirium he flirts with eating a dead rat, then he uses it as a weapon (Look out for the line "Eat the rat!" coming to a Cage meme near you). There's also a scene involving a nest of bird eggs that takes you all the way back to 1989 and his cockroach-eating scene in Vampire's Kiss.
Like Walkabout, Finnegan lays on deliberately discomforting cutaway close-ups to cackling kookaburras, shrieking cicadas and echidnas clawing at the earth. The flies - drawn to Cage's sunburn and sweat make-up ("there was a lot of fake sweat") - were an authentic bonus.
"We were just lucky with the flies," he laughs. "I thought we were lucky. I don't think the actors thought that."
Like many in Ireland and the UK, the filmmaker (whose previous films include Jesse Eisenberg sci-fi horror Vivarium and Eva Green thriller Nocebo) grew up with sunshine-filled Aussie soaps like Home & Away and Neighbours.
He seems to relish the suggestion his pulpy psychodrama flips that image on its ugly edge and plays like Home & Away on crack.
"Yes, the score for the film by Franois Tetaz, for the scene where Nic is walking around drinking out of puddles and eating bird eggs, has a piece of music called Clam's Casino that actually has flavours of Skippy in it."
What's that, Skip? The outsiders have stolen your banjo-and-harmonica innocence and turned it into a demented riff on dinkum tribalism? Tsk tsk!
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- Perth Now
Infamous Aussie outback pub up for sale
An infamous Aussie pub at the centre of an eight-year-old outback mystery and a Netflix series that gripped the world has hit the market. The Larrimah Hotel in the Northern Territory is for sale for the first time since the popular two-part series was released in 2023. The show delved into the disappearance of Paddy Moriarty who was one of town's 12 residents and a regular at the pub when he went missing. The Irish-born 70-year-old was last seen with his red kelpie cross Kellie leaving the Pink Panther Hotel in Larrimah on December 16, 2017. Publican Steve Baldwin bought the pub from Barry Sharpe in 2018 not long after Mr Moriarty went missing. Paddy Moriarty lived in Larrimah for 11 years when he mysteriously disappeared after leaving the Larrimah Hotel in December 2017. Helen Orr Credit: News Corp Australia The hotel is located about 500km south of Darwin in the middle of the Northern Territory along the Stuart Highway and is a popular stopover for travellers and tourists keen to know more about the town where Mr Moriarty disappeared. Real estate agent Warren Andrews is selling the property listed for $795,00 saying, 'You have to see it to believe it'. He describes the hotel as everything you would expect and want in a 'true blue Aussie bush pub.' 'From the pink panthers, the giant draught stubble, to the resident emus and crocodiles, this pub is steeped in history and mystique,' he said. Real Estate agent Warren Andrews said the classic Aussie bush pub had everything from pink panthers, giant stubbies, emus, crocodiles and was steeped in history and mystique. Jason Walls Credit: Supplied Mr Baldwin told NewsWire there was more to the pub's history than the tale about one of its most regular punters disappearing. 'The pub will be 100 years old in five years, it was created during the war by the military and played a big part,' he said. 'We're at the end of the railway line from Darwin, where a lot of troops would come from down from, then go south to Alice Springs and then to Mount Isa and end up back here on the train. 'They built an airstrip here after the bombing in Darwin. 'There were nearly 10,000 people here which is huge, now there is eight.' Mr Baldwin said three of its residents had died since Last Stop Larrimah first aired on Netflix. 'They were all geriatrics,' he said. 'According to Carl, who was in the Netflix show and lived across the road, he reckons there was no beer on tap here for about 30 years,' he said. 'There were taps in the cool room when I got here that weren't being used so we opened the place up and rebuilt the bar.' The Larrimah Hotel, also known as the Pink Panther Hotel, is located about 500km south of Darwin in the NT. Jason Walls Credit: Supplied Mr Baldwin said it was hard to quantify how many visitors passed through the hotel each year but more and more people stopped to find out more about the mysterious town. He said a new gas plant in the Beetaloo Basin was due to start soon which would bring more workers to the region. The pub also comes with two crocodiles called Sneaky Sam and Agro that live out the back of the hotel and are fed by Mr Baldwin. 'We say we are selling the crocs and we'll chuck in the pub,' he said. When asked how much a crocodile was worth, Mr Baldwin replied, '$795,000.' Publican Steve Baldwin said the NT government recently increased the reward to find out what happened to missing punter Paddy Moriarty to $500,000. Jason Walls Credit: Supplied 'I just want to slow down a bit and retire,' he said. 'It's a good opportunity for a low level entry into a good business that has lots of opportunity going forward. 'You don't often get a 100-year-old building here in the tropics, or in the Territory, or one at the centre of a Netflix series, and he still hasn't been found. 'There was a reward of $250,000 to find out what happened to Paddy Moriarty, and in the budget last week the treasurer upped it to $500,000. 'I don't know it will ever be solved, and the old publican has died. 'Fran still lives here, she's 81 years old now, she'll stand on the balcony or come in here and say, 'He's leaving, don't go missing now'.'
