Kathleen Skene
“ABANDON hope. If you ever find yourself staying at The Evening Star Motel, then you will know for sure that God no longer loves you.”
That grim TripAdvisor review, authored by Sydneysider “Howard J”, sums up the generally miserable consensus of the holiday experience offered by the notorious doss house – and one-time murder scene – at 126 Frank St, Labrador.
Review after harrowing review chronicles the modernday horror story that was the Evening Star Motel in the last ramshackle years of business before it was demolished last month.
But there was more to this familiar grey-blue highway hotel than is commonly known.
After demolition wrapped up last week, all that remains of The Evening Star is a dirty block of land and some asbestos removal signs. The motel is gone – but not forgotten, and maybe not for good.
The owners have razed the fibro landmark to make way for a four-storey replacement motel – apparently with the same name, according to council planning documents.
The new Evening Star, approved by the council in 2016, would have 15 rooms, including two that are wheelchair accessible, rooftop terrace, undercover parking and a manager’s residence.
Features of the old Evening Star, which stood for decades on the former main highway, included windows without glass, fridges without power, toilets with no toilet paper – fights, grimy mattresses, police knocks and a pervasive feeling of being unsafe.
One guest wrote: “I was expecting a fire. Do not stay.”
“Consistently checked to see that my car wasn’t stolen,” despaired another.
“There are no words. Never put yourself through this terrible existence,” warned a fourth.
After her holiday, Jessica from Malaysia said “Nothing’s good. We finished the half roll of toilet paper provided by the motel then we needed to use our own box tissues from the second day onwards.”
“I wouldn’t recommend this place to my worst enemy,” says one survivor.
“Definitely do not children or elderly to place,” wrote another.
Hiu from Hong Kong’s review described the Evening Star as “Hemp land, because halfway stop water” – but maybe that was an autotranslate fail.
The Bulletin has attempted to contact the current owners of the Evening Star, who submitted plans for the new motel in 2016 – however they are proving difficult to track down.
The plans were submitted by a company called BW Evening Star, whose directors Bo Feng and Xiaoling Chen have registered addresses where they do not actually live.
Last year, the motel appeared to stop taking paying guests and squatters moved in, tearing the televisions from the take this walls, lighting fires inside and generally trashing what was left of the sky-blue buildings.
Southport councillor Dawn Crichlow said the motel had been used as emergency accommodation by local homeless services – but it had gone swiftly downhill “when the druggies moved in”.
“It certainly put a roof over the heads of many people who were homeless – we used to ring the homeless service when we found people who needed help and they would put them in there,” she said.
“Then it went backwards and a lot of druggies got into it, they started having fires.
“They filmed the first episode of Gold Coast Cops right across the road.”
The only news photos of the Evening Star in the Gold Coast Bulletin’s archives are of forensics-suited police carting the body of a stabbed drug dealer down the stairs in July of 2004.
But dig deeper into the motel’s history and it becomes a lot cheerier – even cool.
The Evening Star was once called The Belvedere and was one of scores of funky 1960s motels that sprung up on the Gold Coast Highway between Labrador and Coolangatta.
As the Gold Coast grew into Australia’s playground, architects shirked the day-to-day drudgery of the capitals and an out-of-the-box array of highway motels blossomed.
The Gold Coast Council’s Heritage Advisory Service estimated there were 80 of the postmodern masterpieces left on the Gold Coast Highway by the early 2000s.
The Belvedere was a jaunty red brick split-level, with a lush green lawn and a handpainted sign advertising its rooms as self-contained with TV.
After it became the Evening Star, the motel’s fibro front was added, and painted peach, before renovations left it the faded sky blue of its later years.
Cr Crichlow said it was good to see what was left of the motel consigned to history.
“Oh well, we’ll have a new hotel there – and best of luck to them,” she said.