Gee it's great, after being out late

The long tradition of country dances at community halls:
From the Hobart Mercury social notes, Tuesday 27 June 1939.
Image from www.trove.nla.gov.au 

One afternoon a week for a few weeks every year in a little town in rural Australia, teachers would frog march their charges, class by class, from the local school and along the streets to the community hall.
Coronation Hall always had an eerie feeling as the little kids filed through the doors and took their places on the pine bench seats, well polished by many bums, around an equally shiny dance floor.
Dance classes could be torture for a boy who would have been much happier with his dog and chasing rabbits along the local riverbank.
The fear of a pointing finger when the big-haired, florid-faced teacher needed a partner to demonstrate a dance would lie heavily in such a boy's belly.
A plump woman would hammer the keyboard of the upright piano on the stage in a 'stridish' style, with the rhythmic precision of a military band, and the kids would strut their stuff.
The vibrations of at least one of those tunes has echoed through the decades. The boy didn't know, until considerably later in life, that it actually had words.
Walkin' My Baby Back Home (copyright 1930), at the time of torture in Coronation Hall, had been revived by performers including Nat King Cole and had etched its mark into the hearts of newer generations. Dean Martin did a great version.
A natural for the dance hall, the rhythm induces movement and the lyrics are supremely suggestive of great night out in a country town.
"Gee, it's great after being out late ... arm in arm over meadow and farm ..."
On school dance night, Coronation Hall transformed from torture chamber to a special playground bathed in the sweet odour of ankle-deep sawdust spread over the dance floor.
When the boy's hair turned grey and he returned to the town, a slab of concrete had spread from behind the corner store over the hall site.
A neighbour weeding a garden nearby told the sad story: "Yes, they say there was hall there once. Apparently they used to put sawdust on the dance floor. Someone dropped a cigarette butt one night and the hall burnt down."
That was the end of an era at Coronation hall but the reverberations from those piano strings lives on.

Sources consulted for this article:
http://www.nla.gov.au
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pWm1QFPI4Q