“It’s kind of strange, being plonked back into your former life, as an adult,” Darren Hanlon says. The 48-year old musician is on the phone, sitting in the old housing commission home he grew up in. The story of how he ended up back in Gympie, in southeast Queensland, has a New Testament ring to it. First, his partner, Shelley Short – the US folk singer who first duetted with Hanlon on his 2010 single All These Things – discovered she was pregnant. Living on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean, the expectant parents reunited in Portland in February 2020, when a plague spreading across the US west coast forced them to make a snap decision to flee.
Flying to Hawaii to avoid America’s mainland transit hubs, they were almost stranded – until a Qantas attendant at Honolulu airport quietly told them to return the next day. “She must have felt sorry, saw Shelley sort of waddling out of there, it was very biblical,” Hanlon says. “So she just snuck us onto this plane and, as we took off, the pilot said, ‘You guys are very lucky, this is the last Qantas 747 flight for the foreseeable future.’”
