Western Mail – Perth – 28 February 1935, page 9
He is known as ‘Red Flannel Joe‘ throughout the district. He is old and somewhat pompous and lives in a tin hut in what was once the main street of this little nor-west town of Peak Hill. It’s almost deserted now, and Joe’s structure is the only one on that side. In the summer evenings, he sits on his step facing into the street and peers with fading eyes at the few passers-by.
Hour after hour he sits silent and still, dreaming perhaps, of those early youthful days when he led a packhorse through the virgin bush from which he had seen the town spring up and then die. Dreaming of the boom days when he owned and worked several teams of horses carting wood for the mines and stone for the buildings, when money was free and beer plentiful and one’s blood ran hot and fast. Living in his memory the prosperous period of his butcher’s shop. Seeing again the brightly polished reflector of the brass carbide lamp – the only one in the town. It swung from a meat hook and cast its quivering light over the suspended carcasses.
He thought of his prospecting venture, the shafts he had sunk, the hopes dashed and revived again, and the gold he won. Few cross the road to speak to him. They know that the opportunity of ‘holding the floor’ is such a great change from his lonely drab existence that it is difficult to dam his verbiage. When darkness, at last, deprives him of sight, he gropes his way back inside and locks the door behind him. He lies on his bed of worn-out and untidy rugs but sleep does not come easily to the old man. Out of the darkness come to him in all kindliness, the departed spirits of his parents. All his troubles and miseries he tells to them out loud, the sounds disturbing and uncanny to any passing stranger.
He attends the post office every day for a letter that never comes. It’s a pitiful ruse to feel important. Sometimes he dresses for the occasion. The red flannel shirt, though soiled, peeps through like a bloodshot eye from between the buttons of his loosely fastened coat. A six-inch wide leather belt holds his concertinaed grey trousers precariously below the equator line of his protruding stomach. On special days he adds a weight gold watch chain from which is suspended two large nuggets of local gold stretched across his expansive chest. In the office, he clears his throat and coughs and importantly, adjusting his spectacles which only have one lens and are attached to his ears by loops of string, he asks for his mail.
His kindly nature and facile pen are a boon and a blessing to less educated old men. He advises, composes, and writes letters for several of them. With the reticence of a sensitive nature he forbears to ask for payment even for postage stamps he can ill afford. From his meager pittance, he buys sweets and biscuits for the children. The oldest inhabitant and one of the earliest pioneers, he is ending his days in prideful isolation, eager for the companionship he so seldom attains.
By ‘Suter Abis’ pseudonym for Jim McDonald.
Moya Sharp
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