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Mick’s got the mail on heritage post boxes

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They’ve been handsome sturdy fixtures of the Australian social and geographical landscape since the Gold Rush days but the ravages of time and progress have seriously depleted their numbers.

Heritage rescuer Mick Slocum says the historic postal boxes that once numbered in the thousands have been reduced to just 180. And he’s on a mission to help preserve a rare example at Geelong’s Eastern Beach.

A cast-iron postal box at the corner of Swanston and Alexandra, a square pyramid style shaped liked an obelisk with a large cornice, is up for a little of the TLC he’s rendered to more than 60 of these treasures to date.

His work in Ballarat recently earned him a National Trust excellence award, after restoring and painting 18 post boxes across the city in their original colours. He’s also turned his brushes to numerous post boxes throughout Melbourne, Bendigo, Castlemaine and other regional towns.

Now he’s eyeing Geelong and some other nearby sites.

What started as a graffiti clean-up on his first pillar post box, a local job, became a mission for the 76-year-old history buff.

“I’d driven past it 1000 times. It was covered in graffiti. One day I stopped and thought I’ll just clean it off for a minute,” he says.

“I bought some cleaning material, cleaned it up and looked at it and thought, I’ll just keep going.

“Then I bought cans of red, gold and black, went back and rubbed it all down and sanded it and resprayed it.

“It was a work of art and made me want to keep going.”

Mick’s love of Aussie heritage goes back a while. He’s celebrated Australia’s musical tradition since his youth, heading up national icon The Bushwhackers as frontman for many years as well as The Sundowners and Slocum & Co.

He’s earned himself an OAM along the journey for his service to the performing arts and if you cast around Flemington pubs you’ll still find him regularly displaying his accordion skills in sessions with long-time music mates.

There’s no mistaking him on the job either. Mick’s been a fashion model of the past for decades, resplendent in checks, tweeds, tartans, boaters and blazers, although he tones down a smidgin with more utilitarian clobber while working on the post boxes.

As for the boxes themselves, while common in Europe in the 18th century, they arrived in England in the 1850s and Melbourne in the 1860s.

They follow three main designs: two circular styles which are similar and cover the periods 1860 to 1875, and 1890 to 1920, respectively, and the more unusual square design of the Eastern Beach model – a design prominent between 1875 and 1890 across country Victoria.

Geelong Advertiser 15 November 2025

A dying art at Warrock

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Art takes a never-ending variety of guises. Given the number of artists extolled for their drafting skills, it seems only reasonable that good drafting might itself be considered a legitimate art form.

This is especially so when, as in so many artistic representations, a tale of some note accompanies the work. It is even more important given that it is a dying skill, one that has been slowly but surely replaced by the cyber skills of computer assisted drafting.

Take the measured drawings of the Warrock farming station north of Casterton overseen by Geelong architect and former Deakin University lecturer Lorraine Huddle.

The striking plans, elevations and sections prepared by 100 Deakin fourth-year architecture students for this project, undertaken in the early 1990s, presently live within the Special Collection of the Deakin woolstores campus library.

All up, there are some 230 drawings of the past settlement’s belfry, bull shed, homestead, shearing shed, shearers quarters, lavatories and much more. The drawings were worth an estimated $300,000 some 20 years ago, and were used by Heritage Victoria to assist in the station’s restoration.

 

The wider Warrock collection at Deakin includes monographs, maps, music, ephemera and pamphlets. However, it is the drawings that really strike the observer. Most are rendered in ink, some in pencil, and display inordinate details which at times extend as far as nail holes in timber weatherboards and often individual bricks.

The measured drawings were used for the restoration of dozens of buildings on the property, a Western District pastoral station about 30 km north of Casterton built by Scottish cabinet-maker George Robertson from the 1840s onwards.

It is considered Victoria’s, perhaps Australia’s, most important collection of farm buildings and includes 57 structures mostly built of sawn timber.

The complex sprawls across a gently rolling parkland of ancient river redgums with its grainstore, dairy, bacon house, blacksmith shop, bullock byre, branding shed and numerous other buildings reflecting the life of an isolated sheep station where all the necessary essential to life and such circumstances had to be grown or stored for long periods.

Other buildings in the complex include a pigsty, privies, stable, kennel, hayshed and hay barn, branding shed, foot dip, slaughterhouse, skin shed, cow bail, duck run, coach house and a cottage.

“Some of the buildings are just marvellous, they’re gorgeous,” said Huddle. “Also, it’s a dying art. All the Warrock drawings were done by hand. The students were very, very keen. The place got them in. There was no electricity there, only in the main house and a little cottage.

“One night I went walking about 10.30 and saw some lights in the conservatory. Students had placed candles in the dirt of a garden bed and were working on the drawings. That’s how keen they were.”

Huddle says George Robertson’s cabinet-making skills were reflected in the detail of numerous buildings at the station.

“You can also see his strong Protestant work ethic expressed in these buildings,” she says. “The bell tower, for instance, looks like a little chapel but it’s just a bell to call people to work.

“Time management was a pretty important part of that work ethic and while Robertson worked hard all the time, he treated his workers very well. He gave them good accommodation and looked after them a lot – but he expected them to work hard too.”

The original version of this article was published in the Geelong Advertiser 18 March 2001.

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