Artist brings post boxes back to life

ONE man is on a mission to bring Victoria’s heritage post boxes back to their former red and gold glory.

Seventy-five-year-old Mick Slocum was in Ballarat last week to repaint the historic cast iron post box out the front of the train station.

With spray cans and brushes, Slocum worked out in the heat through the afternoon of March 21 on the structure, which was one of 27 he’d restored across the state to that date.

Slocum’s work was initially voluntary, but when Australia Post heard about him, and his broader goal to repaint all heritage post boxes across Victoria, they put him on the payroll.

The first six boxes were self-funded by Slocum, but they’ve all been passion projects.

“I have really enjoyed coming up the country because I get to meet a lot of really interesting people,” he said. “These post boxes are cast iron and made in Australia, and they’re half an inch thick. This one will still be here in another hundred years, at least.

“They are well worthy of preservation, and extremely valuable.”

As he made the Ballarat postal gem shine, Slocum had an audience of people including passers-by, a letter-poster, and Ballarat Historical Society president Marion Littlejohn, who snapped some photos for their archives.

Slocum is an artist, but not the visual type you may expect. He’s a folk musician known by many as the frontman of The Bushwackers.

He said his DIY renovation experience gave him the confidence to clean and paint his first old post box in inner-Melbourne.

“I must have driven past it 1,000 times,” he said. “It was covered in graffiti, and I just stopped one day and thought I’ll just clean it off for a minute.

“I came home, bought some cleaning material, cleaned off the graffiti, and stood back and looked at it and thought, I’ll just keep going.

“I went down to the hardware store, bought a can of red, a can of gold, and a can of black and went back and rubbed it all down and sanded it and resprayed it.

“The rest has been history, really.”

Putting his spray cans and brushes to work is surely different to playing the accordion and singing a tune, but Slocum said it’s been a fun creative outlet, and a community contribution.

“We’re lifting the veil on colonial heritage,” he said. “These things have been around for 140 years… and used to be emptied three times a day, and they were full.

“They were initially put in in Melbourne in the 1850s, and they were a green colour, then they changed them to red and gold about the 1880s.”

Slocum said the next heritage post box on his list would be in Bendigo.