Bringing 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 at Bendigo’s Pall Mall yesterday, and the Ballarat train station last week, to re-paint historic cast iron post boxes.

With spray cans and brushes, Slocum worked out in the sun on the structures, which were the 27th and 28th he’d restored across the state to 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 Bendigo postal gem shine, Slocum had an audience of passers-by.

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 1000 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.”