Archie Hancock appeared on Christmas postcards in Goulburn about the time he became a national celebrity, appearing on 60 Minutes and the Ray Martin Midday Show, after his election at the age of 80. Photo: Supplied by Helen Hawkins.
In moth-eaten clothes done up with safety pins that he called ”bachelor’s buttons”, Archie Hancock became an unlikely hero in Goulburn in the early 1980s when he was elected to the city council on his fourth attempt.
Archie is best remembered for walking from his cottage at North Goulburn into town every day with a potato sack over his shoulder and rifling through garbage bins in the streets and parks.
His election to the council at age 80 outraged some people. An editorial in the local paper warned of the council being turned into a circus. A former alderman, Miriam Naughton, later threatened to sue Archie for comments he made on national television.
Most people embraced him, showering him with 455 first-preference votes when he finally succeeded in winning a seat on the Goulburn City Council. They duly returned him in 1987.
Born in Broadway, Sydney, and employed as a blacksmith, he and his family moved to Goulburn during the Depression, where his father-in-law owned land, according to a front-page article in The Sydney Morning Herald, which followed his election to the council.
Archie and his wife, Dorothy, who later separated, had two daughters, Janet and Jean, and two sons, Wally and David, who both died tragically.
Carrying water to his parents’ house one early afternoon on a property about 13 kilometres from Goulburn, Wally suddenly collapsed. Archie placed him on a motor lorry and drove to St John of God Hospital, where his son was pronounced dead.
In August 1964, David died when he fell down a cliff face at Bungonia Gorge, east of Goulburn. He was 17. He and a friend were climbing down a steep cliff near the bottom of the gorge, using a rope. When they were about 15 metres from the bottom of the cliff, the rope snagged. David tried to free it but slipped and fell from the cliff face, receiving fatal injuries.
Archie’s eldest granddaughter, Deborah Davis Richards, was 13 when she and her brothers and sisters and mother, Janet, moved from Melbourne to Goulburn in 1974.
“I can remember the first time we went there [Archie’s home]. We walked into the house and there was rubbish everywhere,” she said.
“We went inside, and you could tell this person was a hoarder, there were lots of newspapers. Inside, it was literally stacked to the ceiling with little pathways through the middle of just … stuff. I remember looking around, thinking, ‘Where does he sleep?’.
“The only time I have known him, he has had the sack over his shoulder, carrying rubbish out of the garbage bins. But he didn’t just collect it, he repaired it.”
A younger Archie Hancock (right) loading pipes on the back of his truck at Gulson’s Brickworks in North Goulburn. He worked for some years delivering pipes from the brickyards. Photo: (Geoff Gulson) Memories of Goulburn, Heather West and Lynette Brown.
Author Jenny Hume recalls Archie reciting Shakespeare and poetry at the dinner table after her sister Ingrid invited him home for Christmas at the family’s historic residence, Garroorigang.
The invitation was prompted by a story in the local paper saying he had nowhere to go for Christmas dinner and would probably sit beside his mother’s grave and eat a sandwich.
When Ingrid asked where she could meet and collect him for Christmas dinner, Archie had said: “Bin number 59.” (Public bins were numbered in Goulburn). He became a regular guest for Christmas dinner.
“He always wore his suit and he’d sit up at the head of the table,” Jenny said.
“He was a very intelligent man, old Archie. He would stop children in the street and talk to them about morality and quote poetry to them.
“He was always very interesting to listen to at the dining table.”
One year, the Humes decided to hold a smaller dinner for immediate family and Archie wasn’t invited.
“Next minute there’s an article in the paper. He was going to sit beside his mother’s grave because the lady who normally asked him to Christmas hadn’t asked him this year,” Jenny said. “And Ingrid said, ‘The old bugger’.”
Ingrid returned to bin 59 and collected Archie.
He spent his final days in a nursing home where Janet, who had endured a tumultuous relationship with her father, looked after him.
Following Archie’s death in the early 1990s, Goulburn historian and restoration enthusiast Roger Bayley bought a wheelbarrow full of nuts and bolts, long out of their manufacturing date, from an auction of miscellaneous things from Archie’s home. Among the assorted nuts and bolts was a mould for false teeth, made in England in the early 1800s, an extraordinary trinket left behind by an amazing man.
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