From the pen of ‘Smiler Hales’ – Alfred Arthur Greenwood HALES (1860-1936)
“You can’t whip a mining camp for novelties”. I was walking along Bayley street the other afternoon, feeling like a poet and looking like a tramp out of luck, when I saw a shingle hanging from a tent, which bore the information that Christian or pagan could get a shave inside. Well, I didn’t want a shave ” inside,” but I did want one on the outside, and wanted it badly, so I lined up and waited for my turn, but before my ticket was due the barber’s hand grew weary and he abdicated in favour of a perfect poem in petticoats—the finest looking woman in Coolgardie – when she said sweetly,
“Can I shave you. Mr. Smiler.”
You should have seen me do the distance between the doorway and that chair, never did a mule team strike a corn patch with a greater vim and vigour, and I plainly told the barber that I had no use for “him” talk about hard times—why Bill Adams, the Arizona expert himself, couldn’t tell how hard it was for me to leave that chair.
Fancy coming all the way into the middle of this abode of desolation, this land of “whisky ‘ and wild cat schemers, and thus : – lighting on a spot where you could get shaved by a woman with a face like a spring poet’s dream, and a figure that instinctively brought back memories of my first waltz by moonlight. I’m going there to be shaved regularly, whether the boss carries a, gun or not !!!
From the Australian Dictionary of Biography — The man with the chronic smile arrived at Coolgardie in 1894 and, during the next five years, became one of the most colourful of those eastern goldfields literati who divided their time between the pick and the pen. His first newspaper job there was with the Coolgardie Miner. Billy Clare, the owner, recalled this dashing, picturesque looking chap, whom so many on the field had mentioned in connection with journalistic exploits and coups in Broken Hill, Adelaide, Sydney … He was dynamic … His ready pen and readier imagination suited the goldfields readers … to a degree which probably no other newspaper man in Australia could have attained’. Hales founded his own weekly, the ‘Coolgardie Mining Review’, and later the daily Boulder Miner’s Right. He also managed a hotel, organized fortnightly boxing bouts and stood unsuccessfully for parliament in 1897 when president of the Coolgardie branch of the Amalgamated Workers’ Association of Western Australia.
Moya Sharp
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