The first Noel of our carols

Andrew Mathieson
WHEN Noel Hooper was just a boy, passing Christmas carollers could be heard from inside the family home.
He would sometimes join neighbours and trudge out to the front gate to have a better listen.
“I can remember the Salvation Army used to come into the streets, not to our doors, in West Geelong where I grew up,” Noel reminisces, now 65.
“There was no singing – they just played the carols.
“I think they did it every year but it was sometimes the luck of the draw what street you were on.
“They used to march in, set up on the corner and play a set of Christmas carols then move on to another spot.”
Back in the days of his childhood, singing carols by candlelight was barely a Geelong tradition, let alone in Melbourne where the spiritual singing first began in 1938 before later spreading worldwide.
Community carol singing shifted from homes and streets to the masses when a late-night radio announcer passing a bedroom window on his way home spotted an elderly woman listening to carols on the radio with her face lit by candlelight.
The joy of the carol has a knack of bringing Noel back into the Christmas spirit every year.
A couple of decades had passed from those distant childhood memories when Geelong’s Carols by Candlelight founder, a Geelong College teacher named Ed Davies, turned in the direction of Noel one day and said: “This job is getting too big for one person – have I got a volunteer?”
Noel took charge of the event just a few years later when Ed suffered a heart attack.
Not that Noel likes humming along to the festive songs.
“I haven’t got time to sit there and sing, I could tell you,” he jokingly admits.
After a YMCA club started Geelong’s carols at Johnstone Park in 1965, Noel has been busy most of six months a year for the past 35 festive seasons. He organises everything from the musical acts to sound, lighting and staging, among other chores.
Like pages in a history book, Noel steps back in time just for a moment as he reflects on the event.
“I can say the first carols program was pretty basic,” he recalls.
“There was just one microphone and, as I understand it, there was basically no lighting.”
The former Geelong Gas Company had to provide 10 gas flares just to keep the crowd from darkness.
Noel flicks through the original program while reciting a few lines about a Reverend Kenworthy, who compered the first event after Geelong combined churches’ attempts to sing random carols for a few years died in the late 1950s.
Noel pauses before thinking about how the carols have come to resemble more of a high-energy rock concert than a few angellic hymns over the years.
“We’re probably using 10 times as much power from my first days,” he admits.
“The sound and the lighting are really up to TV standard these days.”
Just two Carols by Candlelights have been cancelled – that is, in the park.
In a seamless transition, Noel was quick to move the first washout to the old Plaza theatre on the GPAC site and the other a decade later to Matthew Flinders Girls High.
“It was already raining in both cases,” he interrupts, “so we were thinking ahead for months.”
Despite running Carols by Candlelight for just on 35 years, the YMCA, real estate and football umpiring have consumed his life to a greater degree.
The old-fashioned real estate agent will step away next week from selling properties for Newtown agency Allpoints@Carr after 41 years.
And after umpiring more than 1000 games, including more than 750 at senior level, Noel is starting to relax from running up and down the field. Instead he sits behind the goals and waves the white flags instead.
“I guess you could say I don’t do things lightly,” he grins.