History repeats

Andrew Mathieson
WEARING an akubra top hat and holding a fob watch, Colin Mockett is transformed back two centuries.
“It’s an odd thing when walking the streets in a costume – people ignore you,” he observes with a grin.
Colin’s love for recreating key Geelong historical figures is usually a hit when he gets into character to lead tour groups walking around the city’s cultural district.
He plays the part when telling the story of Howard Hitchcock, a former Geelong mayor and philanthropist who Colin compares to an early 1900s Frank Costa.
But Colin remembers the performance failing to impress one young fellow down the street, who was decked out in a New York Jets T-shirt and with the words Dodgers emblazoned on his baseball cap.
“He was twigging me out as I was walking toward him,” Colin tells.
“He was clearly embarrassed and he looked away like I didn’t exist.
“The point is that I was in Australian gear from the 1930s and he was in something totally foreign.”
Colin’s most revered character from Geelong’s history is Captain Foster Fyans.
Colin, an English immigrant, knows everything about the early Irish settler, such as his escape from Ireland’s potato famine to his role as a de facto prison warden in the new colony and, most importantly, founding Geelong.
All of a sudden Colin thrusts into a hearty Irish accent of the day.
“If you don’t know my name, you should do if you’re from Geelong,” he shouts.
“I’m the man who started Geelong, I chose the site for Geelong, I gave Geelong clean water, I gave Geelong peace and I…I…I can’t remember what else I gave Geelong.
“Well, I gave Geelong bloody lots.”
Like most of his working life, Colin fell into theatrical portrayals.
The Hamlyn Heights resident took up stand-up comedy while serving on the committee for Geelong’s National Celtic Festival because there seemed more to Celts than just songs and dance.
“That was also when I found out that to get a big-name comedian was really damn expensive,” Colin laughs.
Putting together Englishmen, Irishmen and Scotsmen dressed up in parodies of their national costumes while telling jokes about each other proved such a popular act that gigs were booked across the country for the next decade.
“I’m an expert on Celtic jokes,” Colin winks.
“If you want to know an Englishmen, Irishmen, Scotsmen’s joke, I know them all.”
Another favourite routine arose at a national servicemen’s convention in Geelong.
Colin’s Captain Meldrum, a fictional character in charge of army records, discovered during the performance that several retired men in the audience were discharged early and still owed a couple of weeks’ service.
“They even got me back the next time they had the convention but by this time I got promoted and I was Major Meldrum and had to come up with some new material,” Colin chuckles.
“The reason Captain Meldrum got promoted was for no other reason that I used a real uniform from a friend of mine and he got promoted, so I borrowed it the first time when he was a captain and the second time when he was a major.”
Before emigrating from England in 1979, Colin had already tried his hand as an unsophisticated butter patter then a butcher and, later, a caterer, even selling pet food.
To satisfy Australian immigration, he ticked the box marking him an entrepreneur.
After arriving in Geelong he converted a rundown milk bar on Latrobe Terrace into the city’s first English-style fish and chip shop.
The shop capitalised on a few unplanned gimmicks.
First, a signwriter confused the name of the business in Old English script to read Mockett’s Old English Fish and Chips.
“People would ask what’s the difference between old English and other English fish and chips,” Colin recalls.
He would sometimes drive to Tullamarine Airport to pick up English newspapers discarded on British Airways planes so he could wrap the last layer of his fish and chips to add a touch of authenticity.
“I also used to say we used English fish,” he grins.
“I told the customers that the fish were English – they swim all the way here and we catch them in the bay.”