Canberra's Barton House in the sixties was a place for young people or anyone who could not afford more than the weekly £11/10s for a shared room, shared facilties, breakfast and dinner, and a brown-paper-bag full of soggy lunchtime sandwiches. Our average age was well below thirty as you had to be young to survive the late-night drinking and -partying.
Pity the retired old surveyor, known as "The Colonel", who lived alone in a room, just him and a copy of every Canberra Times ever printed. He spoke to no-one and yet, if you met him in the corridor, he would stop and stare, daring you to go past him. You could hear him before you saw him as he always carried his own set of cutlery in his pockets. In the mornings he would stand outside the communal showers and rap his walking-stick on the door if anyone dared to stand under the shower for longer than what he considered was a reasonably long enough time.
According to the archives, "The Colonel" - who only made it to sergeant - came to Canberra in 1913 to work as surveyor for the Commonwealth. His real name was Ernest John Dowling and he was born in Geelong on 20 March 1891 (which would've made him 74 years old the first time he rapped his walking-stick on my shower cubicle).
Mercifully, he died on 13 August 1971, long before his home, "Barton House", was demolished in 1981. A trig station on a hill near Uriarra in the A.C.T. is named after him which is more than any of us callous youngsters achieved who so mercilessly made fun of him in the sixties.
