Welcome to Canberra, now let me slosh some dirty water over your windscreen.
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Nah, that’s ok, I’ll do it for free. Who knows, you might change your mind by the time I’m done, especially if I stand by your window for a bit.
Many of us have strong views on squeegee men. We wave them away, sometimes crankily, muttering about what visitors to the city must think being approached several times on their way down our grand entryway.
We do mental calculations about their tax-free earnings.
We speculate about what they spend the money on.
Then we wonder aloud about why the government or the police aren’t doing something about them.
How strange and magnificent then is the response to the death of a person who’s been plying this much trade longer than probably anyone in Canberra.
Our story today about Lindsay/Lindsey (so little is known about him that we can’t even be certain of the spelling of his name) has been phenomenally popular. The striking portrait by staff photographer Rohan Thomson and the story we published this morning have been shared thousands of times on social media. Tributes have been coming in fast.
Leading them, and indicating that a government clamp-down on windscreen washers isn’t imminent, was Chief Minister Katy Gallagher.
‘‘He was a hardworking and kind man and my children and I always looked forward to getting one of his windscreen washes whenever we saw him...He will be missed,’’ Ms Gallagher said.
Today’s outpouring is such a Canberra response. It says a lot about the size of our city that the person holding the highest office in town would heap praise on the bloke cleaning windscreens for change. If he had been working an intersection in Sydney or Melbourne, even a major one, it’s hard to imagine his passing would rate a mention let alone spark mass tributes.
Personally, I’ve never liked having my windscreen washed at an intersection. I’ve been one of the people who’ve muttered some of the things mentioned above.
And you can be sure that not all the people paying tribute to Lindsay are regular and happy customers like the chief minister.
So why then is Lindsay being eulogised like this?
We know very little about him, except from what he said in that profile five years ago. In that he said he had come to Canberra from Melbourne in the 1990s, bringing with him ‘‘a bad crim record’’.
He wouldn’t reveal his age then, and it seemed a reasonable guess that the years had worn him down harder than most.
Every day he copped abuse at the lights, derided as a junkie (which he denied) and a bludger.
When he spoke for that profile piece five years ago, he said all that abuse washed over him like water off a duck’s back.
While some of the harsh criticisms are still being made online today, overwhelmingly he’s being remembered fondly.
People talk of a man who worked hard, often in weather most of us would find intolerable, even when he looked ill.
Yes, he might have pushed that pedestrian walk button when it wasn’t necessary to keep traffic at the lights, but for the main he didn’t seem aggressive about getting business. Most seem to think him polite, even charming and a good person.
It seems quite plainly that Canberrans, even those who waved him away, saw the humanity of their fleeting interactions with him.
They saw the evidence of a life lived hard, bad decisions made. There was an element of compassion, a sense of ‘there but for the grace of God go I’. The coins in his hand might have felt like some small charity.
As Ms Gallagher said the his morning, many of us will miss seeing this long, bearded face through the windscreen.
It was a face of Canberra, just not the kind you might expect to be celebrated.