In loving memory

Remembering Joseph

When Guinness World Records wrote up Joseph's loudest-shout title, they ran it under a headline about the quiet kid who grew up to have the loudest voice in the world. I've thought about that a lot since he died — because both halves of it were true, right to the end, and the people who loved Joseph best knew both.

Most of Canberra and Queanbeyan knew the loud one. The town crier. The bell, the coat, the voice you could feel in your chest from the other side of a car park. He was the official crier for two cities, he held a Guinness World Record, and he was going to tell you about it — he once rang a friend in the UK in the middle of the night, just to share the news, because he was too proud of it to wait until morning. That was Joseph. When something wonderful happened, everyone within earshot was going to hear about it, and Joseph made very sure the earshot was large.

But turn the volume down, and there was the other Joseph — the soft, sincere voice he kept for the moments that actually mattered. His daughter Audrey said it better than I can: everyone knew him as the town crier with the big achievements; she just knew him as the person she'd come home to. Ask what he cared about most, in a life absolutely stuffed with things to care about, and the answer was always her. Every record, every stage, every scheme came a distant second to Audrey. It wasn't close.

Joseph lived about six lives in the space of one. He worked the railway as a young man, sold phones, spent years at Dirty Dick's Theatre Restaurant — which may be the single most Joseph venue ever built — and was most recently with Sanitair. He was an actor, a singer, a dancer, a magician. When COVID shut the world down he simply moved the magic onto Zoom and built a community that reached from Canberra to Nashville to London. He hosted the No Name Trivia Show and kept his guests on the line for hours, because he genuinely could not bear for a good conversation to end. He went skydiving — twice. He got himself scuba certified. He was studying a Bachelor of Film and Media, and it is a real ache that he won't get to finish it.

And somewhere in all of that, he became a marriage celebrant — which is how he came into my life. Joseph delivered around thirty weddings with our team over the last couple of years. That's more than sixty people who got to spend the biggest day of their lives with him, and he made every single one of them brighter. He used to tell me, more than once, that one day he was going to marry Audrey and her partner Miles himself. There are a lot of us who wish he'd had the time.

If you really want to understand who he was, you almost don't need me — you just need his friends. One of them shot a short film with Joseph, who shaved off his trademark beard for the part without a word of complaint, worked through the night, and then — already nearly home at two in the morning — turned the car around and drove all the way back across town, because the crew needed his glasses for the final shot. Another remembers pitching him some impossible magic trick, and Joseph listening with that little grin before saying, "Yeah. Or you could get a bigger hat." A karaoke host once warned him that "My Way" was a big song. He said, "I have a big voice." He did — but she meant something more than volume, and so do I. He was big in every way that counts.

He had four karaoke songs on high rotation, and he once won a competition on a cruise ship singing "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" in a borrowed sarong and, by all reports, very little else. Of course he won. He always did. Joseph didn't walk into a room so much as arrive in it.

We were lucky to share the work with him. Luckier still to have called him a friend. The rooms are quieter now — which is the one thing he'd have hated most — so do him a favour, and be a little louder. Sing the big song. Make the earshot large.

Gee Whizzy, Joseph. Thank you for all of it, mate.