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Perth, |
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Mr Honesty gets out from under the bonnet
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Denis put his years of skill to work - and found the parcel of sausages and steak which the owner had placed in the boot of her car three weeks earlier. Denis is hanging up his spanners after 41 years as a mechanic and auto electrician, with most of those years spent working on thousands of cars from the Subiaco neighbourhood. His son Greg who has worked in the business since 1993 is carrying on, although he says the future is very uncertain with rising fuel prices, five-year warranties on new cars and increased computer work in cars. Denis has strong Subiaco links - he was born in a private home in Nicholson Road in 1941 to a local couple - Mim (Blakemore) and Ken Hextall. He started as a 14-year-old apprentice mechanic at Bassendean, helping to service what was known locally as the "night cart", or even the "honey cart". (Young readers may need to ask their grandparents to explain.) He said: "As you stood under the truck, the maggots would be falling out of it on to you." He swears it is true that while the truck was being serviced, the usual operators would have a lunch break nearby. He said: "They would pull up under a big tree near Bassendean station and lift two pans from the truck: they would sit on one pan and use another as a table to hold their sandwiches. True." He moved to W.J. Lucas in Perth and worked up to a senior position because he was both a mechanic and an auto electrician. He lectured instructors from Carlisle Technical School on how to install air-conditioning in cars; if he wanted to do that work now, he would have to be examined by the men he taught in the 1970s. He went to night school to learn how to run a business before setting out in partnership with Tony Jackson as Dentone in a tin shed on Barker Road in the shade of two giant gum trees in 1984. "I loved that old place, even though a few times a car would drop through the old wooden floorboards and a rabbit would stick his head up through the hole," he said. "There would have been a nest of rabbit warrens under that old place. "Even though it was a very dirty old building and pretty hot in summer, we had the most fun there. At Lucas's he had worked on the government fleet which included the governor's Rolls-Royce. Many of those customers followed him to Subiaco but he declined the offer to work on the governor's car in the old Subiaco shed because the shed was too dirty. He said the old garage should have been heritage-listed (it had started life as Bakewell's Bakery and became Buck's Autos before he took over), but it was demolished by Subiaco council and turned into a carpark. Tony retired in 1989, then Denis moved to Rokeby Road in the sprawling steel garage that his long-time competitor Ken Manolas had built opposite the council chambers. But after three years there, the property was sold and he moved north to the edge of Subi Centro in Hood Street. For many years he has been an auto electrician. But he says that it is no longer easy for him to squirm and wriggle under a dashboard to reach the wiring. Denis has a reputation for extreme honesty and low charges. He has been known to phone a customer to say: "I've had to repair the brakes on your car - it's going to be another $27. Will that be all right?" He says big changes in vehicles have squeezed small mechanics out of business. Warranties up to five years on new cars and the switch to computer-dominated cars meant there was less repair work and little room for repairs - merely replacement of parts. Some expensive imported cars were designed so that a simple job, like replacing power steering hoses, involved $2000 worth of work. Simple jobs could be done on a 1960 Holden in 15 minutes. He said that in Japan car licences now increased sharply with each year of a car's age so that by its seventh year the owner would pay to have it crushed as scrap metal, rather than pay exhorbitant amounts to keep it on the road. He said: "They don't bother about servicing or repairs - they drive them into the ground, then buy a new one."
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