By KIM THODAY

There is a town in Victoria called Maryborough. In that town lived a man called Wal Richards. He lived there for all his sixty years. He was often around town but most people ignored him. He was an embarrassment really. You’ve seen him, or versions of him in your neighborhood; that solitary figure pacing different streets at all hours. You see him nearly every day in a different spot. There it is again that familiar fleeting shock of difference that secretes into the fissures of unconscious unresolved tensions of humanness. Wal is scruffy, disheveled, awkward, out of proportion. There he goes slowly along the foot path past the pub, riding his old blue and white Malvern Star dragster. It’s the days of five o’clock closing and Wal is glad to get past a few minutes before to avoid people leaving the pub and mistaking him for someone called Retard, or Derro, or Spastic, or Wanker.

He’s not as young as he used to be but he still makes some yards on his old ‘deadly treddley.’ Some kids in the town take a bit more notice. They are spooked by his misshapen face. Different stories go around how it was that he is like he is. He can’t read or write. He has a speech impediment and so he never speaks much. His body is all doubled over and out of kilter.

Look someone, there he is now . but one kid wonders how Wal got an invite to this wedding because it’s so posh. The kid sees he’s got a box brownie camera. Oops he’s gone? Where did he go? Ah . there he is, half hidden by one of flower pedestals at the side of the Church.

Wal went to over 2000 weddings and most of them in the town. He never got an invite but there he’d be with camera at the ready. People pointed and took offence at his intrusion in the early days. But a few wits said it didn’t really matter, after all what harm could it do, the pictures wouldn’t turn out anyway. Wal could hardly dress himself let alone operate a camera and develop the pictures. For the most part Wal just merged with the other unintelligible religious objects. It’s a pity because like Wal they hid something important. On a few occasions Wal would go to a Church in another town if it involved a Maryborough person or couple being married there. A few times he rode to a town 40 miles away. Or sometimes a Maryborough wedding was conducted in Melbourne and his phantom-like figure would be up on the train platform at 6am in the misty morning light.

Wal died recently. No-one really noticed. Apparently some rellys turned up for the service but no-one knew them. They were out-of-towners. A few months later someone thought they better clean out Wal’s old hut. In the lean-two out the back there are hundreds of old shoeboxes. Take off a dusty lid. Every box is full of black and white photographs. All together there are thousands of pictures. Hundreds of Maryborough weddings. Photos of every wedding going back decades. A unique photographic history of a town’s people. People captured as they were, mostly un-posed, not knowing they were seen by one who was not seen. Furtive brides, teary mothers, harried father-in-laws, drunk uncles, giggling bridesmaids, nervous grooms, dutiful fathers .

Hundreds of people have been visiting Maryborough’s new exhibition of Wal’s pictures. It’s become a bit of a tourist attraction. And for the town families they can see themselves as they were or look at pictures of their decedents. People remembered, noticed by one who went unnoticed. And there is no picture of Wal. Maybe some are trying to remember Wal. It’s important to be noticed, remembered; in fact it’s essential to being human. But perhaps the most important thing we can do in life is to truly see others. Maybe that’s what Jesus meant when he said we must die to ourselves. Perhaps God is a bit like Wal, noticing us, accepting us, loving us, just as we are; God riding along on an old dragster, determined, despite our lack of sight, to take our picture, to remember us, to see us for what we are and what we can be.

Kim Thoday Hewett Community Church of Christ, South Australia http://www.hewett.org.au