Vale Boomi
A fortnight back a man carrying his bike downstairs fell and fatally broke his neck. His name was Brendan Mahony, more fondly known as Boomi, the stilt-legged man in a kilt who made the corner of Forbes and Burton Streets his own.
It is too sadly certain we shall not see his like again: Two metres tall yet incredibly larger in life with his ebullient transgressions of the discretions of conventional dressing and his eruptive chortlings of delight at greeting old friends and meeting new.
Many readers must have missed his life, so unexpectedly terminated by mischance. His was an unaffected individuality that stood out even in Darlinghurst, the precinct [never village] of determined difference and eccentricity.
His exuberance was a celebration, never a demonstration. He was unique because he was so enthusiastically himself whatever wild disguise or costume he wore.
I remember riding along Bourke Street with him one evening. He was in his kilt en route to a community meeting in Alexandria. I argued the fecklessness of the separated bi-directional cycleway soon to scar the street. Though not of a disposition to oppose he saw Moore’s folly for what it remains and promised to take my apologies to the meeting and put my opinion.
I regret not knowing him better than to say hello to and exchange quick jests about whatever. I had looked forward to getting to know him…
It was always joy to behold him gliding his lanky limbs through the crowded confines of his café, attentive and considerate with a casual congeniality that welled naturally from his uber-generosity of spirit.
Excuse my seeming gushing but in this tragic instance it is an inadequate outpouring of words in memory of a defiance of definition. If Boomi had not lived no-one could imagine him. That laidback laddie had such personal pizazz it is not possible to be overly effusive expressing the distraught sense of who is passed.
He was a man so loved as he was loving.
by Peter Whitehead
