What’s said in the chair, stays in the chair, says Tony Stewart, the Cooma barber who’s kept the Monaro’s wayward male locks in check for more than 40 years.
Diplomacy is half the art of being a country barber and Tony has had to step gingerly among the things he hears - a bit like how he moves on his feet, stepping between the shorn locks, as he works smoothly around his clients sitting in an old barber’s chair.
Tony, whom you wouldn’t believe, looking at his tall, slight (and friendly) appearance, once played prop for the Cooma rugby league team (the way he ducks and weaves as he’s cutting hair you’d think he was a former halfback), has put a worn patch on the lino in the ambit of the barber’s chair (original) from moving across the studio floor.
Barbering tradition jumps from the walls. His Vale Street barber shop has a famous red swirl barber’s pole out the front, with old barber trade relics in the front window, and vinyl chairs along the eastern wall from the ‘70s his clients have sat in dozens of times. It’s a faithful clientele and they keep rolling in the door from Monaro towns and farms, workers, councillors, farmers, old and young and even hipsters with long beards putting faith in Tony’s modern clips.
Tony has heard more town tattle than the average person. But if the art of barbering is cutting hair, it is just as much about understanding your client in the chair, sympathising and making them feel they’d love to return. And return they do.
Tony’s art is moving on from thorny subjects. He moves the conversation ever so diplomatically on to general topics, avoiding politics, especially local politics. Sport is the go, and Tony shows unaffected sympathy for the team of any keen football follower. His diplomacy is so great, the United Nations could learn a lesson from it.
He often replies “you would” or “do you really?”, as he listens politely, moving swiftly across a fringe or cutting close to an ear without a pause. He’ll ask a general question like “how old is he?”, or confirm “that’s good” or sympathise “i remember that well”, giving words of encouragement, in a barber shop decorum he’s combed up over the years.
In the chair today and up for his upteenth cut is no other than Tony’s old friend Terry, a Cooma rugby league team-mate, who remembers the hard won contests with a ferocious Jindabyne side in the late ‘60s and ‘70s when a game was called off due to an onfield blue. When The Land visits, Terry is in the chair. Terry goes back a long, long way to the time when Tony was a trainee barber. In fact, Terry was one of his first “test mannequins”. In the 1970s there were four barbers in Cooma catering to the hordes of Snowy scheme workers who hit town from their mountain work huts on a Friday and were looking for some town fun, often plonking their whole weekly pay on the bar (back then about $250).
A trainload of young ladies would often arrive in Cooma from Sydney for the weekend. The police sometimes turned a few of the ladies around if they were not the desirable types. In the Snowy scheme heyday, Cooma’s population hit about 10,000, there were five nightclubs - more than Canberra then - and a town making merry.
Tony learnt his barber trade under the watchful eye of his mentor John Lynch, when Lynch, “a top boss”, ran a barber shop down near the Tourist Cafe. “I earned 10 pounds a week back then. I thought I was made,” Tony says. To be a barber you had to show proficiency in three skills: a light trim, a short, back and sides and a shave. Shaves were big back then as the Hydro workers often came in rough and wanted to look the piece when hitting Cooma’s nightlife. To obtain his licence an official from the department of labour would watch Tony perform the three tasks. Tony learnt the delicate art of shaving by practising with a balloon. It required a steady hand, and Tony promises he never broke a balloon !
Tony eventually took his own premises with the encouragement of his dad, a famous sideline league caller for Radio 2XL. Tony’s uncle Les was a barber who suggested Tony increase his skills base when long hair came in. Two Italian hairdressers showed him how to get around the longer locks. It turned into a great career.
Tony rarely closes the door, usually just taking holidays with his wife Marnie, his “guiding light”, over the New Year period.
I earned 10 pounds a week back then. I thought I was made.
- Tony Stewart, Cooma barber
And how has he kept fit all these years ? “I love swimming and walking,” says Tony. Swimming in Cooma in the old days in winter when the council pool was not heated? “The first lap was hard but after that it was fine,” he says with a broad smile.
Some say it might be the mountain air that keeps Tony so trim. Another client waiting in the vinyl chair pipes up - “I reckon you keep fit by moving about cutting hair, look at the marks on your lino!”. “Really?”, says Tony, as he swivels around Terry, about his 500th cut from Tony, looking pretty slick - again.