Many thanks to my former colleague Ian Kirkwood for some of the information and photos in this post.
When the name of noted Newcastle eccentric Leo Maley is mentioned in the company of people who crossed his path during his lifetime, a common reaction is a raised eyebrow and a reference to his notoriously difficult nature and odd behaviour. Another reaction, less common but but sometimes encountered, is a sympathetic sigh and a comment that old Leo’s life was a tragedy.
For my part, I never knew him. Nor did I ever go into his famous shop, The Coliseum, on Maitland Road, Mayfield. I have a memory of looking in the window and seeing all sorts of dusty items, sun-faded and jumbled, with equally faded price tags. Leo was an old man then. He lived in rooms adjoining the shop but had long since stopped paying power and water bills, so the utilities had been disconnected. He famously tipped his urine in the gutter by the road and dropped his other waste in a neighbour’s bin.
I think the first time I heard his name was when another reporter at The Newcastle Herald laughingly recounted some of Leo’s antics during some stoush with the local council. And he had plenty of stoushes. A regular in courtrooms, where he insisted on representing himself, he lost more than he won. One of his most famous victories was in 1988 when, facing court over his failure to lodge tax returns, he had his convictions quashed because the tax office’s lawyer missed hearing his name called and failed to reach the courtroom in time.
In his many disputes with authorities Leo wound up with at least a couple of prison sentences. In 1983, a Cessnock District Court judge dismissed an appeal by Leo and called him “a sanctimonious old crank who is a pest in the community, who commits petty anti-social acts”. The judge had requested a psychiatric report, which declared Leo sane. Leo said the judge’s decision to seek the report was “the joke of the year”. The judge wasn’t laughing. Leo did an 18-month stretch from December 1983, found guilty of misappropriating a $360 cheque in a tenancy dispute. He was by all accounts a shocking landlord. I heard a story that he would fill his rental property’s toilet cistern with water from a bucket and when showing a potential tenant the place would ostentatiously flush it, to pretend the water supply was connected.
When Leo died, aged 80, on December 18, 2000, he left a small fortune. The shame of it was that nearly all of that fortune was chewed up by legal and insolvency fees and the bills he had for so long refused to pay to the authorities he hated.
People who knew Leo well were sorry for him and described his life as a terrible waste. He was born in North Sydney in 1920. His father, draper Michael Lawrence Maley, was then 37 and his mother, Laura Ellen, was 28. At the time of Leo’s birth the family lived in Miller Street, North Sydney. When they moved to the Newcastle suburb of Mayfield is unclear, but advertising for The Coliseum began appearing in Newcastle newspapers in mid-1922. An advertising feature in The Newcastle Sun of December 13, 1923, reported that the “up-to-date general drapery store” had been “established two years”.
Leo was an only child and clearly an intelligent boy. In 1933, aged about 12 or 13, he was awarded honours for his music studies at Mayfield’s Convent of Mercy and in 1936 he played violin at the convent’s annual concert. By 1943 he was studying at Sydney University – a resident at St Andrews College. Clearly the family already had money. Leo graduated with a Bachelor of Science in 1947 and a Master of Science in 1948. Newcastle Herald writer Ian Kirkwood reported in a detailed article on Leo, published on September 8, 2001, that there were persistent unconfirmed rumours that Leo may have spent some time after World War 2 working at the Australian Government’s Woomera rocket range in South Australia.
That Leo was back at the Coliseum by 1950 seems clear, since a newspaper report in that year has him appealing to the council to rezone the area in which the shop stood from residential to commercial. But in January 1955 it was his father who was woken by noises in the shop at 3.30am and was hit over the head by an unknown intruder when he went to investigate. He wasn’t badly injured, apparently.
It seems that Leo was very close to his mother and her death in March 1951 is said to have affected him deeply. Laura was buried in the Catholic section at Sandgate Cemetery. Locals who knew the family recalled Laura running the store as a grocery shop and described her as an efficient businesswoman. Much of the family property was in her name and she chose to make Leo executor of her will. Leo’s father died in August 1967.
Evidently Leo’s state of mind deteriorated steadily over time, worsened no doubt by his regular run-ins with the council, utilities, courts and tenants. Those who knew him said he was “a broken man” when he came out of jail in the mid-1980s. He stopped paying bills and the family properties – still in his parents’ names – slowly decayed around him. Power was cut off in 1988 and his utility-free lifestyle really began. At the same time Leo was lining up for charity. Every day he’d go to the home of a friend, Mayfield lay-preacher Peter Boyd, for an evening meal. Most days Leo would go to a nearby McDonald’s restaurant to read the free newspapers. Another Christian friend, Patrick Hamilton, helped him out with paperwork and preparation for Leo’s numerous legal and court battles.
When Newcastle Council urged him to rectify the Coliseum’s awning, which was deemed to be dangerous, Leo refused. But then the earthquake hit in 1989 and the council did the demolition job itself, handing him the bill. A furious Leo said the council’s action was “a scandal of great magnitude” and he painted a sign on the store that read: “Nothing wrong here. Business as usual. It’s only the stupid council.”
The council wanted $2600 to cover the awning demolition but by the time Leo took the matter to court, lost, appealed and lost again, legal fees had pushed his debt to more than $78,000. That was just the council. Also chasing him for big sums were Hunter Water, the Tax Office and the NSW Department of Housing. By February 2000 the authorities had run out of patience altogether. The Commissioner of State Revenue got a bankruptcy notice over a claim for almost $270,000. Hunter Water wanted $40,000 and the council was still after its share. Leo appealed and lost in October 2000, and that was his last throw of the dice.
In December Mr Boyd’s son found Leo collapsed with a broken leg on the floor of the Coliseum. Leo died in hospital on December 18, three days after the final bankruptcy order against him was granted. He was given a “pauper’s funeral” at Ryhope. A few days later Mr Boyd organised a memorial service at Mayfield and about 30 people attended. For years Leo had told people he was broke: that his mother had left her estate to the Catholic Church and that he was only entitled to the rents. That wasn’t true.
What was true was that he’d done little if anything to sort out his parents’ estates after they died. The three blocks of land associated with the Coliseum were still in his mother’s name, along with a property in National Park Street. A house in Myola Street and another property at 134 Maitland Road were in his father’s name. When the insolvency trustee went searching through Leo’s belongings they found a bank account in Leo’s father’s name with a balance of $115,000. Letters from four different banks were seeking unpaid fees for safety deposit boxes. Old system title deeds to the properties were eventually found at one bank, and another safety deposit box contained tens of thousands of dollars in cash. Other bank accounts held more money. There was a $100,000 life insurance policy and valuable parcels of shares – still in Leo’s father’s name. An unopened envelope contained a cheque for almost $10,000: compensation for a bicycle accident.
When all the debts and the cost of the insolvency were cleared there was apparently no more than a couple of hundred thousand dollars remaining, much to the dismay of some of Leo’s kind and patient benefactors who deplored the waste of resources that could have been put to much better use. But that was Leo’s life: a complicated situation no outsider could truly understand.
Still, though Leo has gone the legacy of his family still stands in Mayfield in the form of The Coliseum, now a popular antique centre and cafe.
Had the pleasure of entering the shop once, in the 1970s. Do not remember Leo, though it must have been him serving. My boss, George Grivas, was a Dad’s Army officer at Waratah camp, and would often travel with me on jobs around town (mainly repossessing rental TVs :0) George dragged me into the shop that day after emphatically describing the stock on display as “1920s merchandise at 1920s’ prices!” He was after a fast-disappearing item, Nugget Shoe Polish – “the good stuff made from real wax, not the modern liquid ‘polish’ ” and of course he found it. Newy certainly had its share of characters. You just gotta love the place!
You are not wrong Phil about the characters of Newcastle – particularly in the bars along Hunter Street.
Thank you Greg for the Leo story – I actually applied to rent from him (unknowingly) in the late 1980s until I was informed of his unique personality – I did not keep the appointment!