This article appeared in edition 167 of Trad & Now magazine in December 2024.

It’s Stupid O’Clock on a Tuesday morning, a little after 3am, and I’m doing what I’ve done all my life when I need to process things beyond my ken and Barbie: writing it all down.

48 hours ago, my friend Frank Hodges died.

I was in the same city as him: Boorloo (Perth) at the time, but not permitted to see him nor even be given details of his condition by the staff in the palliative care unit of the hospital where only several weeks earlier I’d spent precious hours with him: Hollywood Private Hospital in Nedlands. A slightly weird-arse hospital, but that’s another story for another time.

The nurses on the Old MacDonald Had A Farm ward are aces.

Back in early October, I had just arrived in to Tarntanya (Adelaide) one Monday night after three weeks on the road to the east coast and back when I contacted Frank to see if he was on the radio that night: 107.9FM Radio Fremantle, in the spot where our media lives intersected for seven months on his show, Folking Around.

He was not, and over the space of the next hour of frantic phone calls and texts to several contacts, I got through to Frank and he told me he had five weeks to live.

In my first weeks in Walyalup (Fremantle, June 2022) I’d bowled up to the studio in Hamilton Hill, WA and offered my on-air services. I was keen to move away from folk in to more secular programming, but the station needed someone to operate the panel for Frank’s established folk show on Mondays at 9-11pm.

I was initially reluctant but agreed, and on Monday 13 June 2023 I met Frank.

4ft not a lot tall, he’d blow away in a stiff breeze, and I’m guessing he never ventured out much onto the Yorkshire moors or he would have caught an easterly wind into the Irish Sea ad never made it to Australia all those years ago. Or conversely, he could have saved his 10 pound fare, grabbed a parasol, Mary Poppins-styles, and aimed south towards the Roaring 40s.

On that first night, Frank offered me a lift back to where I was living in Melville and that started a seven month arrangement: I’d stand out on Williams Street, glancing nervously at my watch, wondering if we were going to make it in time to get to the studio in Hamilton Hill, and take the on-air baton from Alan Dawson and his now 37 or 38 years running Twilight Zone radio show highlighting local WA music (of which there is an embarrassment of riches).

You’ll never never know if you never never go, people. Western Australian local music is the duck’s nuts, the dog’s bollocks, and the bee’s knees. It’s stunning.

In my first year, I got late to the WAM Music Song Of The Year awards at Freo.Social and stood right up the back, tucked away in the corner in the only spot left, jammed up against the bar. The talent on-stage and the attention and fervour of the crowd was inspiring. You could have plugged a 240 volt cable into my earholes and lit up a small city with the energy I was taking in from that night. And I was there late.

Meanwhile, back on on-air Monday nights, a friendship developed. An ex of mine who worked as a counsellor to asylum seekers once clued me in on the value of driving with others. You don’t *have* to make eye contact, your voices and ears do the heavy lifting, and you’re both going in the same direction.

From Melville down Williams Street, up Marmion, past Woolies, turn left onto Cannington Road, all the way to Rockingham Road, turn left and turn right at the studio. Race up the stairs in time to do the football tips on air with Alan.

I treasured those rides so much because the real Frank came out as he’d light-heartedly mumble and grumble about the others on the road. Never mind the fact I often had to remind him to turn his lights on or turn his indicator off, he’d have a running patter on who was on the roads and all their ills.

It was on trip two or three that the five-star swear word tumbled out his wee mouth and I thought, right. Ok. A) Do you kiss your wife with that mouth? (Just jokes; I roll out the sailor-blushing blue words when needed.) and B) Now we’re getting to know the real Frank: plain speakin’, irreverent, and funny as [duck].

I ended up staying in Boorloo/ Walyalup (Perth/Fremantle) only 14.5 months, and I can honestly say I really only made one friend in that time. Sure, I met scores of people and went out often – up to five nights a week with various groups. But that was all superficial, and there was only one constant in my life: Frank Hodges.

Typical of many septuagenarians I’ve been privileged to know: they keep the live, original music scene going because they vote with their feet, their bum on a seat, and are keen to share their disposable income with independent artists.

We saw all sorts in that time. We went to two Albany International Folk and Shanty Festivals, one Nannup, and countless gigs north and south of the Swan. I never needed a gig guide: Frank kept me updated via phone and text and email multiple times during the week. He’d collect details of what was happening, and sometimes the first 20 minutes of our two hour show would be him, slowly reading out what I rebadged the ‘parish notices’ of who was playing where in the cities and the south west of the state.

I initially thought it went on a bit long but soon realised people loved it, whether it was to get the information or just to hear Frank’s mesmeric verging on somnambulistic voice in that gentle Yorkshire-Australian lilt. You can catch his last programs at www.radiofremantle.com.au/shows/folking-around while they’re still there.

Sadly, all our shows we did have now fallen off the publicly available rota. Those shows live in the mind’s eye and ear.

We had guests, we had live music, we bantered and carried on like a father and son – and called each other as such on air. At first it was genuine irritation at his scatter-brained habit of cutting across whatever I was saying with some random thought. Soon enough it became endlessly endearing and you might have been forgiven for thinking it was rehearsed like some radio version of The Last Of The Summer Wine.

My weeks and weekends were full of gigs and going out and going to festivals, but Monday nights were radio nights, and I treasure those half a dozen plus one short months dearly. I never once thought, oh stuff it; I’ll play hookey and give it a miss. I had to occasionally duck out with respiratory problems, and knowing Frank was ill and receiving ongoing treatment for his conditions, I didn’t play fast and loose with any viral germs I might have been harbouring.

Once I was struck down by a mystery men’s waterworks condition so savage I feared it was going to take me off the planet, and had to listen from my bed through gritted teeth with tears of pain streaming down my face as Frank (and Alan as stand-in) interviewed a constant in our musical time together: The Original Foc’s’le Firkins. We went to see their album launch in 2023, and I snuck in for the last song at their last gig only last month. Frank had broken himself out of Hollywood Private Hospital that evening just to be there.

It was the Firkins’ last gig and may have been Frank’s last gig too.

After I found out Frank was dying that fateful Monday night in early October, I immediately made plans to get to the west. I would have jumped on the first plane out of Tarntanya, but it was school holidays and a massive storm was ripping across the country from Albany to Malacoota. I waited it out then lassoed a relocation vehicle (a Renault motorhome) and set off up to Port Augusta via Port Germain, into Ceduna, across the Nullarbor, the Great Australian Bight, the Goldfields, the agricultural belt and slammed almost literally into Welshpool, taxi to Walyalup.

Seems like a long way there, but there’s something calming (for me) about hundreds of kilometres of open road matched with the novelty of crossing the open plains of the Nullarbor and further. Despite the four days’ drive I counter-intuitively arrived in the west rested and refreshed, and by and by I caught up four times with Frank in two weeks.

It wasn’t quantity but it sure was quality.

I will take to my own grave the memories of sitting by his hospital bed, watching two episodes of Would I Lie To You? which he’d never seen before, and then Akmal Saleh’s stand-up comedy show.

And hearing sounds of genuine laughter come from the man such as I’d never heard before.

He could chuckle at my or his own jokes, but to hear him in gaels of laughter at the comic inventions of Britain’s and Egypt’s finest minds was like warm treacle or golden syrup for the ears.

I would not trade those memories for all the tea in Tallahassee.

About two weeks before he died, I headed back across the continent, this time in a brand new Audi Q2 that the car company needed relocating to the west, and had a similar only very different trip. At some point on the Nullarbor, the contact with Frank dried up like the desert scrub. The calls and replies became as sparse and hard to find as open roadhouses off the highway.

And when I arrived in Perth on Wednesday 13 November 2024, noone was returning my calls. I finally called the hospital, but in his last days, they’d gone from chatty and obliging to, “If you’re not family, I can’t tell you anything except that he’s here”.

I hung up that last time in floods of tears, and in the very early hours of Monday morning 18 November in Adelaide, I awoke to the news via text that Frank had died 25 hours previously while I’d been sitting in a hotel room in Mundaring WA watching the UEFA Nations League and World Cup Qualifiers from Europe.

I really wish Frank’s Leeds United had gone that extra inch and made it back in the Premier League this season. They managed to do so in season 2024-2025.

Frank was a true friend to me in Perth. Maybe my one true Perth friend.

He was care, concern, a phone call when he hadn’t heard from me, an invitation most weeks to events new and old. He was fun, funny, had a turn of phrase that would charm the socks of a centipede or blast the clogs off a Dutchman. He could work blue and, like Billy Connolly, he was a joy to watch in full flight.

I’ll miss my friend but I feel truly privileged to have intersected with his life for the time I did. I’ve made eight trips back to WA this year, partly for singing and music, but in equal measure for Frank.

Rest easy, dear man.

I’ll see you when I’m looking at you.


Bill Quinn
Hyde Park, South Australia
04:17h Tuesday 19 November 2024 ACDT (followed by the usual several hundred edits)