Syd
Thanks to Neil Hickey

“Sir Syd” Noyes was a humble Brisbane garbage collector unwittingly cast into a political tit-for-tat 30 years ago over the distribution of government accolades.
He died at a nursing home in 2007 after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease.
Mr Noyes, who worked for 49 years a garbage collector in the northern suburbs of Brisbane, was thrust into the headlines in 1974 when the Transport Workers Union nominated him for a knighthood.
The nomination was a tongue-in-cheek retaliation to the Bjelke-Petersen government’s nominations for friends, colleagues and sympathisers. Predictably, the nomination was ignored, although the “Sir Syd” moniker stuck.
The state secretary of the TWU, Hughie Williams, who helped orchestrate the nominations, said the union was only half-joking when it put his name forward.
“It was to give Sir Joh a slap in the face for giving knighthoods and honours to all his mates involved with sly grog and brothels and all the rest of it,” he said.
“Look at someone like Syd. He worked every day of the week in rain, hail or shine, including Christmas Day, to pick up people’s garbage.” A champion schoolboy boxer – who fought at Brisbane’s Festival Hall. His fitness regime did not extend far beyond his working life – and it didn’t need to.
His day involved 4am starts lugging 25kg metal bins over fences and lifting the contents into a two-metre tall disposal carriage.
Back then, bins were left at the side of homes, not conveniently on the side of the road as they are now.
I recall that, when I was the elected local councillor for Albany Creek, in the 70’s, that I received complaints about the garbos making too much noise in the mornings.
I joined a truck on its morning rounds, to find out first hand.
The ‘boys’ kindly let me carry a few bins – back breaking with every dog in sight, nipping at my feet. I lasted less than ½ hour. To last a life 49 years, in my opinion was eternity.
The job brought him few riches – he lived most of his life in a housing commission home in Wavell Heights – but he became a cult figure in Brisbane’s north for his long service and, and of course, for his knighthood near miss.

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