Maurice and the many hats

If you’ve spent time along Johnston Street or Parramatta Road, you’ve likely seen Maurice Ponza Jappanarid on the road, squeegee in hand, hair loose and hat firmly on. Not always the same hat. Pirate, reggae, even a government-issued hard hat from Beijing, he carries dozens. The day he left one at home and a customer asked where it was, he realised the hats were his calling card.

In a YouTube documentary, Maurice speaks openly about his past. After a warning from a police captain, he stopped dealing drugs and chose steady work instead. “Now I work,” he says. Window cleaning became a way back into ordinary life, one pane at a time.

But Maurice’s mark on the Inner West is not just clean glass. He has been known to decorate traffic signs and street furniture with small, colourful additions, a kind of pavement gallery documented online. The touches are cheeky and theatrical, much like the man himself.

A separate short film about Maurice, later awarded the People’s Choice at the Bondi Short Film Festival in 2011, captures the warmth locals recognise. When a newspaper headline cast him as the “window cleaner to fight ‘$30k worth of fines’”, it told only part of the story. Around Annandale, Maurice remains part of the streetscape, polishing windows and, in his own way, polishing a second chance.

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