Chapter 11 — The Life That Followed

Leaving Yea did not leave the past behind. It began an adult life built through work, mechanical ability and movement, while the education denied to me continued to shape which doors remained open.

For a long time I thought the story had moved on.

I worked. I travelled. I learned things I had never been taught. I drove coaches across country, talked to people from all kinds of lives and eventually built businesses of my own. From the outside there was an adult life taking shape.

What I did not understand was that leaving Yea, leaving institutions, and leaving particular people and places did not mean that I had left what happened there behind.

Some things I remembered. Some I remembered differently at different times. Some seemed not to exist at all until something brought them back.

I did not yet have a language for that.

Almost Twenty

I was almost twenty when I left The Yea Chronicle. My apprenticeship had never settled into what it was supposed to be. At different times it appeared to shift from hand and machine composing towards Linotype maintenance or mechanical work. I had learned a great deal about machinery because machinery made sense to me, but I had not received the education needed to work confidently and accurately with language.

Through connections, I obtained a position with The Border Morning Mail in Albury, New South Wales. I explained something of my background before I began. They assured me that they would keep me for twelve months and then review my position.

In Albury I lived with my younger sister Helen and her husband, Bob Munro. They operated a service station on the Hume Highway. It gave me somewhere to begin again while I tried to discover whether the skills I had acquired at the Chronicle could become a proper occupation elsewhere.

The Year at the Border

I worked as a Linotype operator. I knew from the beginning that I was not working at the standard of the experienced operators around me. I was slow, and my output was poor by comparison. We discussed whether my mechanical abilities might offer another way into the business, but there was no need for additional staff in that field.

The newspaper honoured its promise and kept me for the twelve months. At the end, the position was reviewed honestly. I was told that I was effectively illiterate: I had not received enough education to perform the work professionally.

That judgment could easily be heard as a judgment of intelligence. It was not. I could diagnose machinery, dismantle it, understand how its parts worked together and find practical ways to repair it. What I lacked was the formal education that should have prepared me for the occupation into which I had been placed at fourteen.

The Border did not manufacture that deficiency. It recognised it. The deficiency belonged to the education I had not received and to an apprenticeship which had used my labour without adequately preparing me for the qualification that should have followed.

Learning Through Machinery

Cars provided another kind of education. Before Albury, when I was around eighteen, I owned a 1962-and-a-half Volkswagen bought from Bryants Garage. It gave continuous trouble, at a time when few local garages were prepared to support Volkswagens.

The car brought me into contact with Tony Hutton and his wife Marian. Tony worked for Laurance Castle, whose garage held the local RACV franchise. I often visited Tony and his wife for great conversations and fantastic crepes. At times I accompanied Tony when he went out after hours to perform roadside repairs and recoveries.

With Tony's guidance I rebuilt the Volkswagen engine. I later worked on several other Volkswagen motors, including one belonging to my brother Robert which needed refurbishment. I was learning by watching, listening and doing. That way of learning suited me. A mechanical problem did not care about status or spelling. Either the diagnosis was right and the machine worked, or it did not.

While I was in Albury, I bought a black Chrysler AP6 from Laurance Castle. Laurance warned me that the car developed a whine above about sixty-five miles an hour. He promised that if it became worse he would replace the faulty part. It never became worse, but the promise mattered. He stood behind what he sold.

The Chrysler was reliable and I often drove it between Albury and Yea—frequently faster than I should have. I had one accident and subsequently modified the car considerably. We fitted larger bus shock absorbers to the front and attempted to convert the drum brakes to discs. Eventually we got the conversion working, and it served the car very well.

Another Kind of Work

After the twelve months at the Border, I was again out of work. My relationship with Robert had entered one of its more settled periods. His employer, a company whose name I presently remember as Courtold Hilton, had appointed a new manager named Miles, recently arrived from the United Kingdom. Robert offered me temporary stocktaking work.

I moved into a house with one of the salesmen and tried working in sales for a while. It was not me. I was not good at casual chatter, and I was somehow too honest to make a convincing salesman.

Miles nevertheless found me useful. I became his assistant, which included driving him to locations across Melbourne. During that period I saw Concorde fly over the city. I also worked in the company's high-ceilinged Collingwood warehouse, including when it flooded.

The warehouse gave me another education in how business could operate behind its respectable appearance. Pieces and lengths of fabric were traded to contacts of warehouse staff at greatly reduced prices. Some people had shirts, jeans and other clothing made from current denim colours or sample batches of prints intended for a coming season.

I had already seen the distance between public respectability and private conduct at The Yea Chronicle. Here it was expressed through commercial opportunity rather than religion, but the separation between what an organisation appeared to be and what people did inside it was familiar.

The Cost of Intervening

My position ended after I intervened when one of the sales representatives was beating his girlfriend, who was five months pregnant. I called the police.

That was enough to outrage Robert. He undermined my position and I was put off work.

The incident taught me something that would recur throughout my life. An organisation could accommodate conduct that should never have been accepted, while the person who objected to it became the disruption. I had not set out to expose anything. I had responded to what was happening in front of me, and again the price of doing so was mine.

Blue Riband

I returned to the practical ability on which I could rely. I found work with Blue Riband Coaches at Werribee. The company operated local school services and city charters. Teddy Holsgrieve was impressed by the way I handled the vehicle, and that helped me obtain the job.

Driving did not require me to pretend to be someone else. It required judgment, attention and responsibility. A large vehicle told the truth about the person controlling it. Position on the road, use of the gears, anticipation of danger and care for passengers could all be seen in what the driver did.

I did not know it when I entered the Blue Riband yard, but driving was about to open Australia to me. It would take me into the snow, across the outback and into the company of people whose knowledge of the country changed the way I saw it.

The life that followed had begun.