Chapter 13 — Building a Life

Returning from Canada did not return me to a settled life. I went back to driving, encountered new forms of secrecy and corruption, married, and began building relationships and work around experiences I still did not fully understand.

A life does not wait until a person has understood everything that happened to them. Decisions still have to be made. Work has to be found. Relationships begin and change. Responsibilities accumulate. Skills are learned because they are needed.

I became capable in ways that did not fit neatly with the account others had made of me. I learned by watching, questioning, testing and solving problems. Later, I built work and businesses of my own from that same habit of seeing how separate parts could be made into a functioning system.

What looked from outside like a life being built was real. But it was being built across layers I could not yet see, and around absences I did not yet recognise as absences.

Home from Canada ↑

When I was deported from Canada, I came home to the same unit I had previously shared with my older brother Peter after he returned from Vietnam.

Peter drank every day, yet continued to report for work at the barracks on St Kilda Road. He had completed three periods of duty in Vietnam while attached or seconded to the Americans.

Before long, Peter told me that his government work involved an intelligence arrangement which I remember him calling “Three Eyes.” I may not have the name precisely right. Today the name commonly heard is Five Eyes. Peter and the men he drank with seemed to play at being spies, and they wanted to find me work involving industrial espionage.

I was not impressed by the spying part. I stayed away from it.

That decision mattered. I had already spent enough of my life around people whose real purposes were concealed behind respectable positions. Whatever attractions the work might have held for Peter and his friends, I did not want another occupation built around secrecy and divided loyalties.

Back Behind the Wheel ↑

I returned to driving. I made local deliveries for Lindsay Fox from International Harvester, then went back to Greyhound and later to Australian Pacific.

Driving remained work I could understand. The vehicle, the road and the timetable imposed their own discipline. I knew how to handle a large machine, how to position it on the road and how to carry responsibility for the people or goods behind me.

The International Harvester work brought me into another corrupted environment. Engines, Allison transmissions and other valuable equipment appeared to have become a sideline for people involved in dispatch.

There was eventually a police investigation. Looking back through the deliveries, it was realised that I had carried three Allison transmissions, two Detroit V8 diesel engines, a Cummins diesel engine, a pallet load of front spotlights and various drums of lubricants to recipients who did not exist.

Every delivery had arrived with official-looking paperwork. The names and addresses recorded on it were bogus. Because the loads had passed through the normal transport process with apparently authorised documents, I suspected that somebody within the transport company may also have been involved. We were never told the final outcome of the investigation.

One of the other drivers was a regular breakfast drinker at a hotel which opened at five in the morning. At lunchtime he drank hard and fast, as though he was already in need of alcohol. He then returned to work as a professional driver.

None of this arrived labelled as corruption or danger. The paperwork looked official. The loads were dispatched. The drivers went about their work. Only when somebody compared the documents with the supposed customers did the structure behind the individual deliveries begin to appear.

At Australian Pacific I met Monica, who worked with me as a hostess and cook. Monica became my first wife. We married around 1983.

There is more to tell about that marriage. For the moment, it belongs here as part of the adult life I was trying to establish: work, companionship and the expectation that a shared future could be built by moving forward.

Classic Cars ↑

I tried driving taxis for a few days and knew very quickly that it was not for me. I then found work with Classic Cars as a chauffeur paid by commission.

Classic Cars was owned by a man I will call Peter D. He had previously worked for ANZ and brought into the business what I understood to be NEC's first small computer. Its hard drive alone weighed about fifteen kilograms. We constructed a heavily sealed room around the machine, using sealed cork and other measures to keep dust away from it.

A man whose name I remember as Tom Arche—the spelling remains uncertain—made the computer useful. Tom and his wife were mainframe programmers who worked on the software side of a considerable part of ANZ's computer systems.

Tom was often at a loose end in the evenings, particularly when his wife was working a night shift. He would come to Classic Cars and program the NEC. Using Condor 3, he created an intelligent booking system for the business. He would write code, drink beer and then sit talking for hours before going home.

It was inexpensive programming, but it was remarkably effective. The booking system helped Classic Cars flourish. It destabilised a considerable part of Melbourne's established hire-car industry because the business could organise and respond to bookings in a way its competitors could not.

That was an early lesson in what a well-designed information system could do. A relatively small computer, given the right program, could alter the position of an entire business. The lesson stayed with me long after Classic Cars disappeared.

The Detectives ↑

One day detectives walked into the premises and asked whether Peter D. was there. I said that he was and led them downstairs to his office.

They introduced themselves, confirmed Peter's identity and pointed towards his car keys.

“Are those yours?”

Peter nodded.

“Pick them up and come with us.”

That was effectively the end of Classic Cars.

My later understanding was that Peter had little or no money while his wife was investing heavily in Queensland timeshares. I also understood that some cars had been sold while they were still subject to hire-purchase agreements. I did not personally establish the financial records behind those claims. What I witnessed was the arrival of the detectives and the sudden end of a business which had appeared to be flourishing.

That is only the brief account of Classic Cars. There are details still to be recovered. But its place in the larger story is already clear. Once again, technical ingenuity, business growth and outward success existed beside conduct that eventually brought the organisation down.

Alice ↑

I believe I returned to Greyhound soon after Classic Cars. On a service which travelled through Canberra, I met a young woman named Alice. She was a schoolteacher working in the Catholic education system at Allora, between Toowoomba and Warwick.

Alice was considerably younger than me. I told her directly that the difference in our ages concerned me. She said that it did not concern her. She told me that she knew I was the best thing that had happened to her. I allowed myself to believe her.

Because she was a teacher, Alice could visit during the school holidays. At the time I was working express services on a five-day turnaround. On one visit I left a key for her because I would be away driving. She searched through and read the documents I had assembled about my childhood.

I was beginning to investigate parts of my life and trying to persuade a law firm to take up my matter involving the Catholic Church. The documents were not casual reading. They were part of my attempt to understand what had happened and determine whether any legal pathway existed.

Alice and I also began exploring our childhoods together. We read Alice Miller, particularly For Your Own Good and The Drama of the Gifted Child, along with other works concerned with childhood harm and its effects in adult life.

She told me about bullying, her damaged relationship with her father and her mother's serious alcoholism. She disclosed other disturbing aspects of her family history. I was trying, at the same time, to find language for my own childhood.

I believe I met Alice around 1985. I moved to Queensland in 1987. The exact chronology still needs to be tested against documents, but the relationship had begun a new phase in the life I was building.

At the time, the reading and conversation seemed to offer the possibility that two people could understand where they had come from and choose something different. I could not yet see how the Catholic connections in Alice's family, my own history with the Church and the gaps in my memory would eventually converge.