I’ve toiled for a dollar, underground and on land,

What seemed more worthwhile, was lending a hand.

 A LIFE OF VARIED EXPERIENCE

     My first employment, as a young teenager, was to undertake a 5 years plumbing apprenticeship. Regardless of excellent reports for both practical and theory practices, I found a great need to leave my job and fulfill plans to start afresh in Canada. So, after three years of my apprenticeship I terminated my identures, and found a job as a landscape gardener which offered much better wages. I saved feverishly for eight months. In September 1966 I found myself aboard the S.S. Arcadia bound for San Diego, California. Ahead of me, a three weeks voyage across the Pacific. I was a teenager full of excitement and anticipation.

     Following a month holidaying in Los Angeles and New York City, I emigrated into Canada on a Greyhound bus. This took immigration agents on the border by surprise. They had never encountered an Australian emigrating by bus! Reality soon hit me. When searching for work in Montreal, my inability to speak French created barriers. I could only find a dishwashing job at a restaurant. My rent was more than my income.

     A week before Christmas, in snowbound conditions, I hitch hiked west to Ontario, where I found work in a copper mine at Manitouwadge. I was employed in the warehouse and lived in the single-men’s quarters. This job instilled a desire to work underground and led to a move further west in search of this goal.

     I pushed my case, and in time secured an underground labourer’s job at the Con Mine, Yellowknife, North West Territories. I would be situated one thousand miles north of Edmonton, Alberta, the nearest city. I adapted easily to this remote lifestyle in the ‘Land of the Midnight Sun’. In the peak of winter we had 22 hours darkness, while high summer offered 22 hours daylight. It was a wonderful existence in a fascinating environment.

     I learned fast, and was soon operating various machinery deep in the bowels of the earth. Traveling to our 4400 feet level in a nine man cage suspended by a cable was initially a scary experience. I operated battery powered trains, air powered mucking machines and slushers for loading these trains. I learned much about explosives and hard rock drilling. It was all contract work and I earned good money.

     Two years later, I came back to Melbourne for my 21st birthday. I met the girl I later married the next day. I returned to landscape gardening and learned to operate earthmoving equipment. I became competent on backhoes, bobcats, loaders and bulldozers. I ended up working as a carpenter building house frames. I was able to work underground once more, but this time in a tunnel being constructed for a water supply scheme. I had married and following my wife’s instigation, I began manufacturing furniture as a ‘cottage industry’. My designs sold well and it was my first introduction into self employment.

     Following my separation from my wife, I headed to Sydney where I began training as a psychiatric nurse at a government institution. I worked in various wards, but the real eye-opener was at the ECT Unit, (electro compulsive therapy unit). This archaic form of treatment was so well depicted in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

     Unable to tolerate the conduct in this government institution where drugs were administered to control patients, I needed to move on again after two years. Darwin, the remote city in Australia’s north beckoned. It had been devastated by Cyclone Tracy on Christmas eve 1974. I drove my old Chrysler from one end of the country to the other, with my faithful dog, Yoben, as a constant companion.

     I worked as a carpenter and concretor during the reconstruction of the cyclone flattened city. So many persons from all over the world rallied to rebuild Darwin. I began a thirty years love affair with this tropical paradise. I did have a break in 1978 when I traveled south and eventually built my horse drawn wagonette. Over the years I traveled this way, I worked as a roof painter, did labouring jobs in a foundry, a piggery, a chicken farm, on road construction, truck driving, and doing carpentry and concreting work.

     I returned to Darwin to settle for a further 25 years involved in the building industry. I worked building houses at many remote aboriginal communities. Eventually, I was diagnosed with ‘retinitis pigmentosa’ and my work in this industry was no longer an on site option. My sight no longer allowed me to drive a vehicle, or machinery. I couldn’t see enough to move safely around building sites. I had lost the ability to read a measuring tape, or handle portable power tools with precision.

     I turned to volunteer fundraising for blind sports and resources. I was unable to get vocational retraining in Darwin, a small community not geared to accommodate the blind.

     I became focused as a blind athlete. In 2004, I secured an Elite Athlete Scholarship at the Institute of Sport after I was selected to represent Australia at World Titles at Johannesburg, South Africa. I was then virtually being paid to play sport! I had fantastic amenities at my disposal to become a world class blind lawn bowler.

     I dreamed of  fulltime employment in the mainstream. I resolved that I needed in depth computer training at Vision Australia. I moved back to Melbourne, relinquishing my Scholarship.  After developing computer skills, and undergoing unpaid work experience, I secured employment in the loans department of a major bank. My working life had taken many turns, but this one certainly had friends scratching their heads in amazement. How could this affable knockabout bloke end up working in a bank?

     I guess it all boils down to resilience and meeting the challenge, while maintaining a desire to move forward. I won’t allow diminishing vision to limit a fulfilling lifestyle.

     This was my most recent, (and possibly my last), job. I was terminated when the bank laid off many workers during the worldwide financial crisis. I am not idle. I still do volunteer fundraising for Retina Australia, enjoy growing vegetables and tandem cycling.