As my reporting to the Big Guy Upstairs draws closer,I thought I would set down more of my old memories.
When I started school at the Norseman Convent in Western Australia in the late nineteen-forties, there were no such things there as pull-the-chain sewerage. There was a wooden lavatory (dunny) situated on a lane at the back of each property, on which the collection truck (night cart) attendant (dunnyman) would change the full pans weekly through a hole in the back of the dunny. We sometimes pushed thorny leaves through the hole onto the bums of kids sitting on the dunny seats during playtime.
My Dad was in the mining industry, and when not at boarding school, my home was in houses with corrugated iron (tin) roofs across Australia. A favourite pass time was to go out “bricking roofs” at night. Me, my brother,and mates, would assemble in the darkness close to the house of our intended victim. We would each have about six stones picked up off the ground (bricks)in one hand, and at the word “now” we would all launch our six bricks into the air above the target roof, then run like hell as the dozens came thudding down onto the roof. We were never caught.
At a Christian Brothers boarding school in the nineteen-fifties, there were double standards. There was a movie every Saturday night, and a brother would stand by the projector and place his hand over the lens should there be any kissing scene, so we would be protected morally.
One day, a lad named Kevin ran away, but was caught and returned to the school. The dormitary master, a fat brutal brother known as “Friar Tuck”,beat up Kevin so severely that his entire head was blue with two black eyes and dripping red blood. Moral protection ―yes, but physical protection ―no way.Years later, I asked a distinguished friend of mine what happened to Friar Tuck in later years. He told me that he had dropped the Friar when he tried it on him, was expelled, and completed his education elsewhere
When I left Uni in the early nineteen-sixties, I was employed as an engineer on the eathworks to the new standard gauge railway line to Eastern Australia, through the ranges north of Perth. My job was to use surveying instruments, with an assistant known as a chainman, and to supervise other surveying assistants, to peg out the areas needing to be either “cut” or “filled”. One such cutting through solid rock was Windmill Hill Cutting.
Using mobile drilling machines, the operators were shown where to drill holes, and to what depth. The holes were then filled with plastic tubes filled with explosive, and primed with detonators connected to fuses containing gunpowder, which when lit would burn up to the detonators, explode the detonators, and set the whole lot off. All men and machinery had to leave the area as the top layers of the exploded rocks were blown hundreds of feet into the air.
One dayI had animportant visitor from Perth, and was talking to him beside the cutting, but out of sight. No-one knew we were there, and suddenly the blast went off with a shattering roar. We stood there transfixed as the excavated rock shot into the sky, then landed with loud thumps around us. Remarkably, neither of us was injured or killed.
In the early nineteen-sixties, I was the Project Engineer for the first lot of expressway bridges across Perth. While we were doing the foundation piling for a bridge near the West Perth Station, one of the workers, George, always had his lunch under the wooden station platform, which was supported on stilts and accessible at the rear. There were large gaps between the timber decking, and George consumed his lunch laying on his back on a mattress he had placed there, while peering up through the gaps into the insides of passing female skirts
The contract included the construction of a large drainage pipe, about five feet in diameter, running parallel to the edge of a main road passing under one of the bridges. The Public Works Department required the pipe to be pressure tested by sealing off both ends and then pumping air into the pipe. A gauge set into one of the sealed ends would be used to demonstrate if the pressure remained constant for a specified time. It wasn’t my idea, but before the Public Works arrived to carry out the test, a worker was hidden inside the sealed pipe with a gauge with a pressure handle, attached to the outside gauge through the sealed end. His job was to use a torch to be able to read the inside gauge, which had the same reading as the outside gauge, and pump up the gauges to ensure their readings remained constant. It worked. Please don’t tell the Public Works.
In the early nineteen-seventies, I was Project Manager on the construction of a six-storey brick apartment building in Port Hedland, Western Australia. The Quantity Surveyor, Peter, went home to England for a visit, and while he was away, the guys on site used the tower crane to lift his car onto the fifth-floor. When Peter returned and asked where his car was, he was advised to look on the fifth floor―and there it was.
I moved to Sydney in the early 1970s as Project Manager on the construction of a slipform concrete apartment building, which had been held up for months by the Builders Labourers Federation (BLF) in the days of Jack Mundey. Those on site were evil communist bastards, with the sole intention of doing no work, but getting paid. They would not work inside when it was raining outside, and are reputed to have killed a building foreman at King’s Cross by tossing him down a lift shaft, and throwing a compressor after him for good measure. I sacked all on my site three times, but had to reinstate them as the BLF shut down all building sites being run by my employer.
They insisted on being able to employ a female BLF member as a first aid provider, but in fact her role was to turn it on for the boys in the first aid room, and to flog pot.
That was in the days of the Askin Liberal Government, police corruption, organised crime, legal child pornography, and Labor support for the Viet Cong in the Vietnam War. Juanita Nielsen, a King’s Cross anti-development campaigner was murdered by organised crime, and her body disposed of in a meat grinder.
One day, I was outside the site office of the slip form building, talking to the foreman who was raking leaves, when a female BLF organiser arrived and the following exchange occurred:
That is when I decided to take to the law. So, while working in construction during the day, including commencing Darling Harbour, I studied law five nights a week for four years at Sydney Uni. But that is a story for another day.
To the credit of Jack Mundey, he initiated the Green Bans, which while misapplied by the BLF, nevertheless opposed the destruction of historical buildings and their replacement with modern rubbish. What we see today is plastic rubbish, not fit for habitation, destroying the traditional ambiance and landscape. Most is constructed by our Chinese or Lebanese friends and exemplifies the destruction of our country.
Onya Jack.
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