but financially things remained embarrassingly bad with accumulated bills and Stan’s continued abusiveness. She was worn out and would leave if she had any way of supporting the children. She was concerned the grass had overgrown the area around the house, making it dangerous for the little children, Ross, Pam and Geoffrey. I bought a lawn mower and gave mum a little more money.
A family I herd tested on Phillip Island offered me other work on their farm. I enjoyed their sophisticated approach to both farming and life in general. Jeff and Ros Wilkinson had received private school education and travelled the world. Our friendship grew into my minding the farm while Jeff was away showing his stud pigs at the Royal Melbourne’s Show in September. I worked the testing to accommodate that time and, indeed, was by now doing extra piecework for others in the hours between one farm and another.
The most common advice offered by the farmers and almost everyone I knew was that I should settle down and keep herd testing. In other words, suspend your curiosity and accept your lot without question. I should be grateful for the job I was doing and don’t aspire for more. They were entitled to dream but I should not. It was a form of condescension that made me angry. I remain wary of people who expect others to do things they would not.
I had a girlfriend, Kay. We spent many nights of the week dancing while on other nights I was out with my mates drinking to excess. I wanted to belong somewhere and dealt with the frustration by filling every moment with activity, either by working or socialising. I doubt anyone knew the turmoil of my thoughts. I was angry with my father, worried about my mother, brothers and sister and dissatisfied with my work. I was an observer of family life, not a participant. Who, I wondered, gives a damn for me?
My girlfriend was not only beautiful, she was an excellent dancer. Despite having no formal training, she frequently won the ‘Belle of the Ball’. It was wonderful fun and we were also good at rock’n roll. Her father played the drums as part of a band for the smaller dances. He seemed to enjoy the excitement of it all as much as we did. Her family was very hospitable to me and because her father was so much fun, we always had a hilarious time. Once when we were all around the table for a Sunday dinner, he was giving cheek to his wife Betty. In reply to his taunts and teasing, Betty turned from the stove and poured a saucepan of custard over his head. He sat there with an amazed look on his face before slowly wiping the custard from his eyes as it flowed over him. We kids just rocked with laughter. He was a genuine clown who had a theatrical take on all aspects of life.
Kay and her mother made their dresses, as did many girls at the time. They were beautiful concoctions of colour that accentuated their figures with numerous petticoats that occasionally fell to the floor while dancing. I realised we had gone over the top when one night I turned up in my recently acquired, near new spotless 1959 FC Holden sedan to pick her up for the district final of the Miss Gippsland competition. I was met by her younger brother, who instructed me to take the back seat out and replace it with a stool. Her grace arrived and sat enveloped by her magnificent new gown in the back seat. It proved worthwhile for we won, or at least she did.
By the winter of 1961 I was bored to tears and restless. I resigned from the Phillip Island and Archie’s Creek Herd Test Association. The lack of a formal qualification, together with the boredom of repetitive manual work, had generated the fear I was destined to a life without choice, one laboring job appearing to be little different from any other. How I felt about anything had become irrelevant and an unaffordable luxury. Life, it seemed, was a matter of survival. I had learned I could do almost anything I put my mind to and I became unconcerned by what I did, provided I was paid.
The atmosphere in the community was subdued because of the almost daily reminders of the Cold War. The Berlin Wall was in the news, the threat of communism to the free world the subtext. The erratic ranting of Nikita Khrushchev fuelled the feeling of an imminent threat to Western democracies. Chairman Mao Zedong, leader of the People’s Republic of China, instituted his Great Leap Forward program which replaced the previous practices of farming with commune collectives, the result of which was a massive famine that, up until then, resulted in an estimated 30 million deaths. Despite the escapist fun of the rock’n roll era, there was a real feeling another catastrophic war was inevitable. The Russians and the Chinese, we were informed, were hell bent on spreading communism.
I heard of a training program with the MLC Insurance Company. I applied and after an intensive three weeks of instruction, was turned loose to sell life insurance. Amazingly, I proved to be quite successful, but I loathed it. I was too ready to empathise with the client. I quit after a few weeks. I tried selling cars at Korumburra and that lasted a few weeks. I was not a salesman.
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