it was.) They called this machine a ‘fax'. Still, the spirit within wanted more.
One of the many terrific things my mother did was to continually tell her daughters how beautiful they were. Personally, I think a degree of rose-coloured glasses was involved when she looked at us, but it was always nice to hear. While I was at school, I completed a Suzan Johnston modelling course, like my sisters had before me. Twelve months into my new job at the agency, the people who ran the course called and asked if I wanted to audition for a job promoting Australian-made products. The promotion was to be government-funded and they wanted one girl from every state. Never one to die wondering, I went to the audition – and, to my surprise, was given the role of the Victorian model. So I handed in my resignation and off I went to Brisbane to start my very short-lived stab at modelling. After settling in to Brisbane and meeting all the girls from each state, we started our ‘training'. Unfortunately, however, after about three weeks we heard the government had decided not to go ahead with the promotion – and I found myself out of a job.
Still, with the confidence I gained after getting the role, I thought, Why not try modelling more seriously? I had some photos taken and did the advertising rounds with my new photo book. It became fairly clear fairly quickly that my mother's view and reality did not quite match. Tall and thin I was; Elle Macpherson I was not. However, I did land the in-house modelling job at Adidas and made a few front covers – admittedly not the cover of Vogue; more like Greyhound News and CB Action magazine. In the end, modelling was not for me – a fact cemented after an appearance on The Bert Newton Show. I was modelling the new Olympic uniforms and went in the complete opposite direction to everyone else, tried to turn, tripped and fell. Not my finest moment and the end of a very short modelling career.
Next, it was back to the wheel of advertising for me with a job as an account coordinator. Multiple lessons were learned in this place. One senior male had octopus arms, which he used for big, long hugs and touches. When I complained to one of the bosses, I was told that I just had to put up with it (got to love the 1980s). The same male spent absolutely no time teaching me anything and kept everything regarding his work to himself. When he was sacked, I was given his accounts to run (Johnson Tiles and the SEC) and found myself way out of my depth. I tried my best to swim, but I simply did not have the experience or knowledge to do an effective job. In the end, the agency lost the accounts and I lost my job.
So there I was – 20 years old and jobless – when my friend Deborah asked me if I wanted to go travelling around the world with her. That was it. That was exactly what I wanted to do! I said I would join her, but the pull of a good party and buying new clothes meant I had very little money saved. When she packed her bags and took off without me, I knew that I had missed out. It was time to get serious so I could investigate my deep-seated knowledge that there was more. I started to work at night for two nightclubs. One was called the Chevron. If you're from Melbourne and over the age of 40, you probably remember that this was the hippest place to be – and I most likely checked your ID. I was hired as ‘The Door Bitch' (a term that was not always affectionate). The nightclub life was an eye-opener for a girl from the 'burbs. I saw all sorts of things: girls being taken out the back for a quickie, drugs and gangsters. I worked six nights a week at these clubs and got a job at a little advertising agency during the day. I was too busy working to spend any money, so rather quickly I had saved enough to start my travelling. During this period I was so determined, most nights I worked until 2 am. I remember driving home thinking that if I drove in the centre lane, I might wake up before I hit anything. Young people can be dumb and, once again, I was no exception. (I can only hope my own children are wiser than I was.)
The adventure that was supposed to last three months
At 21, with a blue backpack, $6000, a plane ticket and a determined look, I set out on my own. I can still see Mum's bewildered face as I kissed her goodbye at the airport. To this day, she still complains that I didn't turn around to wave goodbye like all the rest of the travellers; my sights were firmly set on the future. I was off to Marine County, San Francisco, to work as a camp counsellor during the American spring and summer.
The camp was for children of different backgrounds, some with health challenges. Many were deaf and in one of the sessions all the children were blind. At the camp I taught the kids about trees and nature, and how to swim, make candles and light a camp fire. At the start of the camp I had to take the children through what to do in the event of a fire or an evacuation. I also explained what they needed to always have at the bottom of their bed – a blanket, shoes and a torch. I asked at the end if anyone had any questions. A blind child lifted her hand and asked what the torch was for. I said to see in the dark, which clearly would not help this particular child; she laughed her head off at this, as did the rest of the class. Obviously, they had played this joke before, but the experience was such a great learning curve for me on how people are people. Not only did I learn a bit of American Sign Language, but I also learned patience and appreciation for what I had as I watched these children with extreme physical challenges overcome daily obstacles.
When the camp ended, I travelled with some of the camp counsellors I had befriended. We travelled up and down the California coast, hiked the Grand Canyon, sat by Lake Tahoe and eventually ended up in New York. From there, we flew to London. I found the city a bit too depressing – grey skies, little houses and lots of rain. I contacted an agency and quickly scored a job as a nanny in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, a little village in France, about two hours from Paris. It was the birthplace of Matisse and the site of much fighting during World War I.
I arrived in the village and couldn't find anyone who spoke English (or at least chose to speak it to me), except the woman I worked for. She was, not to put too fine a point on it, a cow. I was hired to look after her three children and ended up in the basement doing all the ironing and most of the cleaning; I felt like Cinderella, without my Prince Charming in the distance. She wouldn't talk to me for days on end; at other times, she would shout at me for mispronouncing the little French I knew. The kids were lovely – or at least I think they were. They spoke no English and I no French; perhaps they actually said awful things to me. I will never know. Overall, it was a horrible situation, but at the time I couldn't see many alternatives. All I could think was that I should give it my best shot. And sticking with the job was good grounding in finding solutions to problems; when you travel you have to rely on your own resources.
I had been playing Cinderella for the evil French woman for a few months when a friend from Oz called me. She was visiting her father in Munich for two weeks and invited me to meet up with her there. I was so miserable in France, I jumped at the chance. Days later I was in Munich with the one line of German I knew, ‘ein Weißbier, bitte' (which literally translates as ‘one white beer, please'). A much-needed and well-used phrase when travelling through Germany. With the same friend, I travelled on to Denmark and that's where I spent my first Christmas away from home. In Australia, my family celebrates Christmas on Christmas Day; Mum makes a big Christmas lunch and we all sit around eating and opening presents. Denmark celebrates on Christmas Eve, so my Christmas lunch there was spent in a local hotel eating a sandwich and drinking a beer. Even the white Christmas didn't lighten my mood – I'd been travelling for nearly a year and I was starting to miss home.
After Denmark money was running low. My friend and I heard there was work in the Canary Islands selling time share, so we made our way to an island called Tenerife. Tenerife was a major tourist attraction for the English; its beaches had velvet-soft, black sand attributed to the local volcano, which not everybody thought was a good thing. (Two years before the time I was there, the council thought having white sand would help tourism and dumped 200 tonnes on the beaches. Within 48 hours, the white beaches turned back into the black sandy beaches they were meant to be.) My job on the island was to get tourists to visit the timeshare resorts that were popping up everywhere. One of the many downfalls to the job was that ‘promoting' was considered illegal. ‘Illegal' in the Canary Islands was a grey area as far as I could tell. As long as the police were making money off the promoters, they turned a blind eye to the dozen or so on each corner. This is how the system worked: a police officer would issue
