Cuppa10

The only thing that shits me about Australia is probably the trading hours in most places of places in certain states.

Eg, Adelaide has horrible shopping hours, Brisbane is getting better but not amazing, the gold coast is really nice with its shopping hours and Melbourne If i recall correctly has nice opening hours in the city.

I came here when I was 5 years old, so I really cannot remember too much about the U.K. so I cant really compare it very easily.

from the perspective of a kid who was taken here by his parents and has spent most of his life here I can give you some info.

1) Make sure you help your keeds keep in contact with family.

2) If you want them to stay 'British' in some sense then make sure they visit the U.K. occasionally.

I've NEVER been back since I left and I can only maintain my ties to the UK through talking with family on the phone and MSN, watching copious amounts of UK television, and from speaking to my parents.



Having said that Australia is home and I really like it, most of the time.

phinax

To slapphead_otool, you got great writing style. The flow of thought is excellent.

Kindly post more as I could vividly visualize old Oz through your post

wannabe in oz

you got anymore for us slapphead_otool?

slapphead_otool

Changing your life........


In the early 1990s I was working hard. I was flying all over the place. Sunday nights were spent packing suitcases, Monday morning were always a 4am start, and a taxi to the airport. I still shudder when I travel down Oroidan Street.

Life was a series of aircraft seats and hotel beds. Some good, and some bad.

I had become accustomed to it, but it was wearing me down, and ruining my marriage. My 40th birthday was a milestone. I was alone in a $50 a night motel in some godforsaken part of Australia. My wife phoned the hotel, and the waiter bought out a small cake with a candle on it. It made things worse.

A few weeks later I walked into a local university, determined to change my life.

I enrolled in a part time Postgraduate Diploma. I picked the subject based upon a popular and stylish television commercial, which had featured two economists talking in a lift. Imagine a scene out of “Mad Men”.

The one think I knew was that economists didn’t work in the Never Never.

At first the course was hard. It didn’t help that I was still trying to work. I would juggle flights to ensure I could attend most of the lectures, and I borrowed notes off other students. At least I had a lot of free time to read the textbooks. There isn’t a lot to do in a small mining town, except drink and read.

When I did make to class it was very different to my earlier experiences. Things had changed a lot. Laptops, PowerPoint class presentations, contract lecturers. We had computer labs, and university email accounts.

I managed to graduate, probably to the disgust of many of the lecturers. I had argued fiercely against some of the rubbish they espoused. Maybe they were right, maybe I was. The jury is still out, but the global economic crisis must have left them with red faces. I didn’t get a lot of satisfaction out of it though. I still think they were a bunch of raving communists.

At the graduation I spoke to head of the business School. He pointed out that if I enrolled in an MBA I could get credit for the postgrad diploma. It made the MBA half price. I think the combined price was about $30k, and this was the mid 1990s.

And so I packed work in all together, became a full time student doing an MBA.

An MBA isn’t really anything. A bit of this, a bit of that. Not a lot of anything. Some finance, some HR, some marketing. Not enough to do any of it. Case study after case study. How would you do this? What would you do if that happened? How do you think things turned out?

I remember asking one of the Professors when I would be given the answer to making millions. He said “you want to be rich, pick wealthy grandparents”. Probably true.

What did I learn?

I learned that successful businesses are like dropping your jam on toast on the floor. Sometimes it lands jam side up. I learned how endless stupid companies survive by good luck, and how endless bright companies fail from pure bad luck.

I learned how to spot good fellow team members across a classroom, and to avoid the idle stupid ones. Team efforts are team efforts. Make it into a good team and you are ok.

I learned that some people just bullshoot their way through life. Others work bloody hard to get through.

(I later learned that a girl might be hopelessly in love with you, and swing things every time so that she ends up working with you in every team effort. She might work till 2 am alongside you, dance with you, drink with you, laugh and cry with you. But because you don’t notice she says nothing and the opportunity is lost. But that is another story…)

I graduated, and within weeks moved into a brand new career. I had an office in the city CBD.

I had completely changed my life, at the age of 45.

Fly Away

Your welcome. I enjoyed the next instalment very much

PS I noticed a certain poster has been banned LOL

geordie mandy

What a fascinating read, i was totally engrossed , like FA i too like your style of writing even i was only a youngster in the 70's.
You certainly have had a varied life and an interesting one. Look forward to the next installment
Mandy

wannabe in oz

i love it, keep it coming mate

West Vic

Awwww

slapphead_otool

This one is for you mandy.....

Dawn Departure:

In 1967 Britain conducted a phased withdrawal from Aden, as part of its East of Suez policy.

It was performed in an orderly efficient manner, as base after base was abandoned. My father returned home long before the Royal Marine Commandos flew out on the last helicopter from Steamer Point.

He told me amazing stories of the withdrawal. Stories of total waste, of men lay out brand new army electronic equipment and radios, and then drive bulldozer tracks over them. He told me about hundreds of tons of documents being burned on oildrum braziers. And the most emotive of all, he told me about the “Mari Celeste” feeling, as he walked through abandoned barracks and camps. Left just as they had been used. Beds made, plates on tables. And he told me of the local looters who ran through the gates and grabbed whatever they could. Sheets, lockers, beds, tables.

It was the end of the British Empire.

A few years later, his stories came back to my mind when I saw the omega Man” with Charlton Heston. A sole survivor of a plague wandering around an empty city. The movie was remade in 2007 as “I am Legend”.

Many years later I found myself living on a large Australian Army base that had been earmarked for closure. It had quickly been built in the early years of WW2, as a training base for soldiers, and had been massive.

The official story was that asbestos has been found, and the cost of fixing it made the base uneconomic. I later heard rumours that the land value was the real reason for closure.

As the base closed, there was something of the Aden withdrawal about the place. Week by week, month by month, more and more units relocated elsewhere. Parts of the base were abandoned.

In the final month those living on base moved into the Sergeants Mess. Everyone else commuted in from new locations.

Then finally everyone was gone. Only the guard lived on the base. Civilian contactors and army teams came in each day to remove equipment.

By luck of the draw I was the last ever Duty Officer. The last night the guard consisted of me, a Corporal and a Private solder. A camp built to hold 10,000 men was in the hands of three.

The guard lived in the Guardroom, building to the left of the main gate. Unlike the rest of the camp it was a single story brick building, with a large verandah. It looked older than everything else, and may have been in existence before the camp was built, but it was in standard guardroom design of many other Commonwealth bases, including ones in the UK.

Double doors led into a wide corridor that ran through the building, intersected by another corridor that ran the length of the building, cutting it into four quarters. To the front left was a long duty room, with a hatch into the main corridor. Behind that was a small telephone exchange, an office and a store room with a safe, filing cabinets, and a gun rack. To the right front was half a barrack block with enough bunk beds for half the guard to sleep, and to the back of this was a small kitchen, and two private bedrooms for the Guard Commander and the Duty Officer.

The far end of the main corridor led into a high walled exercise yard surrounded by jail cells, and at the far end of this yard were toilets and showers. The whole thing looked Dickensian, even though it had been built in 1940.


Young soldiers tend to be superstitious, and there were many rumours about the cells. Lurid tales of prisoners hanging themselves, and ghosts who haunted the area. Many soldiers refused to enter the yard in the dark, and would walk some distance to other showers and toilets. I went in there a few times, more to keep up appearances than anything, and it was bloody creepy. The poor lighting didn’t help.

And so on that final afternoon we watched the trucks leaving, carrying more stores and equipment. And then it was quiet.

At sundown we lowered the Australian flag for the last time. No one had told us what to do with it. I had considered keeping it.

Just before we started two elderly men from the local RSL arrived to witness the event. The Corporal ran down the flag and, as he unclipped it from the halyard, the two men stepped forward to help him.

I saw a strange thing. Without a word being said, a decision was made and a transition took place. The two old men took charge of the flag and the Corporal stepped back. The two veterans carefully folded the flag, and took possession of it. It was the proper thing.

They pulled a bottle of whiskey out of the car, and against all the rules we all had a drink out of dirty coffee mugs.

We spent the night watching black and white TV. An old set someone must have bought in years ago. It was at the far end of the accommodation quarters, with an old sofa and armchairs. We were supposed to do regular patrols. The Corporal took the minibus and went around the camp a couple of times.

It felt like being a condemned mans last guard.

Before dawn the next morning I walked all over the camp for one last time. It was amazing. I am Legend, Omega Man and my fathers stories all rolled into one.

I went into the camp cinema. Rows and rows of wooden seats, as hard as hell. A large white wall, and a small projection box. A single old projector was still up there. There were marks on the floor where long ago another one had stood. There was rumoured to be a second cinema, now disused. I never found it.

The armoury doors were wide open. I went inside. Corridors of mammoth steel cages, all open, the floor strewn with brass padlocks and empty green crates. Blackboards on the walls still bore armourers notes. At one time you could have armed a nation with the contents, and it was a secured environment. Now the alarms were disabled, and the doors were open. Strangely, one steel cage was full of toilet rolls. How did they ever come to be in an armoury?

The cookhouse floors were littered with large aluminum bowls and pots. Like everywhere else the lights worked, and some were still on. I pulled a lever and the blue flame of a gas cooker burst to life. An extraction fan was roaring away. I tried in vain to find the switch, before giving up and moving on. The Mari Celeste image was strong.

Behind the cookhouses were dining rooms, still with rows of tables. Thousands of plates bearing the army crest stood in racks by serving hatches.

I walked past countless streets of accommodation blocks. Some still had beds and lockers, some were stripped bare. Most still had lights on.

At dawn I met a local walking his dog through the maze of buildings. “I thought you had all gone”, he said. I told him we almost had.

The MT pool was empty, huge workshop doors swung in the breeze. Some old trucks stood in the crock park. Unrepairable and unmovable. They are probably still there even now.


The entire training wing was wide open. More modern buildings, looking like a 1950s English Secondary school . Outside, like everywhere else, stood row upon row of smoldering home made incinerators. Perforated oil drums standing on bricks. I pulled a singed manual out of one. It covered how to light an army field cooker. Because it had the word “Restricted” on the cover, and because no one wanted it, it was confined to the fire.

The parade ground, once swept with toothbrushes, and the scene of a million parades, was piled high with equipment. Beds, stacks of blankets now sodden with rain, pallets of food, new truck tyres, blank notebooks, and more and more toilet paper. Contractors would pick it up sooner or later. Most would probably be dumped.

It was about 8am before I got back. The Corporal was cooking breakfast. A white ute pulled up. It was the security guard from the local council. The new owners. I went out to greet him. It was like a bailiff taking possession of your house.

I went inside and said “its time lads”.

The Corporal was an old sweat, older than his years. Without a word he went into the left corridor and took a fire axe off its hooks. He walked to the end, and with a single blow severed the main telephone connections to the base. All of the direct lines, all of the switchboards lines, went dead. The base was now cut off from the world. He then walked back into the Duty Room, and picked up a box of papers. Whist I had been walking he had pulled all of the notices off the walls, anything that could be classed as Restricted. He walked outside and burned them on an oil drum incinerator.

And that was it. The base was no more.

We got into the minibus, and the Corporal joked “where to”, like a taxi driver. The private asked if we could go via a McDonalds, as he was still hungry. I offered to shout them a second breakfast, as we went through the gates, the last soldiers to ever leave the camp.

And to the ghosts of those young men who once marched through that gate, to die on some foreign land, I say this:

We didn’t leave as you would have liked, with bands playing and flags flying. But we were very much like you. A hungry Private, a competent Corporal and an officer who just wanted to go home.

paulry

This is the first time that I've seen this thread. It's excellent!

Such vivid descriptions and a great writing style . You really need to consider writing a book about your experiences.

travelling_annie

Amazing stuff, absolutely fascinating! Keep writing, desperate to hear more...

geordie mandy

Wow what an expereince, it sent goosebumps down my spine. Tried to give you Karma but wastold i needed to spread first
Mandy

superskib

No corrie and fish and chips

Shove the Corrie mate, but you can get a fair dinkum bag of Fish & Chips at Woy Woy just up the coast from Sydney, and you can share it with the pelicans.

Only been twice and am too ancient to move but wish I'd done it when I was 25.

Be lucky Gibbo

z3phron

Awe-inspiring life experiences indeed.
thanks for sharing.

boots

slapphead,
The most poetic,animated,inspiring read in BE.
Similiar circumstances,insignificant compared to your history,and your posts make me think of my experiences and where I am heading.
As mentioned before,you should consider a literary career.