Sooner or later we all discover one basic truth - if you don't have rich parents, you have to work to breathe - that is, if you want to eat and be safe and be warm and dry and drive a half decent car, generally you have to earn it. (Or steal it. But even the basest thieving requires some effort.)
Like most of us with hard-working parents, I learnt this by degrees, from about age 7 onward, learnt not to expect any free handouts, pull my weight, all that. All while going to school and getting the best education and for as many years as they could afford.
Mum's dirt-farmer dad died when she was 14. The Bank and the Depression were closing in and godknows which was worse. She grew up with the credo that you worked like a horse or you went under. Dad's dirt-farmer dad was tough and ambitious and expected his sons to help him work the land for buggerall because it was hard times and the next drought was always just over the horizon or already blowing sand across the paddocks. All my aunts and uncles came from the same origins. There was no escaping The Work Ethic.
As a small kid I did all the usual assigned chores stuff to get a few bob for The Adelaide Show, once a year. Enough for a saveloy roll with sauce and a ride on the dodgems and to pop off a few rounds at the shooting gallery. Anything else needed private enterprise. Living up in the Hills, my older brother had the rabbit trapping market sewn up, so I tried blackberries in season, had a stall down on the side of the Gorge Road. But in the late 1940s we averaged about three passing cars a day. Me and younger brother ate most of our stock. It was lean times.
Back in the suburbs - if 1951 paddocks and collections of makeshift shacks and sheds out at the margins constitute "suburbs" - there were more opportunities. The first was short season onion-crating. Back then all of the northeastern district of Adelaide was Bay Of Biscay black-dirt country that grew vegetables like crazy. The post-war migrant Italians saw the goldmine it was and it flourished. Onions were favourites. They lifted them and piled them up to dry then paid us plebs two-and-sixpence to rip off the tops and tails and fill a crate. It was shitty work. Shitty flyblown work. In the full sun. Mostly for kids and hard-up adults. (Today those same prime market gardens are under roads and endless jumped-up housing because politicians never did understand agriculture.)
But then I struck gold. A regular part-time job, trundling foodstuffs about on my bike handlebars for the (only) local corner grocer, two nights after school and Saturday mornings. Ten bob a week. Every week for a year. I was 12. I was filthy rich. I bought essentials. Model plane kits, radio parts, a groovy flag for my bike.
Then we moved back to the bush. But I'd become a City Kid. Uncle Leo was from the old school, the same one Dad and Mum came from. No hand-outs. Me and slightly younger cousin teamed up, did a deal on cow-milking and (eternally) winding the handle of the (effen) separator but it was barely pocket money. I needed more. I was set on having my own MG TC sports car by the time I was 16.
We tried galah-marketing. This involved raiding nests and stealing away young cockatoos and hand raising them on porridge and shipping them off to the galah markets of Adelaide to a life of solitary confinement for the amusement of the sort of bastards who keep cockeys in cages. I think we raised three but then let them go. Prayed they found their mothers again.
Next there was wool-picking. Wool-picking is the lowest job in the bush. It's what the swaggies resorted to during the Depression, involves scabbing through endless paddocks under a merciless sun with a wheat bag, looking for dead sheep, and picking out any usable bits of wool. Flicking off maggots if it was still a bit fresh. I have no idea what the scouring works in the city did with it but I think a full wheat bag was worth about the same as two loaves of bread. The MG TC was looking like a mirage on the horizon.
Shearing time we "rousted" (from whence comes "roustabouts"), brought in sheep, swept, pressed wool bales - well, did the climbing in and jumping up and down before the real baler finished the bale - did endless fetch and carry. Tea and cake mostly. For the shearing gang. Listened to their stories. Learnt new swear words. But shearing was about one week a year. Funds quickly dried up.
(It was somewhere in here that The Germ lodged in my psyche. The Author Germ. It's caused by voracious reading and an over-active imagination. It settles in the back reaches of the head of pimply gits and keeps whispering - "Write Stuff" - "Make Money" - "Travel" - "Make money travelling and writing stuff!" It never really went away. Ahhh, sad sad sad).
Whole new possibilities opened up when we turned 13 and a big dry set in and rain and feed were in short supply. Uncle Leo suddenly decided we were old enough to drive, drive the majestic Fordson Major tractor and the oil-guzzling brakeless '35 Ford V8 ute. And get paid for water carting and hay carting out to the "outback" block where he'd moved the sheep onto the saltbush. He hated water and hay carting but geez we thought it was just brilliant! Wouldn't y'know it but it started raining again and the dams were full but our money dried up. We were desperate. Uncle Leo suggested weaners.
A weaner is a young pig that's been reared on the scabbings of the house kitchen and garden and anything that looks like a weed and any old grain and chaff you can sweep up and winnow out a bit into something only a pig will eat. We had to go into debt to Uncle Leo for the initial investment in sow-ware and boar-visits but the pig pens were already there from when Uncle Leo's dad kept pigs. (Uncle Leo was a bit of a gentleman farmer and always saw himself above swine. But he encouraged us to give it a shot).
Pigs are great. They wallow and eat and root and pump out weaners and not much else. Sometimes get "scabby back". Which is treated with anything that looks a bit like oil. Including oil. I walked away from the farm at 15 with fifty quid in my kick and I was laughing. Till we settled back in the city and I found that fifty quid didn't buy an MG TC. So I lowered my sights and trundled this thing home one day in time to turn 16 and get my licence. Which back then was a matter of sitting down and answering about twenty questions, and get at least twelve of them right. Pay the fee.
And that was the end of Making A Quid. As a kid. At 16 I left school and went into the Railways as an apprentice and joined the Union and learnt serious grown-up engineering and the fact that any male who is to command respect had to always have the best paying full-time job he could manage. And being an Author was not one of them.
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Footnote - Over the next twenty years I diversified. I tried engineering, dairy farming, forage harvesting, office equipment, tyre retreading, more engineering, managed a service ("gas") station, fitted out high performance ski boats, did motor racing management, farm tractor field service, motor mechanic, my own backyard speed shop, office management, and - finally - wine industry accounting. Which, for the last 30 years of my working life I stuck to. Because I loved being around wineries and vineyards and winemakers, and the salary and the fringe benefits were brilliant.
Okay, all that looks a bit shiftless, but as a young guy I needed to try things on. As young guys should. With the exception of the last job, none of them stuck, none turned into a career with a fat salary. But they gave me the stories. Stories I'm still writing. Wouldn't change a minute of any of them, including the one or two I hated.
ps - I still have the first money I actually made from writing. A cheque for ten shillings and sixpence. I was 14.
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