1950 was the year I turned twelve. I was given a bicycle and my first pair of long pants at Christmas that year. The bicycle enabled me to earn some pocket money by delivering telegrams from the local Coburg Post Master General’s office. Australia’s first surviving set of quads was born to the Sara family who lived in a street at the top of a long hill in Bell Street, Preston, and naturally telegrams poured in. As soon as I had taken one packet up there another lot lay waiting. The Sara family has no idea of how many telegrams got ‘lost’ eventually by me and the other delivery boys. I gave the telegram business away then and enlisted for selling newspapers, first outside the Coburg railway station after school and at weekends, and then by bicycle delivery. My bike bags were overstuffed with The Age, The Argus and The Sun News Pictorial making the bike unrideable and progress very slow, so that job did not last long

I was launched into the post war secondary education system at Preston Technical College in 1951. Due to lack of classrooms, teachers and everything else, the classes were held in the grounds of a primary school in Thornbury not far away. The classes commonly held over fifty students which made it hard for the semi-trained returned servicemen/teachers to achieve much, even if they had any equipment with which to demonstrate. These days we would think that more than a few had what we now call PTSD.  One well respected teacher definitely had malaria: the class would stop and someone would get a jug of water and a glass as Captain Dave started to shake and sweat. No one ever misbehaved when he was afflicted. I recall standing in long queues of students to use a soldering iron in one of the sheet metal classes or a wood saw, plane or hammer in the woodwork classes which were referred to as Sloyd.

Transferring to Preston Tech Campus for the second year of my ordeal was an eye opener. Many students there were drawn from Fitzroy, Richmond, Collingwood and the housing commission developments in Heidelberg and Preston. These housing commission homes were built following the slum clearances of Camp Pell, at Royal Park. Camp Pell consisted of left-over second-world-war army huts which had been pressed into housing service.

Schooling had been fairly gentle up till then. Now there were some very tough kids and we rapidly segregated into ‘Housies’ and others. On top of this was a regular inflow of migrant kids from the refugee camps of Europe. Many spoke no English whatsoever on arrival and hung around in language groups. Fights occurred when the “Pollies”, Polish kids, being the toughest group, had mini riots with the “Yukies” from Ukraine over some WWII grievance or dominance of the school canteen queue. You just stayed clear. There were no Asian or coloured students but there were heated discussions as to whether Greeks and the like were really white.

The Air Training Corps Cadet system was great for me and I became adept at Morse code and rifle shooting and got to have my first flight from the RAAF airfield at Ballarat in a DC3. Spotty fourteen and fifteen year old students catching a bus to school with a Lee Enfield .303 rifle in hand was quite acceptable but it was awkward on a bike. By then I had taken to catching a tram into town and reading at the State library which had a much better book collection than school. My older sister, Wilma, who worked at the English Scottish and Australian Bank in the city, caught me on the same tram one day and asked where I was going. Thankfully she never let on to our parents. One of the qualifications for her job in that bank was that she wasn’t Roman Catholic. My very first job was as an apprentice to a small book binder but I was sacked for being too interested in the content of the books.

My next job was as a store man packer at the Audiphone Company, a hearing aid company in Howey Court in Collins Street. Hearing aids used large quantities of bulky, heavy and expensive batteries which were frequently carried in a pouch separate from the hearing aid. The aid itself was generally slung around the neck and was attached to the speaker which fitted into the ear by a cord which required frequent replacement. Very often people only turned them on when they wanted to discuss something or ask a question.  It was a busy job which I enjoyed and I got to meet a lot of ‘Deafies’ as the clients were known. (I’m a Deafie now). Many were WWII survivors with damaged hearing from explosions, air crew operations, gun fire and so on. When the transistor hearing aids came in from America our senior manager was in despair as they were much more reliable, smaller, lighter and needed fewer parts. Naturally they were more expensive. They sounded better and used a fraction of the batteries the old units did. He was concerned the business would fail due to loss of repeat battery sales. However the salesmen did not hesitate to convert customers with great success.

I began a night course at RMIT in what passed for electronics in those days, and much of what I enjoyed learning then stays with me still. I had dreams of getting into television on the technical side but was told by my father not to waste my time, ‘it was just a flash in the pan’. I had my television debut at RMIT around 1955.

 I befriended a man by the name of Arthur who was in the British Army Corps which liberated the Bergen Belsen concentration camp. It was he who drove that bulldozer that is pictured in Lord Bertrand Russel’s book ‘The Scourge of the Swastika’. He said he came here as it was the furthest he could get from Europe. He helped me greatly in some parts of the course where I struggled.

I turned eighteen in 1956 and got my first motorbike with the help of my boss Ralph at the hearing aid company. It was risky in those days because roads were bad, signage was useless, lighting was poor and no-one wore helmets except as an affectation as we thought. There were thirteen deaths on one weekend.

My father would let me drive the family Vanguard even though unlicensed at the time which was very trusting of him and I took to going to local dances where there were GIRLS. From suburb to suburb at the Coburg Town Hall, Heidelberg Town Hall and Leggett’s Ballroom in Prahran, I bruised shins sometimes twice weekly.  I never did learn to dance well but that wasn’t why one went dancing anyhow.

We moved from Coburg to the far flung region of North Balwyn with unmade roads and no sewerage connections. We had running hot water via a briquette brown coal fired furnace, an oil-fired room heater, and the luxury of a black and white TV. Dad insisted on putting the aerial inside the roof as thieves would be bound to come and steal the TV if they saw an aerial on the roof. Then there was a washing machine and a rotary clothesline too. Things were looking up.

Monty Blandford, who called the Anzac day marches, ran his Hospital Half Hour radio program for the benefit of the returned servicemen still languishing in hospital or being treated for long lasting injuries both visible and unseen. The theme tune was ‘Blaze Away’ with the words “We’ll make a bonfire of our troubles and we’ll watch them blaze away”. I think this may have been a Boer War song actually.  I had an uncle who was a Gallipoli veteran, later gassed and wounded in France, who was in and out of the Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital.

Before Wilma left Australia to settle in Canada she had sparked in me a life-long love of music. She took me to the Melbourne Town Hall where I was spellbound watching and listening to Burl Ives singing and playing his guitar. This gave me folk music.  I still remember his rendition of ‘Brennan on The Moor’. She took me to see a performance of Gian Carlo Menotti’s opera ‘The Consul’ set in Eastern Europe at the height of the Cold War.  I hated the Secretary who frustrated the need for a visa. Wilma used to play 78 rpm records of opera. I didn’t like it until one day Gigli’s rendition of a Puccini aria from Tosca suddenly fell into place like a jig saw assembling itself.  It was a gift that she never knew she gave at the time. I have told her since.

Ice skating was something my boss Ralph introduced me to in 1955, and after a while I became good enough to join an ice hockey club, lasting one game before quitting. I then took up speed skating which required less explosive bursts of energy. Arriving at the Glaciarium in St Kilda road at 6.30 in the morning for practise and listening to the virgin ice crackling under your blades, leaving vortices of mist spinning behind you until your next lap, was a feeling to be treasured. I wasn’t much good, but I enjoyed the feeling of almost flying. Colin Hickey, one of our number, won a bronze medal at the 1956 winter Olympics.

Around this time Rock and Roll came to town. Elvis Presley was all over the air waves and dance halls were bouncing to the new beat. I hated it. I tried to like Presley and failed. I went to see the Jail House Rock movie with Presley and thought it was awful. In retrospect it was awful. Nowadays I would probably just find it ludicrous. Bill Hayley and the Comets came to Melbourne, performing at Wirth’s Circus near Princes Bridge. At the same time Ted Heath’s Big Band from England were appearing in town but their shows were not well patronised because the new sound had taken over.

The folk movement gathered strength around this time and Frank Traynor’s Jazz Club was established.  Danny Spooner arrived in Melbourne which gave some relief. Little coffee/ folk clubs arose and people started drinking sweet wine instead of beer. Remember ‘Sparkling Est’,  Pimms cocktails. People my age remember that at the beginning of any movie or concert ‘God Save the King’, later Queen was always played, and that people stood to attention for the National Anthem as it was then. We also recall the electricity brown outs and coal strikes, the extended rail strike that lasted three months, the interminable wharf strikes, the gas shortages, briquette heaters.

In 1957, after leaving the hearing aid people, I joined  a stationery supply company called S&M Supply Company. At that time S&M stood for Shire and Municipal Supply company. It sold various stationery items specific to the needs of local government authorities as well as mayoral robes and chains and such.  More importantly, and what attracted me, was their involvement in supplying the needs of local government sponsored Municipal Libraries. I was back to books at last. I loved the job and did very well at it, but I had begun to develop ideas and ambitions of my own. Eventually I left them to start in competition, founding the well-known  successful Raeco Library Supplies business who bought out S&M many years ago.