Employment

Working conditions between the two world wars were pitiful. Employers could just about get away with murder.

I heard that some blokes looking for work used to wait outside a business, in case someone got fired and they could get the job. I believe it.

Dad talked to his neighbour often of an evening. They would sit out on the front steps of the neighbour’s house. I remember hearing the word “onion-ployed” very often. Dad would have worked if he could.

He had no continuity of work, but one job I can think of was building a fence for a property owner in Green Hills.

For fencing jobs, the landowner supplied the wire. Everything else had to be found or done by the labourer.

So Dad had to cut down trees for fence posts first of all. Then he went to a blacksmith at Greensborough to get a tool made up to strain the wires.

Mum would bring out the old pram. It was used for carting kids, collecting firewood and moving house. She would go to where he was fencing at midday, boil the billy, and take home a load of firewood. Usually he would take sardine sandwiches for lunch, and she’d take a billy of water with her.

Sometimes there was a sandwich or two left over, and Phyllis and I would share it. A bit dry, after being wrapped in a serviette all day, but it was tucker.

How we survived, I just don’t know. We were as skinny as rakes.

Mum got work when she could, which wasn’t often. "Grace Park" was a large farm stretching from Watsonia to Lower Plenty. lt was being subdivided, and proper houses were being built there. This was an opportunity for Mum.

To scrub out an entire new house, scraping and removing all the excess plaster from walls and floor, she would receive the princely sum of five shillings. Even then she had to supply her own sandsoap, laundry soap and scrubber. Whether it paid her to do it, I don’t know.

Even I looked for work while I was in Briar Hill. I suppose I was about ten years old.

Someone told me that a certain man was looking for gardening help, so I went down to see him. He did not ask what I could do, just "Are you a Catholic?" I said no, and I didn’t get the job. They call them the "good ole days!"

Alfie King was a friend of mine. Once in a while we used to go to Roy Willet’s butcher shop in Montmorency to ask for a few scraps of meat to go yabbying in a nearby dam.

One day Roy (Mr Willett to us) asked us if we’d like to weigh up the dripping and parcel it up. We thought that was a great idea. We enjoyed weighing it on the scales and wrapping it up in white butchers’ paper, and then newspaper after that. We’d weigh about six chunks of about half a pound.

For thanks, he’d give us a slice of Stras. sausage each. That was really a treat! Roy made his own dripping, rendering meat trimmings in a boiler in the shop backyard.