Some chronology for John Joseph Ray

1964


A view of Brisbane, where I took my Senior and did my first university degree



Customs officer

Unsurprisingly, my marks in the Senior exam were not high enough to earn me a Commonwealth Scholarship so I had to do the first two years of Uni part-time. I therefore used my Senior pass to get into the 3rd (tenured) division of the Commonwealth Public Service. I became a Customs Clerk.

One of my jobs was to send off seized pornography for censorship. I saw so much pornography then that it has never again been of great interest to me.

I also worked at the mail exchange searching incoming mail for items of interest to Customs and Excise. I became quite good at detecting prohibited imports and dutiable items.

. I worked there from 25.5.64 to 22.3.1966.

I think I saved a fair bit of money during those two years.

For my first three years in Brisbane I would almost always have my evening meal at a nearby Greek Cafe (Tharenou Bros.). Always the same order: rump steak well done with chips and salad. At least I only drank tea with my meals in those days.



Student

While Iwas working at Customs I also became a part time student at the University of Queensland.

But when I got to university, I was an outsider, though for different reasons than before. Being a contented soul, I have always been a conservative. Being contented is a pretty good definition of being conservative. But universities are of course a hotbed of Leftism. Lots of people there think the world about them is all wrong and they know how to fix it.

I had however done some very wide reading in my teens -- Aeschuylus, Sophocles, Plato, Herodotus, Augustine of Hippo, Thucydides, Descartes, Aquinas etc -- and was already aware of the Leibnitzian doctrine that we may live in the best of all possible worlds. The point of the doctrine is that some bad things may be an inevitable outcome of good things and that one might therefore destroy good things while trying to destroy bad things. The long history of Leftist "solutions" to problems having "unexpected" and destructive "side effects" certainly validates the Leibnitz doctrine.

So I was skeptical of the intellectual miasma of Leftism from the day I set foot in a university. And it showed. In response to some Leftist assertion, I would say: "But what about....". And there is nothing a Leftist hates more than debate. To challenge his beliefs is to attack his person. But I was not discouraged. I was quite active in student politics, disrupting the cosy consensus wherever I could -- and having a lot of fun in the process. I did have some friends, mostly from Catholic DLP families, but I was otherwise as excluded as could be.



My first kiss

It was with Sandra Bloor, a fellow employess of the Customs Dept. She was a nice girl but shortly there after I met Janet C., Who was more interesting to me

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E.&O.E.

My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Personal); My Home page supplement; Subject index to my short notes. My annual picture page is here

Email me (John Ray) as jonjayray@hotmail.com