Some chronology for John Joseph Ray

1964




A Brisbane autumn



First job in Brisbane at Abraham's bag factory>

My first job in Brisbane in 1964 was as a clerk at Abraham's bag factory out at Rocklea. I bought an old Army B.S.A. 500cc motorbike (for ten pounds) to get to and from work. I loved that bike: Manual advance/retard and all. It was a couple of months before I discovered that it had a fourth gear! Tram tracks are very dangerous to bikes and I once slipped on them and came off in the middle of Ipswich Rd. I was lucky not to be run over.

I eventually wrote the bike off in another accident in which I broke my leg. Where I came from that was almost a rite of passage for young men. I went back to my parents' home in 308 Mulgrave Rd in Cairns while I recuperated. It was then that I took the picture of Roxanne as a little girl that now hangs on my wall. She always was the good-looking one.





The drain

While I was back home I took a number of pictures and another one was of a drain. In a conversation recently, my brother said he grew up in a drain. That amused me -- not least because it is true.

So what are we talking about here? Bombay, Calcutta or some Third World slum? Not at all. We both grew up in a spacious three bedroom house with all mod cons in the pleasant Australian city of Cairns.

99% of what my brother was talking about is explained by the picture below. It shows the local kids playing in a stormwater drain out the front of our house in Cairns.



Kids in the photo are: Nolene Kelso in red raincoat, Ray Kelso standing on the bank. In the water are my sister Roxanne, brother Chris and Carl Foster, from Fosters auto spares, next door. Geoff Michna wasn't there that day!

Chris says that for most of the year the drain was quite "yucky" but was a fantastic place to play after the tropical storms came and the flood waters washed it clean and filled it up .

Note also from the foreground that we grew up in a house with a white picket fence -- which is, according to our "intellectuals, an unimaginable horror -- though I have no idea why. I have subsequently put up a few white picket fences myself.

For birthdays and Christmasses these days, kids get DELUGED with plastic toys from China. I have bought a few such toys for little kids myself at times. But NO such toys are as remotely as satisfying to kids as a half-overgrown stormwater drain -- particularly if you never wear shoes and are allowed to play without adult supervision.

So my brother and I were discussing that photo and what he actually said was: "Geoffrey Michna and I grew up in that drain" -- referring to his childhood friend from a couple of doors down. He is not in the picture above but he sure was often in the drain depicted!

Perhaps these days computer games do far more for kids than a drain ever did but I wonder. There is no doubt of the endless fascination that drain offered to the neighbourhood kids.

Back at work

I stayed at the bag factory for only a few months but had some educational experiences there. I was a stock clerk so was sort-of half way between the office-workers and the factory workers, most of whom were female. I kept factory hours, however -- starting at 7am. The office workers started at 9am. It was my introduction to class distinctions and was all very new to me at the time. I was struck by how the factory girls seemed to live in a different mental world to me. I hardly understood them at all. My head at that time was full of writers from Thucydides to Ruskin and that would have been greeted with great derision had I mentioned it.

I was at one stage given the chance of driving the forklift but a veil of silence over that is probably best.

There were a couple of freemasons working in the factory and that was new to me too. The factory foreman -- a very important man named Henry Trenerry -- was a Mason and there was another guy too. The manager was a former salesman named Garlick. It was my introduction to the idea that salesman often become managers.

The factory made bags (paper sacks) for one of the sandminers on Stradbroke Island and Henry had to ring them up at times. I still remember their phone no.: "Dunwich 16".

I cannot remember why I left Abrahams but I imagine that I got bored with it.

I then went to work for Harry Beanham at Gearco



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E.&O.E.

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