I come from a background of what would be termed today as ‘working poor’.
We grew up in a housing commission town in WA and it was always a case of ‘what you go without doesn’t matter’. We didn’t know how the other half lived and frankly didn’t care.
Our childhood was full of sport and outdoor adventure. Our parents kicked us outside and only wanted us back for dinner when it got dark.
Any thoughts that we might be missing out on something because of our lower socio economic situation were negligible.
I’m so grateful for what my parents gave us, especially the freedom to explore and make mistakes. Managing nine kids together must have been horrible at times for them, along with very little income.
My Dad was a shift working security guard at the local BP refinery and Mum was a home maker full time. I can vividly remember Dad counting every last cent at the kitchen table.
He would count out piles of 10 with 1, 2, 5, 10 and 20 cent coins, then pay the bills and issue Mum with her house keeping for the week.
It’s remarkable what you get conditioned to when you grow up in that environment.
For instance I moved into a flat with a fellow soldier, Keith in Toowoomba when I was 17. We were half an hour from our army base at Oakey and where the regimen of three meals a day was laid out for you if you chose to live in the barracks.
I was way out of my comfort zone, not unlike Steve Martin in ‘The Jerk’, a bumbling fool. Keith was a gregarious and privileged eighteen year old from Sydney’s North Shore who had attended the country’s most expensive school, Knox Grammar.
For the first few weeks we lived off junk food because cooking was simply getting in the way of partying.
We finally decided to go to a supermarket and purchase something organic and whilst navigating the aisles, Keith threw a frozen chook into our trolley.
I immediately reacted with a “hey, hey what are you doing mate?”. He gave me a quizzical look and replied, “what on earth are you talking about?”
“We can’t afford that can we?” I said. “It’s actually cheaper than those two steak burgers you demolished last night you idiot” he dismissed me with.
The fact was that chicken was a high priced item in our family home. The old man dissected the rare chook that came our way with surgical precision whilst my younger brother Glen and I were left drooling in the background. In our eyes the roast chook was our holy grail.
That level of naivety continued to plague me many times after leaving home at seventeen.
When I arrived in Melbourne over thirty years ago I would drive around the leafy streets of the inner city and wonder what sort of jobs people had that could enable them to have houses as beautiful as these?
Are there actually that many surgeons, dentists, lawyers and plumbers in Melbourne? How is this possible to own a multi-million dollar home, even on those exorbitant salaries?
As it turns out it of course, much of it comes down to old money.
I’m proud to be someone who is self-made (what I’m made into I’m still not sure) and never having received a ‘leg up’ financially, however I must admit feeling a little envious of friends who have received some form of hand-me-down from a generous relative.
With that in mind I received an envelope from one of my older brothers Bruce recently during a trip to his place of retirement, Bicheno in Tassie.
He found it during a clean-up and it came from our Mum. It was addressed to myself and Glen as follows. As well as stamps there were one and two cent coins.
Mum had put the gift together in 1973. This was to be some form of inheritance.
Again it comes down to conditioning. Mum was clearly under the impression that these items would be worth something in fifty years’ time. It was all she had.
Remaining ‘glass half full’, I was determined to see if it was at all possible that our Saintly Mother who would have turned 100 years old recently, was onto something.
Back home, I emptied the contents and logged into Ebay. To my astonishment there were examples to cross reference the values so I took note of everything and rang Glen in WA with the news.
“Hi bro, I’ve checked our inheritance and I’m pleased to say there were the same stamps on Ebay.”
“Fair dinkum mate. Does this mean I can pay off the boat?”
“Not quite. Its $20. A quarter chicken and chips and an iced coffee each”
“God bless her.”
“Here here.”
