Standing in the Princes wharf, surrounded by Tasmanians fighting for workers rights I thought of my father.
He left school at 14.
He was good at English; he loved books, a love that was to stay with him all his life.
The family couldn’t afford to keep him there, so, along with his three brothers he went out to work.
His first job was in a tin factory, where, as a young boy barely out of shorts, he experienced first hand the realities of the factory floor.
As soon as he got his license, he started driving trucks. Anything, he told me years later, to get away from the noise and stench of the factory.
He drove trucks till he died.
He became the union representative when the company he worked for wanted to bring in contract labour.
The workers went on strike for 13 weeks.
In those days, if you didn’t work, you didn’t get paid.
We ended up eating tripe, an experience and a taste I will forever associate with the stench of poverty.
There were 6 kids and Mum.
She got a job at the local hospital in the pay office.
The workers were forced back to work because they couldn’t hold out any longer.
The contract drivers came in and Dad left.
He got a job driving for a brewery, Resches.
Mum described the next 10 years as the worst of their married life.
First load of kegs
Dad would get up at about 5 am. I’d hear him making his tea and toast and he’s always take Mum in a cuppa and some toast.
They would pick up their first load of kegs and palettes and start delivering at 7am.
Each pub and club would hand over the boys a 6 pack or a couple of long necks, or if they were lucky, a couple of draughties, and it was always schooners.
By the time they got back to the brewery at around 9pm they’d be well and truly pissed.
Sometimes, drivers didn’t make it back.
One guy woke up in Moore Park early one morning and retraced his steps back to the brewery. He found his truck with a street sign speared through the radiator a few blocks away.
No breathalysers back then.
They moved from Sydney to the Gold Coast where Dad got a job as a water truck driver.
I’d left home.
Mum got a job cleaning units in the high-rises.
The first Christmas they were up there Mum asked me to speak to dad about his leg.
He had a large mole on it that was bleeding and he refused to go the doctors.
I was a nurse and I knew what I was looking at.
It was a melanoma the size of a large prune, dark and lumpy with bits of dried blood on it.
“Dad,” I said. “If you don’t got to the Doctors with that leg, pretty soon you won’t have a leg to get there on.”
“Just let me have me Christmas and me beer and then I’ll go, I promise,” he said.
He knew.
He went after Christmas, and he lived for almost five years. He died with me holding his hand as he took his last breath.
His last words were “I’m ratshit.”
They didn’t have occupational health and safety back then; that’s something unions fought for.
Dad probably got his melanoma from driving all day, window down, with the sun shining on his right leg.
At least he wasn’t in a factory.
