TRAUMA TOWN PART 7: My first real job was with a council, assistant librarian at Stanton Library in North Sydney.
I was still doing my bachelor’s and was getting sick of the assorted jobs I used to trade in, dish pig and so forth. Those jobs. There was an industrial reason I ended up in that council job.
Short order cook at Taronga Zoo Cafeteria. Mid-80s Taronga Zoo catering was full of John Cusack-type figures languishing in their last school holiday job at 28. It was a classic closed shop; you didn’t come to the Zoo for the food, but by the time you got there and lugged yourself around, you were hungry and thirsty. I think the Zoo was run by the state government then. The catering was subbed out to a contractor; it was a monopoly surrounded by walls to keep the creatures in and non-ticket holders out, which included other caterers.
Now, with more experience about this city, it was the sort of operation an Eddie Obeid-esque figure probably had a cut in or should have. That was the only responsible way to justify the quality of the food.
I had worked in restaurants as a busboy, kitchen hand and dishwasher before the Zoo. Never a waiter; someone did not trust me in front of house, taking orders. I was ok with that at 15.
I did the Sunday shift at the old Misha’s Restaurant at Balmoral Beach, now the Bathers Pavilion, through year 10 to 11. The Twin got the same job at the same time. We did alternative shifts. It was too confusing for everyone having us together. We rode the push bike down Raglan Street at 6:30 am to punters pissing in the park next to the restaurant before it opened at 7:00 am. It was a Sydney all night thing to have breakfast there, and the council toilets opened at 8:00 am.
Misha’s was a busy restaurant run by a real man called Misha; he was the most onomatopoetic persons I had seen to date. A rotund European who sat around a lot. He occasionally gave directions. Once he told me to go upstairs and bring a few more tables down. Upstairs was his own restaurant hoarder’s paradise. I sensed a wheel in a wheel, some European stuff hidden up there.
Once you stepped over the puddle of urine on the side door to Misha’s, it was great. Chunky 1970s breakfast comfort food, a full bar from 7:00 am onwards (Misha was punctual on that), harbour views and the gayest waiters in Sydney. Paul, the head waiter, looked like Peter Allen and suffered from a loss of buttons. He kept an eye on the Twin and I, managed the floor. The Twin was gay, and it was normal to be gay at Misha’s front-of-house. The kitchen was still full of casual homophobia, cut down by Paul when he dumped some plates and pointed out hollandaise sauce dripping off the short order chef’s apron. Where’s Misha? Over there on a rock. He liked the beach too.
With that on my CV and realising that Misha was more about fun than penalty rates, I got a summer holiday job for year 11 and the last summer of year 12, in zoo catering. The pull of a regulated workplace was strong.
Year 11 summer was great. In a cafeteria outpost, unsupervised and next to the Gibbons. I read all my HSC English texts and started to read about Gibbons. The Twin took the cafeteria post near the Seals. I was not surprised to find out that the palaeontology records show that a common cause of death for Gibbons was falling out of a tree. The records for Seals were more mysterious.
Year 12 summer I got a promotion to assistant chef/slop-hand in head office. The Twin stayed in the outposts. Head office was next to the Spider Monkey pit. I used to pre-fry the mullet before it was shipped to the catering outposts, keep the chips up to the fryer, the odd chiko roll. Pre-fry, store. Defrost another block of mullet and then batter. Bulk and volume.
My favourite thing was to enter the walk-in freezer till all the moisture in my trousers froze and fed off cuts of battered mullet to the Spider Monkeys nearby. Everyone got a smoke break in a kitchen. For me that was monkey time. I was Anthony Bourdain to them. They knew it was wrong and would quietly come one-by-one to the side of the pit, take a piece of mullet, not make a scene, retreat and eat. They were risk managers.
There is always one good thing about a job you remember; for me, it was those faithful rats with ADHD, arms, legs and a tail.
My father sent the Twin and I to an expensive school; there they said, at work, look busy and wear a suit. I saw wisdom in the way the monkeys looked busy but did their own thing. No suit. A debt not paid. I walked away from my monkeys; it was hard. That was the last job the Twin and I shared.
A stint on Captain Cook Cruises as dish-pig, deckhand and short order cook, again (if you call pouring slop into a vol-au-vent and scraping stuff into a pot cooking) and some waste management duties. We used to dump our rubbish in Pyrmont after dropping off the punters at the Quay.
Glass was not favoured on the boat, and all the beer came onboard in XL Foster’s Lager Steel Beer Cans, which I have never seen anywhere other than in Barry Mackenzie movies. There was a sense of piracy, and you could drink, eat and take stuff home with you after the cruise. It was all paid for the second you boarded the boat. But finishing a shift at 2:30 am on a dock in Neutral Bay and waking up your flatmates at 3:30 am to eat the oysters wore thin. Where was my monkey muse? And I couldn’t swap shifts with the Twin?
And then local government arrived, the council putting you through now. That job was well paid and a regulated part time task that you could plan your goals around. Stacking books on a Sunday was double time, and then I moved on to operating their home library service for 2 years.
It was a proper part-time job: no one asked me to throw garbage bags of rubbish over a cyclone fence onto an abandoned wharf, I didn’t feel obliged to take up smoking to have my work break, and I didn’t come home from a shift smelling like the possum that fell into a damp bin. No monkeys yet. And you had a defined shift; you could pace it or finish early.
The Council gave you a car for the book deliveries, and you could do foreign orders; for me that was visiting my mum, fried food on the highway and occasional swims during summer. I realised this is what I wanted then: lightly defined tasks, structural laziness, the opportunity to do your own thing and reasonable, indexed wages.
So, what’s wrong with local government? Well, nothing, but after nearly 40 years of interaction with that layer of government, there are a few ticks that could be pulled off.
The core of local government is both its chief justification and reason to exist – its democracy.
Local government is more property owner democratic in an old 19th century way. In NSW these places are still ratepayer clubs and often time-capsules for their community. Councils are democratic and must be good. Can you have too much democracy? Is life a Sara Lea cake: the more layers, the better? I tend to think layering isn’t such a good concept for government. Watch the monkeys; they like to get on with stuff. Lean and focused might be the better model.
Let’s look at this issue a bit closer next week.
