I’ve been gainfully employed since about the age of twelve. In those early days, most of my paid work involved teaching swimming, but I also delivered junk mail and worked in holiday camps. After leaving the navy, Dad had begun work with the weather tech company Delairco and I often helped at technology trade shows. At fourteen, I did a stint at a local McDonald’s in Canberra as the official ‘sauce girl’, putting the tomato sauce, mustard, pickles and onion on the orders. I liked the job and had a good relationship with the young manager, but after a particularly messy sauce fight in the kitchen one evening, my shifts dried up and I quit.
After leaving secondary school, I sat the Commonwealth Bank trainee test and became a junior clerk. It was a miserable start. The assistant manager immediately informed me that my dresses were either too thin or too tight or somehow just inappropriate. I liked the other people who worked at the bank, but I didn’t like him and he didn’t like me. As punishment for my ‘attitude’, he would send me into the archives in the roof of the bank for days at a time to find errors in old teller ledgers. I thoroughly enjoyed this work. Better still, I was allowed to wear what I wanted up there.
I lasted three months before the area manager called me in one day and said, ‘You’re not enjoying this much, are you?’ I told him I thought it was boring and I couldn’t work with the assistant manager’s attitude. To my great surprise, he agreed to pay me four weeks in advance in lieu of notice and I was free to leave. I could hardly contain my joy.
Two days later, I landed one of the best jobs I’ve ever had. I became a car wash chick. The Whale Car Wash floated on a sea of soapy water at the corner of Lonsdale and Elouera Streets in Canberra’s commercial precinct of Braddon. The job required a 7.30 a.m. start and I only worked when it was busy. No cars, no work. I started getting roses from anonymous customers and even appeared in the car wash’s TV commercial.
The ad agency had hired a glamour girl with a big bosom to get into a white bikini and sit on the bonnet of a car while it was being washed to prove how gentle the machines were. I was the far less glamorous size 8AA girl vacuuming the car and handing out tickets in the second scene, but the way they shot it made it look like it was me in both scenes. They ran that ad for over ten years on the local commercial stations and friends were amazed at my TV transformation.
I also liked the two blokes, Barry and Harry, who worked there with me. One had a cleft palate and one had an acquired brain injury. Barry ended up being sent to Goulburn jail for six weeks because of unpaid fines. I remember how unfair I thought that was, but he was quite happy about it. He’d never been on a train before, so the trip to Goulburn was exciting, and when he got there he would get regular meals and even snacks, he told me. He didn’t have to work and he could play ping-pong and basketball all day with a bunch of new friends.
The car wash job offered irony as well as infamy. The bank manager who had paid me out at the Commonwealth Bank would walk past each morning on his way to work. Often he would see me there with the soapy sponges and vacs and just shake his head. I thought it was hilarious. I’m sure he thought I would end up living on the streets.
I saved a few thousand dollars at the car wash and when I turned eighteen I took a gap year and travelled alone to the UK where my Granny and Grandpa were still living in Scotland. I visited family as well as some of my Pretty Beach friends who were now living in the Jersey Isles. There was also the obligatory Contiki bus tour. Granny showed me some of Scotland’s grand gardens. For the first time, I started to develop an appreciation of design using plants.
The following year I started a four-year course in Landscape Architecture at the University of Canberra, but quickly changed stride and moved to Industrial Design within a few months. I think I was attracted to the more functional aspects of this course than the static nature of architecture. It was a small class and I was the only female. That didn’t bother me, but it did highlight my lack of practical woodwork and mechanical education. I fell in love with a final-year Industrial Design student called Pete and had a great and naughty time.
* * * *
Stone Day at the University of Canberra was held to mark that day in the late 1960s when then Prime Minister John Gorton laid the foundation stone for the institution. Of course, the large chunk of granite at the front of the building immediately took on the more colloquial meaning and getting stoned there became the order of the day. Well, it did for me and my friends, anyway. By then it had become Stone Week and the celebrations and special events were many and varied.
The Stone Week of my second year was a turning point in my academic career. A few of my friends had chopped an old white EH Holden station wagon so that it resembled a giant convertible. On the grassed areas outside the union building we crammed as many stoned students as we could into the car and drove up and down the concourse—much to the annoyance of the union organisers.
One night the university’s Shakespeare company decided to hold a performance of Much Ado About Nothing in the Union Refectory. Still stoned, my new boyfriend Pete and I thought it would be totally in keeping with the theme of the event to judge the performance using the standards that the Bard’s own audiences would have used. So we scoured the university halls of residence for eggs and fruit, and made our way to the balcony that skirted the performance area below.
At the point where Hero the heroine starts swooning at her wedding, we let fly, reigning eggs down onto the players. I think we even yelled some old English sayings like ‘Hweat!’, ‘What Ho!’ and ‘Eow!’ The outraged actors yelled back ‘Fuck off!’, but in accents more redolent of Dubbo than Dunsinane. It wasn’t until the next day we realised how upset everyone was. Pete and I were called into the Vice Chancellor’s office and ordered to pay hundreds of dollars in carpet and costume cleaning. We argued that it hadn’t been ill-intentioned and had in fact been in keeping with Stone Day antics. But the Vice Chancellor would have none of it.
As punishment, we were barred from all union facilities. Not being able to go to the union bar was effectively like being banned from the campus. Pete finished his final year soon after, and the idea of coming back for another two years with the bans and without my boyfriend made uni a less attractive place to be.
Still of a mind to study design, I decided to quit university and do the popular three-year fashion course that was on offer at the local TAFE. It covered everything: tailoring, pattern-making, textile manufacture, industrial sewing, design drawing and even fashion parades. It was the learning experience that engaged both my limbs and my limbic system, and it was the first time I felt like I was on track to something tangible. It was also the first time I had sex for money.
* * * *
I was supporting myself by waitressing at the Parkroyal Hotel on Northbourne Avenue. After work one day, I joined some of the staff and a few regular guests who were having drinks at the bar. After a couple of wines, one of the guests quietly asked me if I’d like to spend the night with him. I liked him without being wildly attracted. He was quite a bit older, probably in his mid-thirties and had a well-worn feel about him.
I was in two minds, so I thought I’d let him take himself off the hook by putting an outrageous condition on his request. I smiled into my drink and said, ‘Well, how about a hundred bucks to go with that?’ I thought he’d feign outrage and, if anything, try and negotiate me down. But no. He just looked me through slightly narrowed eyes and said, ‘Okay’.
I was stunned. He didn’t even haggle over the price. I was thinking ‘That didn’t go to plan so I suppose I’d better go through with it!’ He gave me the money while we were in the bar and then we went back to his room. He was the oldest guy I’d ever fucked. We drank a lot and I fell asleep with him, but I left at dawn. Unfortunately, I was sprung by the night manager who just happened to go past as I was doing the walk of shame down the hallway. It didn’t go down well with management, they were very disapproving. They didn’t sack me, though, because I was popular with the guests and a hard worker. I didn’t think much more about it after that, though the $100 did stick in my mind. It was twice the amount that I had just been paid for five hours of waitressing!
I started work at a restaurant where waitresses were instructed to wear a badge that said, ‘Don’t Let Keating Stop You Eating’. It was a protest about the proposed fringe benefits tax that the Hawke government was about to introduce. When the tax came in, the restaurant changed its name to Fringe Benefits, but the damage had already been done. The long business lunches with the big tips suddenly stopped. The tax also affected revenue at many brothels: many businessmen would take their clients to a brothel to celebrate or seal a deal.
It seems like a century ago now that you could claim a sex worker on your business expense account, although many of the brothels changed the name on their credit card facilities to try to fool the tax office—and their customer’s partners who might see the credit card statement. One that I remember was called ‘ACT Plant Hire’. Another brothel used an Italian-sounding restaurant name for their credit card facility until the wife of a regular client rang the brothel looking to book a table. She wanted to surprise her husband for an anniversary and knew that he loved that restaurant because she’d seen from his credit card statement that he dined there frequently.
* * * *
About six months into the fashion course, I lost my licence for driving over the limit. Feeling hard done by and in need of a break, I absconded from lectures with a few friends and we went to the coast for a couple of days on a magic mushroom field trip. Harvesting gold tops and blue meanies in the cow paddocks at Nelligen is an ancient and honourable tradition dating back to the late 1960s when Canberra’s hippy pioneers first invaded the south coast. Following the harvest, we drove to my parents’ beach house at Bawley Point, though Mum and Dad didn’t know about it.
After three days of psychedelic partying, we dragged ourselves back to Canberra, whereupon I was immediately summonsed to my mother’s office in town. At that stage she was working for the Overseas Telecommunications Commission in Canberra’s CBD. She was in a very dark mood, but still feeling the effects of the mushrooms I was finding it hard to understand why. As it turned out, she had just seen the court report of my drink-driving charge that she was never supposed to see. After a secret deal, my sister Kirsty had promised to get up early the day after court and remove the court reports section from the Canberra Times before my parents could see it, which she had. But as luck would have it, the report had my age as Fiona Patten, 31, of Aranda. A friend of my parents had seen it and thought it hilarious that the newspaper had aged me by ten years. So she just had to fax it to them! At least my father saw the funny side of it. Not long after, he had the faxed court report framed and presented to me at my 21st birthday party.
I finished the fashion course, but I never graduated. One of my teachers had set us a ridiculously simple test about basic computing that I thought was an affront to my intelligence and I answered the questions in much the same way. I also resented his overbearing attitude. He failed me on this test, and the course, even though I managed to get 99 per cent on everything else. Angry and fed up with institutions, I was ready to move out into the world.