The next episode starts with me getting a job back at The Swan Brewery and trying my luck as a bookmaker at Perth Races. Well the races did not go well at all so Swan Brewery was the go. In addition I worked on Saturdays at the races for one of my ex- Darwin colleagues who worked on course. The job at Swan was in charge of stock control and in involved stock takes every Saturday morning. The brewery shifted from Mounts Bay Road to Canning Vale in 1977 and it involved much hard work getting systems up and running.
By this time we had sold our house in Cloverdale and purchased a near-new well-equipped house in Wilson. The boys were set up as electrical apprentices and Beth at Curtain University for a year. My dear wife Jo got herself a job at Atkins (W.A) as an order picker and was considered the top picker. She resigned much to their dismay and worked at Manchester Trading Company in Victoria Park for 20 years. She was extremely good with her selling points to the many bargain hunters who shopped there.
The boys were now tradesmen and started to go their way. Dave and his girlfriend Sandy went to Kununurra where he worked at the airport. Mark and Debby, his girlfriend, shifted to North Perth and Mark still worked for the government. Beth stayed home for a while and had a variety of jobs and then shifted from house to house with various people and then with a friend Claudia purchased a house in Maylands. As time went on Mark and Debbie shifted to Bassendean had 2 boys, Randall and Ayden, while Dave and Sandy back from Kununurra built a house in Roleystone and had 3 children Sarah, Haley and Darcy.
However, not all was bliss, as follows – Dave and Sandy split up and not long after that, Mark and Debbie. No blame is attached to any party as they rearranged their lives and the children have grown up to be good citizens. Mark remarried to Amanda and they live in Karratha, Dave has no partner but is living a good life working on mine sites and Beth lives in Sydney and is a career woman.
I moved on to different jobs at Swan, Warehouse Administration Officer and then to Transport Manager. Jo stayed at Manchester Trading and she drove her Honda to work and back every working day.
Once the children left home we went on several overseas trips including twice to Hawaii to see Aunty Nan and her great husband Roy Gurney [1]. They have a son called Mark Gurney, our cousin and he married a girl called Barbara. Her father was of German decent and mother Japanese and migrated from Guam in the Pacific. Roy was a veteran of World War 2 and served in Germany and Japan. He had and intense dislike for his former enemies and Nan had to calm him down on several occasions at family get togethers. On my first hello to Roy since he and Nan were married in Brisbane (I was the barperson at their reception at Graceville) he presented me with a carton of beer and a nice hat. Nan died some years later from lung cancer (she was a heavy smoker) We were in the back of a car driven by Mark and Barbara Gurney who was taking us from Honolulu to Wahiawa to see my Aunty Nan and Uncle Roy. Mark said to Barbara I can’t understand what Mal is talking about. I said to him it’s Aussie English not Yankee bullshit.
When we were in Hawaii Jo and I visited the Primo Brewery. They served us up with great big pots of beer. Jo couldn’t drink hers so I helped her.
Jo and I went to Hong Kong and Jo took her own material for clothes. When we got into the tailors shop he started to bring out samples I said put them away mate the lady knows what she is doing but you can open a beer for me.
We were at the International Date Line Hotel in Nukualofa at Tonga and a man came and said are you Mal Mackenzie. I said yes and he said I used to sell you carbon paper when you were the office manager at The Swan Brewery Darwin. We went for a tour of the Anchor brewery in Singapore and the guides name was Colonel Yap. He sure could yap. We were riding bikes at Bora Bora in Tahiti and Jo fell off. She did not hurt her self so I took her down the road and bought her a Bora burger. We did a 5-day trip to Taiwan and had a private tour guide. His name was Alex and he looked like Alec Fong Lim.
A lady called Malegeny T Jackson ran the hotel at Savaii in the Samoan islands. She took us to a local village to meet the chief of the tribe. We had to sit on the floor of the hut with a fiber mat over our legs while they served us with black cocoa and corn beef sandwiches. In the mean time pigs wandered through and roosters and hens fluttered around us. We walked down the road at Savaii and came across a gentleman of the cloth with a skirt and a black umbrella. He gave us directions to the next village and when I got there I shared some king browns with the locals.
In Davao City in the Southern Philippines we went to the local restaurant and had heaps of San Miguel stubbies with 2 waterside workers from Fremantle and 2 farmers from Beverley. I went into a shoe shop in Makati in Manila and asked if the shoemaker could make me a pair of hand made shoes of the best quality. He said yes and brought out a crocodile on a leash with a tape around its mouth. He tiedmit to a post in the gutter with water running over it. I said no thanks and left in a hurry. We went to the San Miguel Brewery in Manila and I presented the person I had been given a introduction to with 2 bottles of quality Australian wine. He said thanks very much and showed us to a chauffeured driven car and said to the driver: show them around. We went to a lot of places and after we had lunch they took us to a cockfight. I felt sorry for the poor roosters. There was big money on the fight.
Dave arranged with his mate Biggesy to take Jo, Mal, Sandy and Sarah for a flight to the Bungles and back. Sarah was a little baby and she gave us a bawling exhibition all the way. I said to her recently do you remember the Bungles trip and she said no. I said I will never forget it. We had a 21st birthday party for Beth in our back yard at Wilson. Some idiots threw empty cans, stubbies and chicken bones over the fence into Jack Bourne’s pool. He was very cranky the next day. When I was in Kununurra I decided to go for a float plane ride around Lake Argyle. There was the pilot, a girl, a large lady and me. We tried three times to take off but the plane would not go up and kept flopping back. We had a discussion on who should stay back and the large lady lost. Ern and Elise Lawrie and ourselves went to Luna Park at Scarborough. We went on the machine that turned over and over and around and around. All our change and other things fell out of our pockets.
[1] Roy Gurney was named Fauntleroy. He was born in Chicago had a sister called Toots and worked on the Boulder Dam in Colorado before joining the Army at the outbreak of World War 2. From then to retirement he was either in the army or a civilian contracted to the army in Hawaii.