1 week ago
36
I arrived in Australia from the UK in 1983, at the sprightly age of 14. Unbeknown to me I was a historical figure, the very last of the £10 poms.
My parents and I were a family full of beans about a new life but just over a year later tragedy struck when my mother was killed in a car crash. My father and I were left to carry each other in grief. We were wildly unprepared. At only 35, my dad did his best to solo-parent while at school I went off the rails – all booze, sex and drugs. I couldn’t care less about education, had no interest in what lay beyond schooling and crashed out of year 12 with no grades.
As soon as I left school it rapidly became clear that, given my lack of qualifications, good jobs were not easy to come by. I worked for a while in a supermarket, tried to sell aluminium siding door-to-door and spent hours at a printing machine, soaked in ammonia, spitting out architectural plans for builders.
Eventually a friend lured me into joining him on the night shift in a blast furnace. The job offered a modest hourly rate for some pretty hellish work.
Adorned with asbestos gloves that went all the way to my armpits, my task was to place long steel rods in the furnace until they turned bright red, then slip the hot rods into long plastic tubes, softening the plastic so I could bend and glue them together to form garden furniture.
A hot furnace, melting plastic, industrial resin, 10pm till 6am. What’s more, my friend was going through an Elvis phase and would play his records all night. To this day I can’t listen to Elvis without shivering.
When I look back on this period of my life, I think of Irvine Welsh’s book If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work. The pithy sarcasm of the title really captures the epiphany I experienced facing a thousand-degree furnace every night. I had seriously screwed up.
I hated school but it was dawning on me that perhaps the teachers were not getting in the way of my good times, they were actually on my side, trying to arm me with what I’d need to have a chance at a job that was more aspirational than melting plastic tubes.
I come from a proud working-class background. I understand the value of a decent day’s pay for a hard day’s work. But with hot steel rods in hand and the aroma of molten plastic and resin in my nostrils, I realised that the future was going to be a long hard slog and I was determined to have a crack at leading a more creative work life.
Like many teenagers, music was everything to me, so that was my first port of call. I signed up for a night course in music recording and mixing. But fate had other ideas.
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While I was studying, my Elvis-loving blast furnace friend had scored a job with his uncle at a television production company, working as a trainee sound recordist. After a few months he told me he was leaving, his dad had offered him a job for twice the pay, replacing the soap dispensers in public toilets. I jumped on the opportunity and demanded that he get me an interview to be his replacement. My night course had taught me a thing or two about microphones.
The rest is history. I got the job and the drive and ambition that had been absent during school was fully awakened. After work I stayed back most evenings and taught myself how to shoot and edit. I was, as they say in northern England, mad for it!
I went on to have a feverish television career. I travelled the world filming for the BBC, covered war zones, toured with Oasis and spent far too long documenting the criminal underworld in London. By the time I returned to Australia I was an ambitious documentary director and was soon making films for the ABC, SBS and a host of international broadcasters.
And all of this I put down to the creative drive I discovered staring into that blast furnace. Despite the teachers’ best efforts, school just didn’t work for me, but gazing into the fiery pit of hell certainly did. On reflection this tale is probably a decent argument for resourcing adult education. School isn’t for everyone, and we all mature at different stages of our lives.
