Open Writing

I stood in front of the burnt-out ruin of my house and couldn’t believe my evil luck.

I was left with only the clothes I wore and some spare items and running gear in my locker at work.

Back at the office I mentioned to Shirley, one of the tea ladies, what had happened and that the arson squad were investigating. Shirley told everybody she knew and about a day later I was called into the commissioner’s office. He said the staff had organised a whip round for me. He gave me in cash more than $1100. I was astonished and delighted.

The typing pool gave me a lurid tie. A girl in human resources borrowed her husband’s credit card and bought me a clean shirt. A shy girl in the library walked quietly into my office, and handed me a sympathy card: inside was $50.

The support from my colleagues was amazing. One of my running friends gave me a pair of sports trousers, a towel, and a pair of running socks, and a free tee shirt from the athletic club.

I reflected on all this and came to some interesting conclusions. One of these was that had my son or I been in the house when it burned down, we might have lost our lives or been severely injured.

Next I remembered that Australia is a nation of immigrants – outside the original Australians – and that many people had arrived on our shores with very little. Conclusion: possessions are not really that important.

I asked myself could I see a gift in this tragedy. Was there a jewel for me? Of course, it was the realisations that my friends and colleagues valued me and wanted to help, and that I wasn’t alone. In a sense, they had picked me out of the ashes and dusted me off, putting me back on the road again.

The house was rebuilt with the body corporate group insurance and I moved back in with a second hand fridge, a second hand washing machine, an ancient iron, and an electric jug for making tea or coffee. I also salvaged a few pans and kitchen pieces from a friend at work.

There was no bed, so I slept in a sleeping bag on the floor of the study.

When Alex was terminally ill and I was haemorrhaging money with her bills, I realised that I could easily end up old and broke. What should I do?

I remembered a lecture from a stockbroker at the UWA summer school a few years earlier in which he said the path to increased wealth, which everybody could access, was to buy good quality shares and sit on them. He suggested specific criteria should be adopted – buy only large, reputable companies, listed on the Australian Stock Exchange, which were well managed, had prospects of capital growth and paid regular dividends with franking credits.

Just before Alex died, I’d bought a few shares in Challenge Bank, then I bought a few hundred in National Australia Bank, and just kept going as funds became available.

I kept my running going and though I was depressed, the running made me feel good, and the performance of the share market kept me optimistic. A friend, a senior orthopaedic surgeon, ran a 10km event with me one Sunday and talked about how I could avoid feeling depressed. He stressed that food was most important and that if I paid attention to my food and drink intake, it would pay good dividends in health. He advised me against eating chocolate because he understood that eating chocolate gave people a quick high which dropped off and they were left feeling worse than ever.

He suggested I always look for the blue sky through the thick clouds and that I should feel glad to be a citizen of Australia, a great place to live, even if you don’t have much.

I listened carefully to all this and enjoyed running with him. He said he had fought a huge battle with depression. His wife had left him and took his daughter with her. He had to pay her a lot of maintenance – his maintenance bill was more than my salary- and her lawyers wrote to him regularly saying it wasn’t enough. He was riding his bike to his rooms, did the office cleaning personally, and had developed an ulcer.

He was more than qualified to give me advice about coping with bad luck and I valued the time he spent with me and the quality of the conversation. I went on to run my best marathon ever at 57, which was pleasing.

I threw myself into my work, took on the job of president of the Main Roads Social Club, and did what I could to make the place work and to help other people enjoy their work lives with me.

The publisher of the social club magazine told me her staff loved to work on this job, it was one of their best tasks and she wished to show her appreciation. She gave me a dozen bottles of wine for Christmas, which I shared with the Social Club committee, none of whom had been shown this sort of appreciation in the past. The magazine just got better and the performance of the social club committee went from strength to strength.

I got a call from the Education Department one day – some of our day labour workforce, employed in the bush, wanted to learn to read so they could get all the news from the social club magazine. What a lovely reward that was for me.

I saved $100 a day and bought new shares as soon as I had accumulated $2000 or more. This way I got in on the floats for WA Newspapers, the Commonwealth Bank, and Woolworths.

By the time I was 60, I had an investment income of about $11 000 a year, which was more than the dole for a single man, so I knew I would be able to manage my affairs in retirement.

My boss came into my office one day, asking, “Richard, how old are you?”

“Sixty,” I said.

“Mate,” he said, “Isn’t it time you went home and put your feet up?”

I wasn’t expecting that. The department was downsizing and they wanted to lose 1,000 staff, offering redundancies. I applied and was accepted, got lots of good wishes in a send off from the staff, and put my superannuation payment and most of my lump sum redundancy payment into blue chip shares. The share market went through the roof. I made more money than when I was at work, and didn’t even have to get out of bed.