an employee engine driver & fireman of the Co.
from January 1937 to December 1973."
I discovered this little gem during another drive to Ulladulla when we strolled along the picturesque harbour to walk off some of the lunch we had overindulged in at the bowling club: pumpkin soup followed by a large Fisherman's Basket followed by a slice of cheesecake.
Who was Jack Myers? Did he have any dreams and ambitions beyond being an engine-driver and fireman at Mitchell's Mill for thirty-seven years from January 1937 until December 1973?
Perhaps the point of this cumulative tale is Jack Myers' pointless life? Perhaps Jack Myers would've been engine-driver and fireman at that Mill much longer had it not been for the Mill's closure in 1974? Perhaps the highlight of Jack Myers' life is this plaque to his extraordinary ordinariness?
I don't know! And please, don't get me wrong: I am not knocking Jack! Jack and millions like him are the red blood cells that hold our society together. All I know is that nobody is going to put my name on a plaque for having lived the same year thirty-seven times over.
Which reminds me of a couple I used to know in Townsville - let's call them John and Elizabeth, because those were their names.
John had come here in 1957 as a young man, leaving his small country Austria to see the world. He took a job in Sydney and, on his first holiday, bought an old motorbike and drove north to explore Australia.
He got as far as Home Hill which, just a hundred kilometres south of Townsville and with a population of no more than a thousand at the time, was a backwater of a backwater.
John put up at the local pub where he met a young buxom barmaid who fell for his Viennese charm and accent, and they eventually settled in Townsville where John became the papercutter at the local newspaper.
He was still the papercutter at the local newspaper when I met them almost three decades later. By then, they had swapped their dreams of seeing the world for six kids and a small house in the suburbs. As Elizabeth wistfully remarked, "I married John in the hope of leaving Home Hill to see the world and I got as far as Townsville."
That was in 1985. Today the only plaque with John's name on it is in Townsville's cemetery. "Für immer in unseren Herzen."
