THE MOST memorable piece of career advice I ever received was given to me in a railway station bar in Wagga Wagga, 21 years ago, by a Scotsman with orange hair. Even the hair was unforgettable. It wasn’t a shade of orange you would find in nature, among Scotsmen or elsewhere. It came from a bottle and there was a certain poignancy in his explanation for how it happened.
Billy – as we’ll call him – was a man of advanced middle age; a former soldier, who had started to worry about his employment prospects. Thus he had just resorted to colouring what was left of his hair. And it was supposed to come out “auburn”.
But he misread the directions, or something, and the result was a bit more dramatic than intended.
In fact, he was so embarrassed that, when we met, he was wearing a cap, which he eventually removed briefly for my amusement. We were both waiting for trains; mine to Sydney, his in the opposite direction, to Melbourne.
There were a couple of hours to kill with conversation, and he must have found me a sympathetic audience. At any rate, when he unveiled his hairdressing faux pas, I restrained myself to a rueful smile, even though I was tempted to grab the fire extinguisher and put his head out.
We got to talking about employment because I was touring Australia on a working visa at the time and, as always, looking for a better-paid job. I had an open mind about this, having already done stints as a vacuum-cleaner salesman, a builder, and working night-shifts in a zinc smelter.
Among the options now, I told him, were sheep-shearing and the grape harvest. Which is when Billy suggested that, if he were my age, he would forget Australia, go to South Africa instead, and work there as a mercenary, “assassinating communist agents in the jungle”.
At this sudden turn in the conversation, I found myself studying him again with the same expression used earlier for his hair, while also involuntarily glancing at my watch to see how near the train was. It occurred to me that during his most recent job – mining out in the New South Wales bush – Billy might have “gone troppo”, as Australians say: a form of heat-induced madness.
But no, he seemed quite rational, and deadly serious. He was himself a former communist, he said. Now he hated everything about the Soviet Union and the eastern bloc. This overrode any quibbles he might have about serving apartheid South Africa where, he had learned, there was a special corps dedicated to killing communist agents working to overthrow the regime.
The bounty was Aus$1,000 a head. And if you were good, he said, “you could get three a week.” Billy gazed into his beer sadly, like a man seeing visions of his glory days, when this dream job would still have been feasible for him too. “I tell all the young army lads I meet that’s where they should go,” he said.
Brief as my stay was, I found that time passed slowly in Wagga Wagga. The town is world-famous chiefly because of its name, pronounced “Wogga Wogga”, which evokes the romanticised Australia of kangaroos and wombats and the outback in general.
In fact, it’s a modern, industrialised place that, being roughly equidistant between Sydney and Melbourne, was once in the running to be national capital.
Wagga means “crow” in a local dialect: a dialect that simply repeats words to form their plural. Thus, presumably, “Wagga Wagga” can mean anything from two crows upwards; although the sighting of two crows could hardly have been so memorable as to be immortalised in a place-name. The usual translation implies that the town is a place of “many crows”.
Other things I learned while there is that it is home to the “Wagga Effect”: a phenomenon that, as well as crows, has produced a disproportionately high number of elite sports performers. This is in turn sometimes explained by another phenomenon, the mythical “Five O’Clock Wave”, said to sweep along the Murrumbidgee river at that time of the evening, so powerfully that it can carry surfers for 100km.
I don’t know how real these things are. But not if the Wagga Effect had turned me into an Olympic marksman overnight, and the Five O’Clock Wave had then swept me into downtown Pretoria waving a gun certificate, would I have considered taking Billy’s advice. Visiting South Africa, even as a tourist, was beyond the moral pale then.
As for shooting things, the nearest I had to such experience was as a boy, during duck-season once, when a neighbour brought me to help him fetch the felled birds (his labrador was sick that day). In the event, he didn’t hit any. So I couldn’t lie to Billy, even to save his feelings. I told him that assassinating communists was not for me and that picking grapes was probably a more realistic prospect.
I wonder if any of the “young army lads” ever did take up his suggestion. Because not only was it the most memorable piece of career advice I ever received, it was also the worst. This was the Australian winter (northern summer) of 1989, when the maps of Europe and South Africa were about to change colour even more dramatically than Billy’s hair. Leaving the morality of his dream job aside, its long-term career prospects would have been very limited.
- fmcnally@irishtimes.com