Australia, my new home

other overseas young people, they were willing to employ me for £12 gross a week. I knew this was even below the minimum wage, but I was so keen to set foot in the wool trade, that I agreed. I was to start on 24 August, and I was very happy.

As there were still two weeks to go, I decided to enjoy some holidays. I had moved from Mrs. Ehrlig's to a rented room in Coogee. Full board was rather expensive, I thought, and since one of my fellow boarders had mentioned a vacant room to a colleague of his, I moved there to 39 Dophin Street.

Coogee is in the Eastern Suburbs by the sea, which had a lovely beach. The house was just five minutes from it, ideal for a beach holiday. I disregarded the fact that August was still the last month of winter in Australia, as the weather was warm and sunny, and having just arrived from Europe, I found even the water not too cold for swimming. I loved it and by the end of the two weeks I was so suntanned that people asked me whether I had been to the snow fields!

At 7 am on 24 August I turned up at the office of Victor Dekyvere & Co. The overalls I had brought from Bremen came in handy, as everyone changed into special store clothes. I was introduced to the senior wool buyer and the others, as well as the sampler. Victor also came to the stores, whilst Marcel remained in the office. All six of us squeezed into one car and drove off to the wool stores.

There were eight different stores selling wool in one week. They were: Australian Mercantile Land & Finance Co, Country Producers Selling Co, Dalgety & Co, Goldsbrough Mort & Co, New Zealand Loan & Mercantile Agency Co, Pitt Son & Badgery Ltd, Shute Bell Badgery Lumby Ltd, and Winchcombe Carson Ltd. We had to value greasy wool at two stores a day for four days. Fridays were no sales.

At the first wool store, Tom Guayatt, the senior buyer, told me to pencil for him. This meant that I had to pick up a catalogue and starting from Lot 1, I had to write in pencil the type of wool (Australian standards), i.e. Tom had to assess the quality or fibre diameter, cleanness and staple length, and if we had an order for that particular type, he mentioned the order number, and the yield which he estimated. The yield is the clean weight in percentages. The first lesson I had to learn was to write down the details on the correct lot. It was easy to make a mistake, but Tom watched me carefully and warned me of the dire consequences if we bought the wrong lot because of my mistake. As I wanted very much to do well, I had to give the work my fullest attention. The wool types were the same I had learnt in Bremen, so I quickly picked up that part of the job, but to guess the yield was far more difficult. Tom would ask me occasionally what yield I thought, but it was either too high or too low, sometimes it was right, and through trial and error I slowly learnt to put a more correct yield on the wool.

I can't have been too bad, for soon the second buyer, Fred Black,

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