The Aussie Functioning Alcoholic

By Ed Shadbolt

Although an alcoholic at 20 years old, after 2 traumatic vehicle accidents, I
managed to complete an apprenticeship and become a tradesman by 21.
A functioning alcoholic I was and I wasn’t alone, many people go through
life just like I did.
I had a partner and worked and travelled Australia, having some great
adventures, with some of them within this book, Tasmania, CapeYork
Queensland, Darwin and others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Inspiring Publishers / ASPG
• Release date: Oct 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9781922920850

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Arriving in Australia

I was a ten-pound pom. My Dad and Mum brought me and my two brothers and sister over to Australia in 1965. I was three years old. I had chest problems as a baby and England had gone through blizzards and freezing weather was killing me. So, we immigrated.

Dad was a Scotts Guard and the proudest man I’ve ever met. He stood guard at palaces while tourists would tell jokes and abuse them constantly but never flinch. He stood in 24-hour parades where they would stand at attention, and he would see his mates faint and smash their jaws on the concrete but never leave his position.

He was a Bren gun operator and saw action in Malaya and was a champion boxer with his regiment.

Dad was a man I could never be.

We landed in South Australia and after a brief period we moved across the border to Western Australia. After a short stint working in the desert on the Nullabour plains on train tracks, he moved us to Kalgoorlie, and he began work on the Mt Charlotte gold mine underground. Remember this was a man that had lived in the UK all his life and now is working in the heat and filth of a gold mine in Kalgoorlie WA.

I went to Kalgoorlie Primary School at five years old and it was the start of the first traumatic period in my life. Here is a strange talking white boy in a place completely foreign to him amongst all these kids and a majority indigenous, just freaking out. I would get led into school screaming and crying and I would get bashed by the other kids regularly. There was no sense saying anything to teachers as I remember, and I was always the strange new pommy boy. This experience has remained with me my entire life on how cruel one human can be to another.

Kalgoorlie back then was a miner’s town and very rough. The houses were corrugated iron roofed and asbestos walled, full of cockroaches and an outhouse. Not paradise by any means but we all lived there as best we could. Kalgoorlie was also the first time I saw the effects of alcohol in a community as there was a pub on every corner and all the miners would drink, especially on payday. My dad was a drinker, too, and caused my mother a lot of pain and suffering because of his alcohol abuse.

Kalgoorlie was unique in many ways; one was the lampposts going down the middle of the road. I remember my dad being obviously very drunk, driving me zig-zagging in between the lampposts going down the main street of Kalgoorlie. At the time it was a fun drunk thing to do but I still remember this and what alcohol and its effects can do. It was the first drunken experience I was to witness amongst countless more throughout my life.

Kalgoorlie also was famous for its roadside brothels. Miners would walk along the footpaths drunk leering into the open display cases of different hookers as they walked along until they chose one. My mum used to clean these brothels and I remember when I was probably six or seven, I would play outside the back of these brothels as my mum would have to take me there as I was too little to stay at home alone. This was on days when my begging not to go to the school paid off and I was with her the day. I also seem to recall the brothels being closed on paydays so the miners would get home to their families with a reasonably full pay packet after the pub.

Another significant event for me in Kalgoorlie was the arrival of my little sister, Julie, whom I still see and love dearly. Other than that, I despised it there. We were poor, a family of six, living in a rundown miner’s house in the scorching heat of the Gibson Desert. I remember we had the local pool across the road. On a hot day, we would go there. To cross the road, we would have to throw our towels on the hot bitumen, step to the end of it, then fling the back in front, repeating this process until we reached the other side. We didn’t have thongs, and the road was so hot it would burn your feet if you tried to run across it.

Being poor also meant we had to make our own entertainment. The desert regularly spawned these mini tornado-like dust storms. One day, we threw a Coke can into a WilliWilli and tried to avoid the flying can while we jumped into it. It was pretty exhilarating stuff.

I remember my dad would take us out to a Chinese restaurant once a year as a treat when he received his tax return. We loved it. However, I also remember waiting in his car while he cleared drunks who had passed out on our verandah before we could enter our house. Alcohol had already been a part of my life at such a young age, and it continued to be a part of my life until now, at 59.

When I was nine, we moved to Perth. It was the best thing to happen to me at that time. I was finally surrounded by kids more like me, not the cruel bullies who took pleasure in abusing and hurting me.

CHAPTER 2

Teenage Years

I had my first major injury when I was 15. I was with a bunch of mates hanging out at a side street riding our pushbikes around and just being fuckwits. Back then we had sort of gangs, there was Rocks or Bogs, Surfies who obviously were the beach boys and Skinheads, who were pommy types with flares and Dr. Martens boots.

Me, Matt Wooley, and Scrote were Rocks and we wore black with ripple-soled black denim shoes. Sort of like apprentice bikies if you like and just into being shitheads and fighting and shit.

So, I was riding my bike, towing a guy from the Midland Mafia gang, and going flat out when another fool made a U-turn in front of me. I flew straight over the handlebars and landed on the road, arm first. I knew it wasn’t good, but I didn’t let it ruin a good night. I went to a friend’s place and camped on his lawn in our sleeping bags. The next thing I knew, my old man showed up. My friend’s dad had told him my arm was in bad shape, so he came to get me and took me to Kalamunda hospital. I underwent surgery since it was broken in four places.

So, I had a cast for about six weeks. After it was removed, during an interschool soccer game, I dived to save a goal, as I was the goalie, and landed on my right arm. This time, it broke in two places. I remember the insufferable principal wanted me to ride my bike five kilometers home so he wouldn’t have to take me, but I insisted as it hurt like hell. So, another surgery was performed and another cast was worn for six weeks.

When I was around sixteen, I was at a party at my sister’s place in Hamilton Hill, in this big marquee, drinking beers, as you did when you were sixteen, haha. I was chatting with my brother Phil, who’s next oldest from me, and we were messing around. He went to playfully hit me and stopped, but he was drunk and ended up punching me straight in the nose! I looked down at my beer glass and saw it filling with blood, so off to Freo hospital we went. They said it wasn’t broken, so we just went back to the party, but my nose was crooked across my face and really didn’t feel good. A few days later, Mum and Dad took me to the Kalamunda spa hospital, where they X-rayed it, informed me it was broken, and performed another operation to straighten it.

So, by sixteen, I had broken both arms and my nose, but these were minor compared to the traumas I was about to endure in the next few years.

I had a good education at the Maida Vale Primary School and Forrest Field High School. I was good at English and science, sucked at math. I also found I had skills in manual arts. I nearly left after Year 10 but I was talked into staying on into Year 11 but I hated stuff like economics and shit like that. Fortunately, they trialed an alternative course for kids like me who were good with their hands, so Year 11 involved just a few core subjects and the rest of the day doing manual arts like metal work, woodwork, and alike. Metal work seemed to be my thing and I made a compost tumbler, letterbox, hacksaw and other things that year at school. When I sat for my apprenticeship interview, I had photos of all these things and I’m sure it got me into the railways as a Mechanical Fitting apprentice.

Besides school, my circle of friends was mostly made up of other mates who lived near me in Maida Vale. They weren’t the academic types by any stretch of the imagination, but we were mates nonetheless. With names like Scrote, Wooley, and Matt, I guess it goes without saying that we were a bit rough around the edges. Who am I kidding? We were total delinquents with little respect, stealing from shops, vandalizing properties, and getting involved in activities that no kid should do.

My first encounter with the law happened when I was about 15. We had discovered that mixing brake fluid and chlorine together resulted in an eruption of heat and fire, which we thought was extremely cool. One day, we went to a friend’s place whose folks had a bit of land. We began experimenting with Coke bottles, quickly mixing these two chemicals together, screwing on the tops, and hurling them to witness the explosion.

It was so spectacular that we suddenly saw a cop car drive down the driveway. The two police officers roughed us up a bit and wanted to know what was going on. Apparently, the explosions could be heard for miles, and the public had started to believe that World War III had begun. So, after a bit of a grilling, we were bundled into the back of the paddy wagon and taken to the Kalamunda police station.

We were made to sit outside in the sun for three hours before being dropped back down to our homes. My dad wasn’t home, and I knew I was going to be in trouble. I had been his shining star due to my educational achievements, and this would shatter him. So, I ran away with two friends and slept in an excavator trench overnight with a jar of Vegemite for sustenance. My friend’s dad knew where we were, and my dad found me the next day, but he thought I had suffered enough.

So, at 15, I was cautioned on a charge of Creating fear amongst the public. What a way to start out in life, haha. There are many other things that my friends and I did that I am just ashamed of, and those skeletons will remain in my closet forever.

CHAPTER 3

Westrail, Apprenticeship of Bad Choices

If there is one major influencing factor of my fucked-up life of dependence, it is the Midland Workshops of Westrail. As I said before, I had secured an apprenticeship there and was stoked as it had the reputation of being one of the most comprehensive training apprenticeships in the state.

Every three months you were moved to a different section, so you could be working on V16 locomotive engines at one section and then moved to the Hydraulics Section or Foundry Maintenance, fuel injection or whatever. At the end of your apprenticeship, you more or less just decided what branch of mechanical fitting you wanted to follow and make your career. I wanted to travel, and maintenance seemed a good fit as wherever you went there was a factory or mill or mine that needed maintenance. Sounds great and it’s what I tell employers at interviews even now.

The Midland Workshops were a very different and historical place. It still had rules and regulations from the early 1900s and the things that went on there were far different than anything I’d seen or ever will again. Everyone had a docket that they picked off a board in the guard house when you entered work. You would take this docket to the area you were assigned to, and the docket board was locked by the foreman until lunch times and finish of work. This docket and number on it were who you were. I was number 697.

The toilet blocks at the workshops were something else. The site was vast, containing many large sheds and hosting countless people. If you needed to use the restroom, you’d have to pass through the entrance where a booth guard would record your docket number. According to regulations, you were allowed a four-minute bathroom break before you’d be informed that your time was up.

That was the theory and the rule, but reality was much different. The workshops had a lot of Italian migrants, many of whom had limited English proficiency. Some of them, the ones with little or no English, would secure these toilet attendant jobs. Upon entering, you’d give your number and they’d jot it down. Then you could ask for a stick book, essentially a porn magazine, for perusal during your toilet visit. The attendants didn’t care about how much time you took as long as they kept recording numbers all day.

I often mused about these toilet attendants explaining their job at social functions or parties. It was certainly an unconventional occupation. The graffiti on the walls in the toilets was another spectacle. I’d switch between different cubicles just to observe the evolving artwork and lewd poems or phrases plastered all over the walls.

Another remarkable sight at the workshops was the end of the workday. At 4 PM, everyone would clean up, change, and gather at the foreman’s office where the docket board was housed. You’d wait for the foreman to open the box and retrieve your docket. Only then were you permitted to stand at the front of your shed, awaiting the 4:15 PM blare of the work completion siren.

It was quite a scene: 3000 men grouped into 50s or 100s, depending on the size of the shed, standing poised for the blast. For many, it was a frenzied race to the time office to drop off their docket, rush to their car, and try to beat the traffic out of the car park. Some men would adopt a sprinter’s stance as if preparing for an Olympic race, while others opted to hang back and not rush out.

Then the siren would go off — WHIRRRRRR — and mayhem would break loose. Thousands of men would sprint towards the time offices from every direction, flooding through the few available doors, hurriedly hanging their dockets, and sprinting to their cars. Some, especially the older men, would take their time. Cars would roar to life, and the car park would be transformed into a chaotic scene of men and vehicles trying to leave as quickly as possible while avoiding the rush. The risks and hazards we faced just getting off work and heading home would be an Occupational Health and