Chapter Eleven - In come the pennies’ out go the pounds

Chapter's - Final

The last pages, including notes

Chapter Thirteen - A lesson and learning - Teaching and taught

Ross had taken to teaching like a duck to a country dam, full of noise, splash, and a sense of destiny disguised as play. The classroom, to him, wasn’t a box for rote and regulation. It was a living, breathing organism, part chalk dust, part imagination, part controlled rebellion. He refused to let it sit still.

Chapter Twelve - I Doubt he'd suit the office

Of all places in the wide, bustling world of classrooms and chalk dust, Ross was to commence his “in-school practical training” at none other than Drummoyne Primary School. The irony was not lost on him. Drummoyne, where the streets smelled faintly of laundry and the river whispered of lazy afternoons. His days at Drummoyne though were locked behind the steel gates of the orphanage. And here he was, about to navigate the labyrinthine politics of pencils, playgrounds, and primary-level pandemonium just a few hundred metres from the very place.

Chapter Eleven - In come the pennies’ out go the pounds

All to the tune of ‘Click go the shears’ 1966 was the year Australia woke up and found its pockets lighter and its world tilting slightly off-centre. Decimal currency arrived with a bureaucrat’s grin and a popular Australian shearing song to promote it, but in the shearing sheds and public bars, it was still pounds, shillings and pints that measured a man’s worth. The old hands refused to speak in dollars. “Bloody decimation,” they’d growl, rolling the new coins across their palms as if they were counterfeit tokens in someone else’s country. “Shoulda left the decimal coins until all the old people died” some wise old punter had said. “Alright for the young fella’s”

Chapter Ten - He was shearing when I knew him

Finally, Monday morning. The town yawned itself awake, and Ross was already standing at the brass-handled doors of Goldsborough Mort & Co., looking as if he’d been waiting there since Federation. The clock struck nine with a sense of ceremony that the rest of Echuca didn’t share. He stepped inside to find that the world of commerce smelled faintly of tobacco, ink, and smugness.