Free Working Class Boy by Jimmy Barnes

We bathed in the lounge room. We all shared the same bedroom. So the idea of seeing nothing or no one on the horizon was beautiful but frightening because we were all used to having someone close all the time.
    Then the voice of my mum would pull me back to reality. ‘Hey Jim, what are you doin’, son?’ And I would run off to play with the other kids.

CHAPTER SIX
    sunny South Australia
    W e got to sunny South Australia on 21 January 1962. It was pouring with rain and it was stinking hot. Coming from Scotland, the last thing we wanted to see was rain and what we thought was hot was never higher than seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit. If the temperature in Scotland got over seventy-five it was a heatwave. It was well over a hundred and Mum thought we’d landed in hell or back in Bombay, which was the same thing to her. Anywhere outside Glasgow was all wrong to Mum, I don’t know why she left really.
    We arrived at Outer Harbour and waved farewell to the Strathnaver . By then the stench of sewerage had disappeared and we were beginning to really like it on board. I think that ours might have been the poor old tug’s last journey. I felt sorry for the ship knowing it was its final voyage. It had carried us out of Britain to this new land that was going to be our dream home. I heard she was sold to the Shun Fung Ironworks of Hong Kong and was broken up and made into razor blades. I’m sure it was not the first time that ship was involved in a close shave. In fact,it might have even ended up as open razors on the streets of Glasgow, but that would have been too poetic.
    We were taken by a luxury coach – well, it had a roof – to the Finsbury Hostel, our deluxe accommodation, and after a delicious meal of powdered eggs and toast we were shown to our suites. Finsbury housed about 2300 people in small cramped conditions. We shared toilets, bathrooms and washhouses. It was not good. We had paid, not a lot mind you, to travel 1200 miles to still be scared to go out to the toilet at night for fear of some drunken bloke staggering towards us with his pants down. We could have got this every night in Glasgow for free.
    Our palace was what they called a Nissen hut – a curved piece of corrugated iron with a door in it. There was no insulation at all from the heat or cold. We wouldn’t have minded the cold because we were used to it but the heat was a whole new experience. The inside of the hut looked a lot like the outside – dull, grey and not very homely. Even the tenements of Scotland had personality when you got inside. Sometimes that personality wasn’t good but it was there; with wallpaper and little things that each family had collected like treasure as they moved from place to place. But these Nissen huts had curved tin walls so unless you had curved paintings they wouldn’t have hung very well. If I’d been a little sharper I would have started painting landscapes on curved surfaces. I would have cleaned up. The furniture was the same in every hut: uncomfortable and sterile-looking couches with bad prints that smelled of disinfectant from where they’d had everything from beer to vomit wiped from them. The toilets were as bad as the old toilets in the back courts of Glasgow. The washhouse had big industrial-looking boilers so that everything that was washed was boiled too. Probably a good thing, when I think about it. I remember that when anything got loud, as Mum and Dad’s voices often did, they sounded twice as loud as usual because of the tin.
    The hostel made the Scottish tenements look luxurious. Every family had the same as us and none of them were happy about it. There were open drains that smelled of sewerage, just like the ship, and the food in general turned out to be as good as the first day – terrible. Everyone was complaining but no one was listening it seemed. I think this is how the myth of the whinging Pom started, with the shocking conditions