If I use my personal experience as a
standard, then I can say that today in Australia
work opportunities are not
as good as they used to be. But then not everything is as it seems to me,
because my judgment is that of a single person and therefore, I might be wrong.
So, let us try to see what has changed since
I came to Australia. There are many things that have changed since then,
because of the progress humanity has made and continues to make; therefore,
working opportunities have changed, so, today it is a lot harder to find a
manual job; this is due to the fact that we do not need as many hands to do a
job as we used to in the past, because the hard labour is being done from
machines, therefore, people that have no skills and rely on their physical
strength to work are not required. For this reason, there are less jobs
available, but if people have a trade or have studied there are working
opportunities for them.
Now that we have explained how we see today
working opportunities, allow me to go back to the days when I came to
Australia, so that I can tell you what opportunities existed then. In order to
understand what we are saying next; it is important to know that opportunities
for jobs have high and lows of their own, therefore, this affects everybody
around that are looking for work.
Now let me tell you my experience when I came
to Australia, because this is the way that we can compare the work opportunity
situation.
Today this sounds an impossible achievement,
but there have been times in Australia when everybody had a job, so, there was
no unemployment at all, from stories that I have been told from people that
were already here when I came, there have been times that the employers had not
enough employees and they would go down to the wharfs when the ships arrived
and select a few people that seemed good enough for them to do their jobs,
therefore, in those days there were no unemployed people, but unfortunately
those times do not last long, as I said working opportunities go up and down.
Now to compare those times with today’s’
opportunities, we are going to describe part of my own life story, therefore,
what I found easy or hard to cope with when I came here, and how I was able to
cope with the hardship of those times, until those things became solved, this
is the way that I know how to
compare and see, whether Australia is still the land of opportunities, so, let
us see what opportunities were available then.
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What sort of opportunities were
available in Australia?
What opportunities were available in
Australia in the sixties?
When I arrived in Australia in March 1961 my
relative and friends were all working, at the same time they were telling me
that there were not many job vacancies available, so, I had to be patient until
a job was available. But what sort of work I could do they were not sure just
we had to wait and see, what I knew about working for other people was that if
a job was offered to me I had to work hard, since in my country when we hired
workers to work in our family farm, we expected them to work hard so that they
would earn their pay, therefore, I was in my right frame of mind to go out and
work hard, whatever job was offered would do me just fine. I have said this,
because it is necessary to understand that whoever attempts to migrate to
another country, he/she must be ready to work hard if they want to succeed, and
it all boils down to this that you need to do a fair work day for fair daily
pay.
Beside my willingness to work I was also
young and fit enough to do any manual job that I was offered, the only problem
was that I didn't speak English, I had learned perhaps a few words on the way
to Australia while we were sailing, as there was an English teacher on the ship
for that purpose. But as we know English is a hard language to learn,
especially if one comes from a country that their language is phonetic and once
you know some rules, one can read from a book and come close to the sound how
those written words are pronounced, but English is not written phonetically, so,
to learn English one must be exposed to the English speaking people and slowly
learn from them, so, I and other emigrant like me had a lot to learn, before we
could speak English well enough to look after ourselves, and to fit in the
Australian speaking community.
Anyhow, let us tell you that although I had
very little English, things turned out all right in the end, perhaps this is
another reason why people think that Australia is still the land of
opportunities.
For me when I came to Australia I was still
thinking the Italian ways, so, I was thinking that I was on my own and I had to
find my own way around, but here I had a pleasant surprise when for the first
time some relative took me to see the unemployment office.
In Italy when you go to an Italian office if
you want something done quickly you need to know somebody in there, otherwise
before your turn comes the office hours are over and you have to come back the
day after, so, I was wondering how could we succeed in these Australian
offices, since I didn’t speak English and my friend was just a little bit
better than me.
Anyhow we waited our turn and soon we were
being interviewed from this middle aged man that seemed to have so much
patience and understanding of the situation, he slowly worked out what we
wanted by asking and repeating what we did not understand, and he noted
everything down as he asked me many things to see what sort of job I could do,
I remember even now that one of his questions was if I were afraid of heights
and I said no, as I was going up some tall trees to prune them, he also asked
if I knew anything about building or building maintenance, here again I said
yes as we sometimes repair some farm building. I believe that these two things
gave me the first job in the building industry, as I was called one day to go
to work for the
first time in Australia. My first job was that of a
bricklayer labour, and we were working on a chimney stack in the brickwork's where bricks are made, which I managed to hold for a couple of weeks, until a
bigger gang came and I became a bit confused in the middle of all those people,
and I lost my first job for lack of knowledge or lack of understanding English.
But anyhow I had my first work experience and I was sure that soon there was
going to be another one.
Anyhow, I need to say that Australia is a
great country to be in, because people are given their opportunities as they
deserve, if you are willing to work hard for it.
And in the unemployment offices the officers
are just great people to deal with, or at least they were when I came to
Australia in the sixties. Now, I am going to talk about how I ended up working
in the Australian building industry for good.
This blog is already too long, so see you in our next post, Australia building industry. I know that what we are telling you are things that have happened in the past, but even the past has a story to tell.
See you soon.
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