Dear Joe (Loudmouth),

You have excellent suggestions.

I remember how difficult it was for me to return to
the workforce after having had my two babies.
I virtually had to start from scratch. So I took
whatever job I could get in a library - and I went
back to doing further studies to up date my
qualifications. I can proudly say
that I finished my studies at Uni while working full
time and raising a family. Of course none of this
would have been possible without the strong support and
help of my husband, my mum, and my in-laws. It was a team effort -
for which I will always be grateful.

Dear Foxy,

My dear wife was luckier in some ways: she'd had both babies before she was twenty, then when we went to New Zealand, got very heavily involved in the Playcentre Movement there, where mothers came together to run their own little kindergartens: she was its Education Officer for the Auckland region (voluntary of course, no pay: I wonder how many other Indigenous people would do that) by the time she was 22.

Back in S.A., after a bit of factory work, she grabbed the opportunity to run an Aboriginal pre-school up on the Murray, and from there - when the kids were close to secondary school age - back down to Adelaide, and onto teaching qualifications. She certainly had ups and downs, as the first Aboriginal graduate in the four-year B. Ed. course in S.A. (she'd upset the controllers of Aboriginal people [not their official titles] so was denied any employment by the Ed. Dept.). So she went back to do more study.

But luckily a job came up in the CAE and she grabbed it with both hands. There's a lesson there: grab opportunities, they may come along only once. She finished up after 23 years - not perhaps with a professorship, as so many other Indigenous people seem to do after two or three years, but as a Senior Lecturer, in charge of support services for three hundred Indigenous students at ten centres.

She held those numbers at a time when many other programs were going down the drain, banking everything on supporting only Indigenous students enrolled in Indigenous-focussed courses (and ignoring Indigenous students in mainstream courses who weren't 'playing the game'). She was vindicated in her support for ALL Indigenous students: nowadays, 98 % of the current sixteen thousand Indigenous students at universities are enrolled in mainstream courses. And goodo.

The next problem - since two-thirds of them are women - will be to ensure that they get proper employment, and are not shunted into the Aboriginal domain. For life. How racist is THAT ?

Life is certainly a steeple-chase, especially for women.

Love,

Joe

Dear Joe (Loudmouth),

Thank You for sharing your wife's experiences.
I only wish that I could have met her. She
sounds like an extraordinary lady.

Dear Foxy,

She certainly was: the eldest of ten kids, she left school at fifteen to take the burden off the family, and worked as a domestic servant (yes, there were such things even in the sixties). She must have worked really from the time she was five or six, helping her mother (literally: they lived in a shed, with no water or power, so I suspect one of her jobs after school was to go over to the nearby farm and collect water), and then right through until the end. No retirement for her, no standard Indigenous bludge jobs for life, either.

When they say " ... until death do us part", they sometimes get it wrong: it doesn't part you. It's forever.

Cheers,

Joe

Dear Joe (Loudmouth),

My parents taught me at a very early age
that when dealing with life's ups and downs
think of yourself as a rubber ball - the
harder the hit the bigger the bounce.

Dear Foxy,

Yeah, that should be the national motto of Lithuania :)

By comparison, Australia really seems like the safest, luckiest, most comfortable, Lotus Land on the planet.

Oh well, back to topic .......

Love,

Joe