Christopher Salter

Ship name / Flight number: Fairsea

Arrival date: 23/12/1959

Left: Chris, 25 years young

During the 2nd Word War, before I was born, my parents, Philip and Mary connected with an Australian airman, which later influenced my decision to migrate.

I was born in London in September 1943. During the war, it was custom and practice for a family to ‘adopt’ a serviceman from overseas and look out for him while he was in England. My family adopted a young pilot from Warracknabeal in northwest Victoria and also formed a friendship with his parents. They were going to sponsor my family to come out to Australia after the war. By then I was just five years old, and I remember my father taking me to see the ship that we would be sailing on the next time it was in port. My Dad was a policeman, and he had a job lined up as the local Bobby (or ‘Copper’ in Australian slang) in Warracknabeal. Then, at the very last minute, they decided not to go. I later found out that my dad’s brother had offered them a house they could afford to buy, and I think that’s why they stayed. However, this ignited a curiosity for Australia in me.

When I finished my schooling at the age of 15 years in Winchmore Hill, North London, I had the choice of going to university, going to Canada, or going to Australia. I didn’t have to think too long before choosing Australia.

I had very, good parents and a very good upbringing. They gave me all the tools to handle life at 16. Although I was their only son, I went to Australia with their blessing.

My father gave me three pieces of advice before I left. Firstly, finish your dry white wine before you start eating your pudding. Secondly, always have the deuce (lowest card) of your longest suit when you play a misère hand (in the card game called “solo” or‘500’). And thirdly, always fit Dunlop, by which he was referring to condoms, not tyres. I followed two of these three pieces of advice.

Left: Chris, 2016

I came out to Australia with about 30 ‘Little Brothers’ in late 1959 on the SS Fairsea. Most of the other boys on my ship were from orphanages. We sailed into Sydney on 23 December and I had my first Australian Christmas on the edge of the bush at the BBM training farm. I’ve always been a horsy person so I enjoyed riding the horses but we didn’t do much farming.

I was mentally prepared to go and work on a farm and it was probably good for me. The BBM sent me to a wheat/sheep/dairy property outside Culcairn in the Murray River region of NSW. I was the hired help and treated as such. My accommodation was a small room in the back of the garage. I was allowed two showers a week, whether I needed them or not. After milking cows twice a day and mucking out animal stalls, I needed them! My wage was about £3.10.0/week and I think I paid £1.10.0 in board. My wage went up a bit when I turned 17 years old, but the board the farmer charged me went up too.

On my first Christmas Day on the farm, I was dressed for dinner and someone in the family asked me where I would be spending Christmas. I was a bit taken a back, as the property was quite isolated, but I hitch-hiked into town and had Christmas dinner at the local café.

I wasn’t lonely, as I’m a fairly self-contained person. I wrote home regularly to my parents on aerogrammes, and looked forward to their replies.

After a year or so I took my annual leave and along with a friend who worked on a neighbouring property and who had family in Melbourne, hitch-hiked to Melbourne. The holiday was eye-opening, as I discovered that there was much more to Australia than Culcairn. I really liked Melbourne and with future plans in mind, returned to the farm.

About a month later, I got a job in Albury driving for Wridgeways furniture removals. I didn’t have a driver’s license, but helped with loading and unloading the truck. This was a good way to see Australia as we drove all over the place. We slept rough or in the truck. Fortunately, I got on well with the owner of the truck and he taught me how to drive. When I wasn’t on the road, I lived in a boarding house in Albury.

I met a young English lady named Kay in Albury, and wished I’d followed my father’s third piece of advice. Kay’s younger brother was coming back out to Australia with his mother from England and her father told his 17 year-old daughter that she would have to move out as they needed her bedroom. This kind of forced us together. We decided to move to Melbourne as Kay had a sister who lived there. We rented a flat in Hawksburn near the railway station and I got a job as a Station Assistant for VicRail at the Toorak station. Our first child, Stephen, was born in 1963 when Kay was 17 and I was 19 years old. Sixteen months later our daughter Toni was born. Eventually we bought a house together in North Richmond and then Croydon.

I spent a while looking for a job that would become a career, which meant I had 16 jobs in five years. Everything from a trainee industrial chemist to working on the Hume weir tie-down project. My 24th job was the perfect one for me. When I was 23 years old, I started working for the Melbourne Harbour Trust (which later became the Port of Melbourne Authority in 1978) as an Emergency Serviceman. My father helped me to get the job, in a roundabout way. He had retired from the police force and was working as a Master of Arms on ships bringing migrants to Australia. On a return journey he met a guy who had just retired from working for the port emergency service and when he described his former job, my dad thought: that’s the job for my boy! He sent me a telegram from Aden suggesting that I check out the port emergency service. I’m very glad that I followed this piece of advice as it was the start of a 14 year career in the PES.

I’d always wanted to be a diver. I learnt to dive with the old copper helmet and lead boots, which was called ‘standard dress’. It was the real deal. I could wear woollens underneath the diving suit, so I was warm and dry. Communication with the surface was perfect and I felt like I was in total control of my dive. I had a wonderful job, based at Victoria Dock in the Port of Melbourne. I often thought: I’m doing all this fun stuff and getting paid!

There was only one hairy incident when I was buried under six metres of mud. However, because I was in standard dress, I knew I was completely safe. I was at the bottom of a rotten pile under a bridge in the Yarra River trying to dig it out when the mud walls around me collapsed. The crew sent another diver down and all they could see was my airline disappearing into the mud. I had a constant supply of air coming into my suit so I stopped releasing the air out of the suit so it would fill with air and, hopefully, I would float to the service. Eventually I shot out of the water up to my waist, looking like the Michelin Man. In situations like this, it was best not to panic.

I stayed with the Port Emergency Service for 14 years and became second in charge. I was head-hunted by the State Electricity Commission to build a similar organisation to the Port Emergency Service covering fire, rescue, first aid and security in the Latrobe Valley where all the coal-fired power stations were. Although this meant hanging up my diving helmet, I could see that since there was no legislation underpinning the Port Emergency Service (unlike there was for the State Emergency Services, the Metropolitan Fire Brigade and the Country Fire Authority), they could be disbanded at any time, which is what happened in 1996.

By the time I had accepted a job in the Latrobe Valley, Kay and I had separated after 12 years together. Our two children stayed with her. In 1975 I met Doreen, who had four children of her own, and she came to the Latrobe Valley and got a job with the prison service. We married in 1977 and lived together for about 23 years

My family eventually migrated to Australia, too. My sister, Linden Salter Duke, came first. She was married to a chemistry professor from Lancashire University and he was offered a job in Darwin as head of the chemistry department. Linden was an author so she could work anywhere. I’m six years older than her, and I thought she was a pain the backside when I was growing up. I went back to London in about 1972 when my dad was seriously ill, and got to know her a lot better when we were both adults.

With both their children in Australia, my parents migrated in the 1980s. They lived in Melbourne at first, but then moved to Darwin to be closer to my sister and her children. My Mum was deaf from the age of seven years (due to complications with a middle ear infection) and became the President of the Deafness Association of the Northern Territory in 1987. She was awarded an AM for her work with the deaf community and the Indigenous community, who have a disproportionately high rate of middle ear infections. She also helped the police to convict some drug dealers. The police had a video of a bikie gang doing what looked like a drug deal but there was no sound. They needed someone who could lip read. My Mum could tell them exactly what was being said in the video, which led to a conviction. The police had to suppress her identity or she could be in danger.

Sadly, my dad contracted emphysema and dementia and went into a nursing home in Darwin in the late 1990s. He died in 2001. My sister died of lung cancer in 2018. While my mother survived six operations to treat a rare form of nerve cancer, she was so depressed to hear that her daughter was dying of cancer too, that she stopped eating and drinking and died before her.

I stayed with the State Electricity Commission in the Latrobe Valley for about 20 years and was promoted to the position of nominated officer/ fire for the SEC. When I started, I had a team of 19 people, but that expanded to 40 staff by the time the SEC was privatised and broken up in the 1990s. I had saved enough money to retire and I was offered a redundancy of two years salary, but I said no, and asked for an extra $16,000. I planned to buy a 60-foot schooner and sail around the world with my new partner, Mavis. I got the extra payout and bought the boat, but then Mavis was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. As soon as she was diagnosed, the boat had to go. We did some other travelling in Europe and England instead, sometimes with her children. She literally died in my arms just before her 60th birthday.

Left: Chris’s boat

In 2007, after Mavis died, I met Merete on RSVP, who was a university lecturer in information systems. I taught Merete how to dive and we have dived all around Australia. We even went to the Galapagos Islands and did some mind boggling dives. We bought some land at Rosebud on the Mornington Peninsula and, after four years and 17 iterations of the design, have nearly finished building our dream house. We’ve employed professional tradies to do the electrical and plumbing work, but have done most of the ‘grunt work’ ourselves. It’s almost finished and we can look over the ocean and the heads of Port Phillip Bay from the warmth of our home. My daughter lives across the bay in Anglesea.

Left: Chris’s dream house with the dream view (below)

I never considered moving back to England and I think I had a greater range of opportunities in Australia than my contemporaries did in England. I’ve been back to visit six times, and caught up with some of my peers and they seemed not to have done much or been anywhere. The BBM helped me to get my first job in Culcairn and I found my own way after that. Migrating to Australia with the BBM was one of the best things I’ve ever done.

 

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