Opportunity Knocks
Australia here I come!
IMG_0801.jpg
(Photo: By andyk MorgueFile)
Having persuaded Carole to share her story with me of her time spent in Australia I’m delighted she agreed to do it. While working on links for the post I came across this lovely BBC wildlife YouTube Clip. It features Ruby and Elvis, so cute! Carole you were so lucky to get to see kangaroos in real life. Check out the clip when you have finished reading Carole’s exciting adventure Down Under.
***Posted on behalf of Carole Connolly, The Library, NUI Maynooth***
A long long time ago, in a land far far away (UCD) before mobile phones, email, Google, the M50 or the Luas, not to mention the Euro, a Library Assistant had a dream. Okay, so, it’s not quite Martin Luther King or Will Smith (I am Legend), but you get the picture.
1986 wasn’t the brightest of times for young Irish workers and for a Library Assistant like myself the future didn’t hold much promise of advancement or adventure. So it’s not surprising that while sipping coffee one wet, miserable morning in the chaos that is Belfield Restaurant at 10.30am, I thought to myself that there has to be more to life than Moody’s Handbook and World Banking Abstracts. I had started working in the Main library in UCD back in 1979 and after a year working at the Circulation Desk had moved to the Social Sciences and Commerce Office. The idea of a job exchange seemed like a good one and during that coffee break a colleague and I chatted about all the possibilities an exchange could bring. Reality check, I would have to work in an English speaking country as I reckoned my Leaving Cert French wouldn’t quite cut it in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
Well I’m not going to the UK I declared, too near home. How about America, surely checking for bibliographic details in San Francisco or New York had to be more hip and exciting than Dublin? Only one thing stood in the way of my dream, the Irish Punt. As I headed back to the library it dawned on me that the exchange rate wasn’t in my favour and I didn’t fancy my chances of surviving on an Irish salary in the USA. So it’s fair to say that Australia wasn’t my first or obvious choice of destination. To be honest I don’t think I’d ever given Australia much thought until that morning. However it had two obvious advantages, English and a cheaper cost of living than home. Time to set the wheels in motion.
Having secured approval from management I sent off a letter to a number of academic libraries in Australia and as luck would have it, one kind librarian advertised my request in ‘InCite’. To my amazement the responses came flooding in from all over the continent including one from Tasmania and a rather unusual one. When I first opened the letter that Leanne May had sent me, I realised that she did not work in an educational library. As I read on and discovered that she was employed by Santos in their Central Library in Adelaide I was intrigued. An Australian energy pioneer since 1954, Santos is a leading oil and gas producer, supplying Australian and Asian customers. It currently employs 3,052 employees excluding contractors. Well that’s different I thought and the idea of getting out of my comfort zone to work in a non academic setting took hold. Fast forward six months, numerous trips to the Embassy, banks, form filling, travel agents and endless red tape I’m sitting in Raffles in Singapore sipping cocktails. Leanne and I had met for lunch the previous day to fill each other in on working and accommodation arrangements we had made for each other.
From May to December 1987 I worked for Santos in their Central Library in Adelaide and I can honestly say it was the most exciting time of my life. So what was different? Well the enquiries were very different for a start. These ranged from an urgent request for a Bible for the legal department, apparently they needed it ‘now’ as someone had to swear on it – makes you wonder what was going down up on the 11th floor that day! Lots of staff popping into the library, checking the business newspapers to keep an eye on their company stocks and shares. Taking requested materials over to my colleagues in the Seismic library (now there is an unusual collection to catalogue). The constant request for new standards, ILL and government publications were an ideal way to get to know the city. The Librarian made sure to send me on these errands and it was a joy to walk about in the sunshine purchasing these special requests. Adelaide is Australia’s only planned city so has the advantage of having a traditional city square mile, the green belt around it is protected by law and the rest of the city has had to grow beyond the green belt. Needless to say all major corporations, government departments and commerce have their offices within the city square mile and it was extremely easy to spend Wednesday mornings walking from one agency to the next.
However it is fair to say that two major events stand out. The first of these was spending a day in the Santos Corporate Box at the Australian Formula One Grand Prix. The speed, the thrill of the race the atmosphere not to mention the food and champagne all under a pure blue sky made for a memorable day. I can still hear the roar of those engines (despite wearing earplugs) and feel the exuberance of the crowd. Perhaps just as interesting was my drive through the city one evening prior to the start of the Grand Prix. It is fascinating to see how parts of a city are transformed for such a major event. The course area had all removable street landscapes and furniture, so that footpaths, traffic lights and traffic islands would disappear over the days leading up to the event itself.
Now in my thirty five years of working in libraries, I can safely say that it is a mostly female environment. However, my second memorable event was the opposite of that. During my time with Santos they arranged for me to visit one of their exploration/mining sites. So at 8am one morning there I am on an aircraft full of men as we took off for Innamincka. This is an all male work station where the employees work and stay for one month on / two week off rotations. I got to spend two days there (taking with me some requested library materials of course). The administration department organised a wonderful itinerary for me. We spent a day driving through the bush out to Coopers Creek to have lunch, stopping off at the only building I saw that day…a bar. Literally a bar in the middle of nowhere, a few jeeps parked outside and inside an elderly Aboriginal man trading some damper (a sort of traditional flatbread baked over an open fire) for a bottle of beer, while waiting for the landlord to cash his social welfare cheque. Not something I would have witnessed had I opted to work in one of Australia’s university libraries. Seeing hundreds of kangaroo race across the desert as the sun was going down as we dashed back to base with our hearts hammering. Learning a little about survival out in the bush was a real eye opener. I had no idea why my tour guides were so concerned about being late back until I realise they could lose their jobs for such an offence. What I didn’t know was that for safety reasons, failure to return by a prearranged time, would raise an alarm and not only would the company send out its search and rescue aircraft but land owners for hundreds of miles would join in the search with their light aircraft.
Despite working for my time there I did manage to squeeze in a lot of R&R with trips to Alice Springs, Ayers Rock, Sydney and finally Perth on my way home. While in Perth I made a point of visiting Freemantle to see the Tall ships that were there that year. I was struck then by how different my experience of Australia was to that of my grandfather. Seventy odd years earlier as a young Dubliner out of work in London, he and a friend tossed a coin and my grandfather won that toss. His prize was enough money to buy enough food and fruit to last for a number of days as he lay undetected as a stowaway on ship bound for Australia. Once discovered he worked his passage until they docked at Freemantle. Fortunately for him, the captain was a generous and kind man who gave him money and allowed him to ‘slip’ off the boat before the maritime officials arrived.
While our method of getting there couldn’t be more different, we both had wonderful voyages.
Library Staff Development 