Safety First

By Ruth Skilbeck

 New trends: fluoro safety-gear for Aussie workers spreads to ' Newcastle bottle shop workers' ... I was fascinated to notice on my recent return from Canada when the plane touched down at Sydney airport the eye catching yellow and orange fluoro gear of the airport crews on the landing strip...(how they stand out in contrast to the muted shades of the Canadian airport staff). Inside the airport I noticed that the airport officials were wearing the same fluoro gear.

Today when I called into my local bottle shop in Newcastle,

I was unable to not notice that the young man behind the counter was sporting a large padded fluoro orange vest - rather like a life saving jacket- emblazoned with the initials BWS - which stands for the name of the alcohol chain- Beer Wine Spirits. When I looked up their website, to check I had the right name, I found their tagline " We take responsible service of alcohol seriously".

Safety gear. Mum was, after the family returned to Australia, an education officer of the ACT Cancer Society -she introduced the Legionnaires Hat to Australian schools (she had someone design it according to her vision). But I don't recall that she wore it herself. She wore rather natty wide brimmed straw hats. To keep her safe from the sun.

Even so, even she who was so careful and educated so many about this very thing, contracted a melanoma on her calf.  Could it have been all the hours she spent gardening in the house we moved into in Kambah when the family first moved back to Australia? There was so much to do there to try to hurry the speed of progress and natural growth, to transform the surreal suburban moonscape into a functional pleasure garden. Who would not have felt burdened by that responsibility? that she took on, and maintained, even after Dad left. But it was more likely she explained to us to have been the result of a childhood in Sydney, at a time when the word melanoma had not even been invented. A time of happy innocence. On the edge of the gully.  It was after that diagnosis, and the subsequent operation that left a crater in the surface of her pale calf that, despite her condition of chronic fatigue syndrome, she defied Doctor’s orders and stoically packed up her house in Raymond Terrace and flew out of Australia, to the other side of the world, back to London. Never to return.

© Copyright Ruth Skilbeck, 2012