62 | T H E B A R OSSA MAG
He was that fast that from the
seats I could afford, you couldn’t
see the ball!” was ‘sivin’ dollars and ‘fufty sux
cents’ – it was just terrible, the
‘six’ was impossible!”
He visited his mum’s sister, “Aunty
Al” who lived in Adelaide and next
thing he knew he had found a job
as a pharmacist. He describes the rising tension
between the Aussie shearers and
those from New Zealand.
“It was in Broken Hill. I didn’t
know where it was.”
“I woke up on the bus and thought,
what the hell? It was a bit of a
surprise... I had absolutely no
money, just the 50 cents Uncle
John had given to me.”
He grew to love the experience
and joined the local cricket team
consisting of a pharmacist, six
New Zealand born dentists and an
Aussie physician.
“I was a bowler, left hand over
– flat out…. We had great fun, we
were unbeatable.”
“In those days, married women
couldn’t work. It was incredible!
I had the whole shop blacklisted by
the union because I had a Clinique
girl come up from Adelaide and
she wasn’t a union member and
they shut the joint down for
a couple of days!”
Guy also tried his utmost to lose
his accent.
“I remember a packet of Amoxil,
“There were fights in the bar, in the
street. It was a real problem so you
didn’t want to have a Kiwi accent!”
That’s just one of the many stories
Guy tells.
He came up with a scheme to
raise the funds needed and became
a door-to-door salesman, selling
“peephole things” he had bought
for fifty cents at the hardware store
and installing them in people’s
front doors as a security measure
for $10.
At Port Augusta, he was offered
a job as a pharmacist once again
and he was grateful for the
continuity it provided.
The family doubled when Guy
turned 40 and he often says he
got twins for his birthday.
He describes the time he decided
to travel around Australia in a
combi van and living on “bananas,
avocado and VB” up in Cooktown
where he met “this Pommy Sheila”
whom he worked alongside,
cleaning the building site of the
brand new Skase Resort in Port
Douglas. It was in this town where he met his
wife Elly, working as a lawyer at the
time, in a night club called “The
Vault”.
He drove across to Darwin, through
all the places “you shouldn’t go
unless you owned a four wheel
drive”, and worked for a dodgy
pharmacist who would drink beer
and say it was fine because it was
too hot and nobody would come
anyway. Port Augusta was also where he
had a full blown argument about
a health policy with the then Prime
Minister Bob Hawke which made
the front page of every newspaper
in Australia and he still has to
chuckle at the stir he made.
Guy would eventually end up
driving to Port Augusta in his
combi which, by this time, was
only running on three cylinders.
“I needed it reconditioned
and I had no money.”
Guy says working out sales
campaigns with his wife and pet
dog at the top of Rifle Range road
was great fun, as was working with
the wonderful staff he calls “The
Sisterhood” whom he shared every
up and down in life with as well
as many “bottles of bubbles”. He
thought they actually forgot he
was a bloke at times.
“It was a terrible, terrible place!
I went there once, got a wife and
that was it,” he laughed. “Never
went there again!”
“It was 1998 and we had a big sale
on at the shop. I got a phone call
saying Elly’s got pre-eclampsia
and I’ve got to be down there in
an hour.
“I drove past and saw Sue Harrison
standing in front of the shop with
this big sign saying hip, hip hooray,
babies on the way, come again
another day!”
Daisy and Betsy arrived safely
but there were some tough times.
Guy and Elly eventually found
their way to Nuriootpa, following
their shared dream of owning
a business. “Twins can be very, very hard
work. I was working 60 hours a
week. I remember coming home
on a Thursday night at about half
past eight, really tired...ride the
bike home and hear all three of
them crying on the couch.
“Then we worked like maniacs
because all of a sudden we owed
hell of a lot of money!” “I’d take over...Not even going to
bed, much less going to sleep, then
go to work the next morning.
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