From the front of the condemned house, you could see the bay where the Anzacs had left to reach the shores of Gallipoli.
He was sitting on a camp chair when I entered. The room was lit by the weak afternoon sun and he was full of cancer. He had a great story that he couldn’t see. He was Boxer from Animal Farm.
A working-class man who’d been working ever since he was five or six, when his father, a farmer, taught him how to drive the tractor.
He left school in Year Eight with two As and a B for everything else. Remarkably, he first got his licence driving a semi.
His father drove him to town in theirs and off he went.
When his parents sold the farm he became an interstate truck driver and spent his life on the roads.
There’s a saying that Australia runs on its trucks.
Well, the reason your toilet paper is nearly always on the shelf, or your bowser nearly always has fuel, is because of men like Reginald. Reg.
Who now, after all those miles he’s driven, is sitting here talking to me, wondering why he ever bothered.
His partner is in a nursing home, placed there by doctors after she struggled with their eviction from the caravan park.
They’d bought a small two-bedroom unit there to live out their twilight years — a purchase that had a clause they must have missed in the hefty contract.
When the caravan park was sold, the new owners demanded vacant possession. So he and his partner, along with over twenty other permanents, were evicted into a country where they no longer had the money to buy a new house and the rentals are scarce and sky-high.
The Australian Dream is dying, like Reg.
It has been betrayed by smiling politicians who never answer questions — not even from their mansions — as they allow the corporations to pillage the mine we are becoming poorer upon.
The house itself had stickers plastered on many of the walls:
“Asbestos containing material. Do not disturb.”
This week, Reg will find out if he will be evicted from this house too, for the developers have plans too.
If that happens he’ll be looking for more accommodation, but where? And who will offer a rental to a man, with little money, and whose doctors have told him, ‘work on your bucket list and don’t stop taking your pain medication.’
But what of those men who years ago, sailed away on the outgoing tide, high on the belief that they were risking their lives to save this worthy nation?
This decent land.
Well, we built Shrines to them, and once year we congregate around these shrines to celebrate their courage, and remember those who paid the ultimate sacrifice . . . For what?
So we could, as a nation, ignore their grandsons — men like Reg, who, after working all his life, after paying who knows how much tax, is now sitting here, stranded in Albany now, effectively homeless and suffering from turbo cancer — With nothing else to look forward to, than to wait for his personal and outgoing tide.
Michael Gray Griffith
Albany 6/5/26
Goodbye Road, the book is not only in the National Archives, as is our website Cafelockedout.com, and so therefore all of our interviews, but your local library has the book in it now, as long as you request it.
But if you’d like a personal signed copy, they are available HERE.
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