Soccer

In the 60’s, the 10 quid immigrant scheme was still in its heyday and every local gathering became peppered with a seemingly never ending mix of English dialects.

Australia, after the 1946 Federal Election embraced a policy of European migration to ensure an annual population increase if two percent.

Artur Calwell, Labour leader, was a strong advocate of “White Australia” and while people who had come as refugees during World War Two could stay and become permanent residents, others, must leave, hence his famous statement of “Two wongs don’t make a white”.

With the multicultural face of the Mother Country changing and the smart state marketing of Australia House, P &O vessels such as the ORION postponed their overdue date with the scrap yard.

In 1961, a former soldier, with his wife and child, spent six weeks on the voyage to Oz. At that time up to 41% of our migrant intake was from the U.K. (now 17%). Most settled in Fremantle or Melbourne.

G and S settled in a cosy flat off Main Street at Kangaroo Point costing $13 per week, sent off job applications, without even an employer reply and eventually landed a job when a ‘friend of a friend’ in a gleaming Jaguar, pulled the strings for a job at Websters Biscuit Factory, opposite Boggo Road goal at $36 per week. (Just in the nick of time).

From then on it was up, up and away.

After a stint working in Toowoomba, back to a rental at Boondall and re-acquaintance with Terry and Elsie (from on board the Orion) and introduced to Walter Linvelt, the Man with the Plan.

At $1,700, a fine, level, flood free acreage, a stone’s throw from the river, in a quiet backwater, became their future home at Albany Creek.

Firstly living on site in a rented caravan, then graduation to a fibro shed built from second hand materials (power by extension lead, courtesy of Smudge next door) and then to a new brick bungalow, constructed by Pine Rivers builders, MTM Homes.

London, after six years, must have seemed a lifetime away. Two secure jobs in 1967, three kids, a two room school with less than 90 students and the opportunity to create the Albany Creek Soccer Club.

Training was firstly in the backyard at Earl Street and then games on a cow paddock off Leitches Road (now Chapman Villas).

The weekly ritual was to fence the cows off, pick up the cow pats and then become part of the emerging soccer scene.

Contact Peter 0418 774 663
peter@petercampbellrealty.com

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