AUTHOR Chris Harrison has returned to Australia from a long stint overseas and, after a varied then illustrious career journey, has taken the role  
of Business and Partnerships Editor.

Dear Sir.

Nah.

Dear Madam.

Nah.

Oi, you!

Yep, that should do it. This is a column, after all.

I would like to apply for Dan Bateman’s old job.

I have never written a column, but I have wandered blindly into many other weird and woeful vocations which have suitably prepared me for this exciting… well… which have twisted my take on things.

My first ever job was to find a rat. I’d left school brimming with professional promise and found myself in an episode of Fawlty Towers. I was a (very) casual caretaker at my former high school when the principal noticed a stench near the staff room.

I had always wanted to kill my maths teacher and for a second thought someone had beaten me to it. It was a rude awakening to the world of gainful employment. I’d spent my pimpled life to that point thinking the rat race was a figure of speech.

Turns out it wasn’t a rat, it was a possum. That’s Sydney’s upper north shore for you – even the roadkill is upmarket. I disposed of the minced marsupial and then quit, my CV still as blank as the expression on the possum’s face.

My second job made me miss my first. As an operations clerk for United Parcel Service I was ordered to clean a delivery van in which 20 litres of horse sperm had leaked from its refrigerated canisters.

Some Australian race horse breeder wanted American seed for his steed. It said "Equine Semen" on the customs declaration, but that makes it sounds more glamorous than it was.

Mopping it up put the mare in nightmare. When asked to come back the next day, I said neigh.

Which brings me, unsurprisingly, to my third job – selling catering equipment for a Sydney catering wholesaler. Quality Cafe & Club supplied all the top restaurants and hotels with their every catering requirement and whim. I wore a suit for the first time and there would no doubt have been avenues to promotion had I not been fired for playing cricket in the glassware section with a pizza paddle and a plastic sauce bottle. It was unfair dismissal, if only in cricketing terms.

To put myself through flying school, I then sorted mail for Australia Post at its Sydney headquarters on George St. (The postcode was 2000. I can still remember almost every postcode in Australia. That’s a talent yet to prove transferable.)

Four mail slots at street level led down to four sorting trays in the bowels of the building: business reply, CBD, rest of Australia, and international post. Each morning a scramble ensued between sorters for the international tray because that meant you could read postcards all day. One creative colleague, however, used to edit them.

Tourists were in the habit of posting several postcards at the
same time, and since they fluttered down the chute together we knew they’d been cast by the same
correspondent.

One adulterous afternoon a two-timing Kiwi tourist sent a postcard to his girlfriend, stating that he "wished she were here" and that he’d seen all the city’s staple sights: Opera House, Harbour Bridge, Bondi Beach… while a second missive to a mate bragged of a night out at the Hard Rock Cafe, where he’d met a local lass and danced her out of her dress.

In red pen, as though preparing himself for a future in teaching, my colleague added to the girlfriend’s postcard: When your boyfriend returns home, ask him about the girl from the Hard Rock Cafe!

Though I lasted longer at Australia Post than he did, I was soon sending my own postcards, but from overseas back to Australia rather than vice versa.

After getting my pilot’s licence I studied Communications and English Literature before venturing to Ireland to visit the haunts of my favourite writers, or at least drink Guinness where they had.

I fell in love. Not with Ireland, with an Italian. A shapely signorina invited me back to her Mediterranean fishing village and I said "si" before she’d finished the question, my ability to interrupt boding well for my move to Italy.

I have spent the past 10 years between Italy and England, where those false but fun-filled starts on my CV gave way to more gainful employment. Deceased possums and unborn ponies have since been replaced by journalism, by copywriting, by language teaching and by writing books.

Language teaching made for the most mirth because of the linguistic lapses of my students. One South Korean girl limped in late to class with a twisted uncle, another tried to buy a London Tube ticket to Mind The Gap, while a most unfortunate Japanese man missed an exam because his host family had been "buggered". To this day I hope he meant "burgled".

After a decade away from Australia I recently moved to Cairns, where from Monday to much of Friday I am a model of seriousness and sobriety in my role as Business and Partnerships Editor at The Cairns Post. But after lunch on a Friday I would welcome the opportunity to loosen my tie… and my tongue.

Perhaps, after so long overseas, and as a newcomer to this region, I could cast a fresh pair of eyes across Cairns and offer a new take on the topics of the Tropics.

But Dan Bateman’s shoes will be difficult to fill.

Yours sincerely.

Nah.

Yours truly.

Nah.

See ya next week! Yep.

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