The Hong Kong experience 1974-82

When our quarrying operation in Mebourne was sold to Readymix Australia I was retained as a liason officer by the Readymix company, but their operations and politics were completely alien to what was considered good quarrying practice – something that they eventually had to address – but not until quite a few failed operations and the loss of a great deal of money. As it happened I was to become part of this at a later date, but for the moment in 1974, I was only interested in doing my job and earning a wage, but it only took a few weeks of observing the senseless new methods being put into place, with paperwork and talkfests replacing my hands on operation, and I was ready to quit!

As it happened there was another newly employed individual in another part of the company who held identical views to mine, and the first I knew of this, was when he contacted me and arranged a meeting, and the result of this was a collaboration of the two of us in charge of Readymix's country operations, something that was well away from the major Melbourne operation and the endless meetings and reports that dominated their thinking.

Laurie McMahon and I reveled in this challenge, and together we spent some good times upgrading small run down operations over Victoria, and into New South Wales at Berrigan to the North, but eventually the Readymix brass intervened once more, and I left immediately to pursue a specialised truck building operation that had been in the works since Boulders sold out to Readymix two years previously. In fact the project had been conceived right at the time of the takover in December 1974 and I made a 6 day return trip to Los Angeles in the first week in 1975, in connection with the project. The first truck had been under construction by a private steel fabrication company, in a Melbourne suburb, with me supervising the operation in my spare time.
The new truck was successfully commissioned and I left Readymix and was soon building the units at a new factory in West Heidelberg, a Northern suburb of Melbourne.

This successful operation continued for almost 2 years, with the building of several trucks and other projects – one of which was the making and fitting of specialised high clearance shutter doors to the rear of foodstuff transport vehicles – but the intervention of big business tactics by others brought into the company, and an operational move away from West Heidelberg saw me once more pursuing a new job opportunity. It was at this point I received a long distance phone call from Laurie McMahon who was now part of a new Readymix global operation in Hong Kong, and within days I was standing, surrounded by huge packing cases, on reclaimed paddy fields right against the Chinese border at Sha Tau Kok, almost within shouting distance of the Chinese border crossing point at Lo Wu.

So I took up residence in Kowloon, and the years in SE Asia began.