The traffic is very light as I charge up the Hume Highway towards Sydney doing 125kph.
Its 2am and blacker than a witches hat on this icy winter night. As the traffic has become
sparser I’ve driven faster. There is a family wedding in three days so I’m anxious to get
the driving over. I need a little holiday so I’m looking forward to this five day break.
I left Melbourne about 11pm. I work in a food processing factory. Just another
undervalued employee who drives a forklift. Endless hour after hour I watch frozen
vegetables come out of a chute and splatter into two huge bins. Wearing an insulated
space-suit I wait in the freezer for Number One bin to fill. As soon as it does I jump into
action and swing the chute over to Number Two bin. Sounds complicated I know (haha!)
but this is the most difficult part of the job and I handle the pressure well! The production
runs 24 hours a day and it’s hard to stay awake some nights. The bins fill rapidly and I
have to be ready or else there is two tonne of frozen carrots all over the ice covered floor.
Shovelling up chopped carrots, wearing the space-suit is not recommended. Earlier
tonight we had been doing frozen peas. You try to shovel peas, wearing my suit, in the
wind tunnel as it blasts away at minus forty degrees and these green ball bearings come
screaming at you at 80kph. I’m well aware my I.Q is not much higher than that figure but
every night I wonder how I ever ended up in here. It’s enough to give you nightmares. The
peas were still pouring out and pinging around me when my boss gave me a wave and let
me off early so I could head to Sydney.
When I crossed the Victorian border into NSW I was feeling a bit tired but far from wiped
out. The Frozen Food Factory (it was known locally as the four “F”s) was my night job. My
day job is working for country TV and radio stations as their advertising representative in
Melbourne. This required a different a different kind of suit. I’d been doing these two jobs
for over eighteen months now. Three hours sleep was normal. Four hours was a bonus.
Five hours was heaven. I had intended to drive all night but I was beginning to see waves
of green frogs hopping across the bitumen and then they’d turn into peas and roll under
my wheels. Am I that tired?
3.30am ticks by and I’m approaching half way. The cars have disappeared now so I push
it up to 140kmh and fly past the labouring trucks. Nothing has overtaken me for an hour
but I urgently need coffee and a pit stop. Suddenly there’s lights behind me and he’s
flying. I ease back to 120kph.
More flashing lights than aspace ship on my tail. Where did the police come from? He
jumps out and runs to my window and starts writing a ticket as I start working on my
excuse. He looks extremely unhappy. In fact he looks very angry, so I try for some
light humour.
“Did you pull me over because of my Richmond Tigers window sticker?” The look in his
eyes made me shut up. He’s a fun guy, there’s no doubt about it. I wouldn’t mind being
booked so much if this guy had a sense of humour.
“Your name and driving license please”. Very curt.
“Wilson” (equally curt to match him)
“Is it John Wilson?”
“Yes, it is” (but how the hell could he know?)
“So is it John Alexander Wilson?”
Now this is eerie to say the least. We are beside the highway, surrounded by sheep
farms. I look closely at the patrol car for cameras but there is nothing and he is alone. “Is
this a stunt from candid camera? Is that show back on the box?” I ask myself.
“Yes, it is” I said very reluctantly. I hand him my license. Watch him very closely. “How
could you possibly know I’m John Alexander Wilson? Were you tipped off?”
And he made a sound. It wasn’t pretty but I think it was a laugh. It may have been caused
by the look on my face.
“No, it’s because I book about twelve Wilsons each month and half of them are John
Alexander Wilson. It’s also my name, believe it or not.”
Right then in the middle of country NSW, I swore that if I ever had kids they were going to
have unusual names. Not just weird spelling but something like “Hemingway” or
“Emerald”. So I copped (no pun intended) the speeding fine and headed off at 105kmh.
Just like a healing sore, the Wilson surname has always itched at me. Ironically, Wilson is
not our family name. My father’s name was Jamieson and my mother’s name was
O’Halloran. Both of my grandfathers were alcoholics (I never knew them). My Dad was a
teetotaller his entire life and I’m a light drinker. The Jamieson name was changed to
Wilson after some shameful activities were front page news in the Melbourne press some
seventy years ago.
So now there are so many John Alexander Wilsons in Australia I’ve decided to change my
name. Hemingway John Jamieson has a particularly nice ring to it, don’t you agree?
John Alexander Jamieson-Wilson or
Hemingway John Wilson
John Hemingway-Wilson Jamieson (sorry, I’m getting confused)
John A Wilson, March 2012, Gold Coast
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