Life is Full of Ups & Downs - Part 11

ON REPAIRS - GRACE BUILDING (Continued)

I meet Chips Rafferty.

In the era in which we worked at Grace Building it was the Sydney HQ of the Commonwealth Department of Veteran's Affairs. That was only a decade after the end of the Korean War and just on 20 years since the end of World War 2.

As a result, there were many, many ex-servicemen and ex-service women who came into the building. Nothing was done "on line" back then - it was all face-to-face (like banking).

One day I was sitting on an upper floor, above halfway, outside a lift, with the car situated far enough above the floor so that I could access the junction box under the car.

The landing doors were chocked open far enough for me to get access to the planks which ran across from the landing to the counterweight guide-rail bracket on the far wall of the shaft, where they were secured by lashings to the steel bracket. The landing-side ends of the planks were "secured" by a counter-weight filler sitting on them.

Attached to the underbow was a short lanyard with a hook and a spring-loaded keeper thingy on the end, which clipped into the safety harness I was wearing. My task was to strip the ends of wires in the new annunciator travelling cable and connect them to the terminals in the under-car j-box.

There I was, sitting crossed-legged on the end of the planks where they rested on the landing floor (on tar-paper stuff so as not to damage the tiled floor), snipping away with my trusty side-cutters and stripping wires with my trusty strippers when a voice said, "G'day son. Waddaya doin' there?".

I looked up, and then got a crick in my neck by trying to angle my head even further back, and there was Chips, gazing down at me as he rolled a cigarette, the paper (no doubt a Tally-ho) hanging from his bottom lip. The tobacco was definitely Champion-brand, because he was holding the packet as he rolled his smoke.

To anyone my age and a bit older, Chips Rafferty (real name John Goffage - see link) was the quintessential Aussie - tall, lanky, sun-tanned and with a laid-back, laconic air. He was to the 1950s and 1960s what Paul Hogan's "Crocodile Dundee" was to the 1980s and 1990s.

My earliest memory of Chips was seeing him in the "Smiley" movies (1950s), in which he played a country policeman.

 The last movie in which I saw him - and which was the last he made before his death - was "Wake In Fright"....in which he played a country copper once again....but this one wasn't quite as nice as the one in "Smiley".

Anyway....back to Grace Building and me looking at Chips rolling his cigarette.
All I could manage to blurt out was something along the lines of "G'day Mr. Rafferty! I'm connecting wires", to which he replied, before walking around the corner, "Well, don't fall down the shaft, son".

I was so gobsmacked to have actually spoken to the man that I didn't even think to ask for his autograph!