When Graham Brisbane of Wollongong applied to become an Australian citizen in 1980, he telephoned to make an appointment to attend an interview as part of the process and was told the offices were only open 9-5, Monday to Friday. “When I explained I was required to work at those times and would like to attend Thursday night or Saturday morning, I was told that this was not possible but I could always take a sickie (C8). What better way to become an Aussie! Thank goodness the ceremony was held on a Sunday.”
During a short career in the NSW prison service, David Markham of Flynn (ACT) had the task of taking cash left by prisoners’ visitors to the local bank (C8) to deposit into their accounts, accompanied by an armed prison officer. “One day, he pointed to the gun and said, ‘You do realise I’m not allowed to use this, don’t you?’”
“Once or twice a week in the 1950s, a young teller was required to travel from Hornsby to Hawkesbury River Station, carrying a cash bag together with an ancient revolver (C8), to operate the Brooklyn agency of the Bank of NSW,” writes Norm Leek of East Ryde. “You had to walk about a quarter-mile to the agency located in the basement of an old, unoccupied house then, two hours later, hastily throw the cash deposits into a bag and literally run to catch the steam train back to Hornsby, with the gun in a trouser pocket. No wonder that any teller who ever serviced that agency was known as a Brooklyn Dodger.”
In the late 1940s, Brian Keast of Minnamurra went to visit his father, a counter teller at the Bank of NSW in Griffith, to show off the cap gun his mother had just bought him and was happy to oblige when his father asked him: “How does it go?” Little did he know that everyone in the bank had a revolver under their counter/desk. “When I pulled the trigger, everyone in the bank hit the floor and grabbed their gun. It does make a big sound in those old bank buildings!”
While on uni holidays in the 1980s, Eva Elbourne of Pennant Hills worked at a jewellers and, dressed casually, delivered bags of gems unimpeded around the Sydney CBD. “It was only many years later that it occurred to me that perhaps that was unwise, for both me and the owner of the diamonds.”
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