Angel

Saturday,January 2nd, 1960

I landed the job! After I sat my finals at the Sydney Tech last year, I applied to the Royal Queens Hospital X-ray Department for a position as a trained technician, and today the postie brought a letter of acceptance! I am to start this Monday as a senior X-ray technician at the biggest hospital in the Southern Hemisphere—more than a thousand beds! Makes Ryde Hospital, my old alma mater, look like a dinghy alongside the Queen Elizabeth. From where I am now, I should never have done my training at Ryde Hospital, but at the time I thought it was a brilliant idea when David suggested it. His elder brother, Ned, was a registrar there—a friend at court. Hah! He acted as my watchdog. Every time someone male gave me a come-hither look, Ned Bloody Murchison warned him off—I was his brother’s girl, so no poaching on taken preserves! In the early days I didn’t mind, but it became a colossal bog as I grew out of my teenage uncertainty and humility, started thinking occasionally that X or Y looked like he’d be fun to go out with.

Training at Ryde did have one advantage, though. It takes two hours on public transport to get there from Bronte, and studying on public transport beats trying to study in the Purcell residence, between Granny and Mum watching television and the men usurping the whole evening to wash the dishes while they yarn cricket, cricket, cricket. Clint Walker and Efrem Zimbalist Junior in the lounge room, Keith Miller and Don Bradman in the kitchen, and no doors between all this and the only spot to study, the dining room table. Give me a bus or a train any day. Guess what? I topped everything! Highest marks possible. That’s why I got the job at Royal Queens. When the results came out, Mum and Dad nagged a bit because when I’d finished at Randwick High, I refused to go to Uni and do a degree in science or medicine. Topping X-ray rubbed my lack of ambition in, I suppose. But who wants to go to Uni and suffer the slings and arrows of all those males who don’t want women in men’s professions? Not me!