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Seagulling & Other Occupations by Michael Morrissey
Summary Please note: This article was originally part of Tauranga City Library's 'Tauranga Memories' website (2011-2020). To your right the 'Archived Kete Link', if present, will take you to a snapshot of the original record. Tauranga Memories was made of several focus areas, called 'baskets'. This article was part of the New Zealand Society of Authors Bay of Plenty basket. It was first licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 New Zealand License at http://tauranga.kete.net.nz/new_zealand_society_of_authors_bay_of_plenty/topics/show/443. Initially created 20/02/2012, it underwent 7 edit, the last edit being 15/10/2016. Editors included: Tauranga City Libraries staff (Debbie McCauley) and Tauranga City Libraries staff (Harley Couper). The original article may have included links, images etc that are not present here.DescriptionIn 1966, I ‘seagulled’ - that is, casually worked on the wharf, which I had done since 1961. Of all the labouring jobs I did - pouring concrete (sacked), walking GIB board up stairwells of houses under construction (sacked), packing dry goods into railway wagons, (so easy no one ever got sacked), hand trucking fruit and vegetables at Turners & Growers (sacked), cleaning office blocks (sacked), stacking frozen butter at the freezing works, working in a motorcar assembly factory (sacked), stacking hot loaves of bread (quit) - it was my favourite. It was well paid, and a bonus would come through about six weeks later. The work was varied, the company good (many were my drinking buddies from the Kiwi Hotel) and ships, even moored at a wharf, have a salty romance.
When passenger liners, their holds emptied by seagulls, sailed for England, the scene was like something out of an Eisenstein film. Hundreds of streamers shot through the air from the ship to the wharf, and as hearts were wrenched and tears rolled down every cheek booming music would play 'Now is the Hour':
Now is the hour
We must say goodbye.
Soon you'll be sailing
Far across the sea
While you're away
Oh, then, remember me
When you return
You'll find me waiting here
I am still waiting here.
I defy anyone to last the distance with dry eyes. Many of the girls I farewelled never returned.
And I am still waiting here...
As this was the pre-container era, cargo was unloaded manually by gangs of twelve. Smaller ships had hatch covers consisting of sturdy steel-tipped planks removed manually one at time by two men. One slip could mean dropping fifty feet into a darkened hold. Larger ships had multi-hinged plates pulled off by the ship's winch. Cargo was loaded onto pallets, wrapped in chains, or placed in a spider's nest mesh of ropes.
It didn't pay to be careless.
If you were aboard the ship working the hold, six of the twelve would normally unload, while the other six would rest. This was known as an ‘up.’ You could sit in the hold or on the ship's deck doing nothing for about two hours. It was OK to read. So on a typical ‘up’ I might be sitting in warm sunshine reading Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller.
Getting paid to read!
Occasionally, news of ups would reach public ears and people would get excited about loafing wharfies, though nothing changed. Rumour had it that permanent wharfies had their ups so well organised, they could take whole days off and be paid. The arrival of container shipping in the 70s ended the days of ups and casually employed seagulls.
A properly equipped wharfie or seagull carried a wool hook and warm clothing. Wool was tightly packed into large bales weighing 700 pounds, their smooth shape making a handhold impossible. With a wool hook, the bales could be manoeuvred into place for hoisting by ropes. Warm gear was needed while working in a freezer.
The seagull's life was one of uncertainty. Will there be work? On which wharf will you working? On what kind of ship? With a freezer hold? With wool bales? It paid to be prepared.
When there was no work, office staff would slam down the shutters as though we were an army attempting a medieval siege and the office a barricaded castle. When there was work, we clustered around eagerly – like hungry gulls competing for scraps of food.
The wharf was a dangerous place to work I was in the forward hold of the Athenic unloading butter when the tray accidentally grazed the side of the hold. Six blocks of butter frozen solid as stone came hurtling down. Everyone scattered accept a large Maori who was hit on the back of the neck. He went down and we all clamoured over frozen butter to see if he was OK. Miraculously he was.
When oxygen cylinders were chained up, the pressure from the lifting hook would make them roll together viciously. If the gang of seagulls was inexperienced, the hatchie would aggressively shout instructions.
When the hook was hanging on the end of its long steel hawser, it didn't pay to stand too close. If wind caught the hook, it could hit hard. When one man was side-swiped by the hook, his head reddened up with a lump about four inches across.
Walking a ship's length when several hatches were being simultaneously unloaded was particularly dangerous. Hard hats were not yet in use.
Eventually, I made a mistake. I left one hand under a wire attached to the trays. As the pressure of the hook tightened the wires, I was yanked off my feet suspended by my left hand. I screamed: the crane loosened, let me fall. My third finger was crushed. Not too badly - an X-ray revealed nothing broken. Workers would get killed from time to time.
Some of the ships I helped unload were small. The Kapuni was dreaded - a typical cargo consisted of heavy sacks of grain crane-lowered onto huge hand trucks. The result was a terrific load that needed one man on each handle to lift. Your back had to be in good shape. The bonus for unloading the Kapuni was one penny.
When I was not working at the wharf I worked as a driver's offsider for Winstones, the well-known Auckland company that supplied building materials such as stone and gravel. Their trucks delivered Gibraltar (or GIB) board to the sites of newly-constructed houses. The largely state house dominated suburb of Otara was the major building area. Apart from providing insulation, GIB board is fire-resistant.
Carrying GIB board taught me a fundamental lesson in one man lifting - anything rectangular is held sideways against the body. When I lost balance and sank to my knees my driver remonstrated, “Never get on your hands and knees for a piece of GIB board!”
As usual I got sacked from my Winstones' offsider job for failing to turn up.
I also got a job on the railways. This was like going home because my father had worked on the railways for thirty years. He worked at the Otahuhu Railways Workshops fixing bogies. In the 60s the railways, like the Post Office and the Land Transfer Office and other government departments, was overstaffed. When cut backs were made in the 80s, the railways shrunk from 20,000 to 5, 000.
My ‘job’ consisted in sitting in a railway wagon all day unloading goods that arrived at the rate of about one item per half hour. Downtime was spent reading, doing crosswords, listening to the radio, talking to your colleagues. We were required to be at our post because a van could arrive at any time. The only hard work came at the end of the day when the wagons were covered with three tarpaulins. I sometime wonder why I left.
By now, I had been sacked several times. Adapting the witty words of Ferdishenko in The Idiot by Dostoyevsky, “I must advise you not to employ me.” Particularly if you are a factory owner. Factories are boredom incarnate and I had great difficulty in dealing with the futile elongation of time induced by repetitive work, so different from the pleasurable delay of time induced by marijuana or the extremes of mania.
When I discussed this factory boredom with fellow workers they said, “You just switch off.” How do you switch off? I was always switched on.
I lasted a week in a motor car assembly factory before being dismissed for ‘tiredness.’ When I spent twelve minutes in the john, the foreman rebuked me for being absent for ‘quarter of an hour.’
“Ten minutes,” I corrected, rounding down rather than up.
The noise in the car assembly factory was deafening. In those days, no one wore ear plugs or muffs.
I only lasted a day in a bakery. The bread emerged oven-hot on a slowly moving conveyor belt. My job was to grasp two loaves of bread together, one non-gloved hand on each side, and place them on trays.
Phil, my fellow worker, told me, “It doesn't feel so hot if you grasp it more firmly.”
I tried his advice and found the bread felt even hotter. As I dropped the hot loaves and the relentless passing of even hotter bread continued until they began falling off the end of the conveyor belt onto the floor, I created a mini hot bread avalanche. The spectacle of me not coping with the hot bread was an exact simulacrum of a comedy in which the anti-hero proves laughably incompetent.
Phil told me he liked the job because you work different hours. How anyone could like this job was beyond my imagining.
About the writer: Michael Morrissey has published twenty books, his latest being Taming the Tiger, a memoir of manic depression. For full bibliography, view Michael J. T. Morrissey at Wikipedia.
‘Seagulling & Other Occupations’ was written for the Memoir & Local History Competition 2011, run annually by the New Zealand Society of Authors (Bay of Plenty Region) with support from Tauranga Writers.
When passenger liners, their holds emptied by seagulls, sailed for England, the scene was like something out of an Eisenstein film. Hundreds of streamers shot through the air from the ship to the wharf, and as hearts were wrenched and tears rolled down every cheek booming music would play 'Now is the Hour':
Now is the hour
We must say goodbye.
Soon you'll be sailing
Far across the sea
While you're away
Oh, then, remember me
When you return
You'll find me waiting here
I am still waiting here.
I defy anyone to last the distance with dry eyes. Many of the girls I farewelled never returned.
And I am still waiting here...
As this was the pre-container era, cargo was unloaded manually by gangs of twelve. Smaller ships had hatch covers consisting of sturdy steel-tipped planks removed manually one at time by two men. One slip could mean dropping fifty feet into a darkened hold. Larger ships had multi-hinged plates pulled off by the ship's winch. Cargo was loaded onto pallets, wrapped in chains, or placed in a spider's nest mesh of ropes.
It didn't pay to be careless.
If you were aboard the ship working the hold, six of the twelve would normally unload, while the other six would rest. This was known as an ‘up.’ You could sit in the hold or on the ship's deck doing nothing for about two hours. It was OK to read. So on a typical ‘up’ I might be sitting in warm sunshine reading Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller.
Getting paid to read!
Occasionally, news of ups would reach public ears and people would get excited about loafing wharfies, though nothing changed. Rumour had it that permanent wharfies had their ups so well organised, they could take whole days off and be paid. The arrival of container shipping in the 70s ended the days of ups and casually employed seagulls.
A properly equipped wharfie or seagull carried a wool hook and warm clothing. Wool was tightly packed into large bales weighing 700 pounds, their smooth shape making a handhold impossible. With a wool hook, the bales could be manoeuvred into place for hoisting by ropes. Warm gear was needed while working in a freezer.
The seagull's life was one of uncertainty. Will there be work? On which wharf will you working? On what kind of ship? With a freezer hold? With wool bales? It paid to be prepared.
When there was no work, office staff would slam down the shutters as though we were an army attempting a medieval siege and the office a barricaded castle. When there was work, we clustered around eagerly – like hungry gulls competing for scraps of food.
The wharf was a dangerous place to work I was in the forward hold of the Athenic unloading butter when the tray accidentally grazed the side of the hold. Six blocks of butter frozen solid as stone came hurtling down. Everyone scattered accept a large Maori who was hit on the back of the neck. He went down and we all clamoured over frozen butter to see if he was OK. Miraculously he was.
When oxygen cylinders were chained up, the pressure from the lifting hook would make them roll together viciously. If the gang of seagulls was inexperienced, the hatchie would aggressively shout instructions.
When the hook was hanging on the end of its long steel hawser, it didn't pay to stand too close. If wind caught the hook, it could hit hard. When one man was side-swiped by the hook, his head reddened up with a lump about four inches across.
Walking a ship's length when several hatches were being simultaneously unloaded was particularly dangerous. Hard hats were not yet in use.
Eventually, I made a mistake. I left one hand under a wire attached to the trays. As the pressure of the hook tightened the wires, I was yanked off my feet suspended by my left hand. I screamed: the crane loosened, let me fall. My third finger was crushed. Not too badly - an X-ray revealed nothing broken. Workers would get killed from time to time.
Some of the ships I helped unload were small. The Kapuni was dreaded - a typical cargo consisted of heavy sacks of grain crane-lowered onto huge hand trucks. The result was a terrific load that needed one man on each handle to lift. Your back had to be in good shape. The bonus for unloading the Kapuni was one penny.
When I was not working at the wharf I worked as a driver's offsider for Winstones, the well-known Auckland company that supplied building materials such as stone and gravel. Their trucks delivered Gibraltar (or GIB) board to the sites of newly-constructed houses. The largely state house dominated suburb of Otara was the major building area. Apart from providing insulation, GIB board is fire-resistant.
Carrying GIB board taught me a fundamental lesson in one man lifting - anything rectangular is held sideways against the body. When I lost balance and sank to my knees my driver remonstrated, “Never get on your hands and knees for a piece of GIB board!”
As usual I got sacked from my Winstones' offsider job for failing to turn up.
I also got a job on the railways. This was like going home because my father had worked on the railways for thirty years. He worked at the Otahuhu Railways Workshops fixing bogies. In the 60s the railways, like the Post Office and the Land Transfer Office and other government departments, was overstaffed. When cut backs were made in the 80s, the railways shrunk from 20,000 to 5, 000.
My ‘job’ consisted in sitting in a railway wagon all day unloading goods that arrived at the rate of about one item per half hour. Downtime was spent reading, doing crosswords, listening to the radio, talking to your colleagues. We were required to be at our post because a van could arrive at any time. The only hard work came at the end of the day when the wagons were covered with three tarpaulins. I sometime wonder why I left.
By now, I had been sacked several times. Adapting the witty words of Ferdishenko in The Idiot by Dostoyevsky, “I must advise you not to employ me.” Particularly if you are a factory owner. Factories are boredom incarnate and I had great difficulty in dealing with the futile elongation of time induced by repetitive work, so different from the pleasurable delay of time induced by marijuana or the extremes of mania.
When I discussed this factory boredom with fellow workers they said, “You just switch off.” How do you switch off? I was always switched on.
I lasted a week in a motor car assembly factory before being dismissed for ‘tiredness.’ When I spent twelve minutes in the john, the foreman rebuked me for being absent for ‘quarter of an hour.’
“Ten minutes,” I corrected, rounding down rather than up.
The noise in the car assembly factory was deafening. In those days, no one wore ear plugs or muffs.
I only lasted a day in a bakery. The bread emerged oven-hot on a slowly moving conveyor belt. My job was to grasp two loaves of bread together, one non-gloved hand on each side, and place them on trays.
Phil, my fellow worker, told me, “It doesn't feel so hot if you grasp it more firmly.”
I tried his advice and found the bread felt even hotter. As I dropped the hot loaves and the relentless passing of even hotter bread continued until they began falling off the end of the conveyor belt onto the floor, I created a mini hot bread avalanche. The spectacle of me not coping with the hot bread was an exact simulacrum of a comedy in which the anti-hero proves laughably incompetent.
Phil told me he liked the job because you work different hours. How anyone could like this job was beyond my imagining.
About the writer: Michael Morrissey has published twenty books, his latest being Taming the Tiger, a memoir of manic depression. For full bibliography, view Michael J. T. Morrissey at Wikipedia.
‘Seagulling & Other Occupations’ was written for the Memoir & Local History Competition 2011, run annually by the New Zealand Society of Authors (Bay of Plenty Region) with support from Tauranga Writers.
Relates To
EventsTauranga Memories (2011-2021) - EventsKeywords2011 Memoir and Local History CompetitionMichael Morrissey
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Michael Morrissey, Seagulling & Other Occupations by Michael Morrissey. Pae Korokī, accessed 01/04/2023, https://paekoroki.tauranga.govt.nz/nodes/view/20224
