On the business front, things were going better than ever. The three construction companies had more work than they could handle, and David had just opened another business—a retail store selling wallpaper, tile, and bathroom and kitchen fittings. It helped the new store’s bottom line that the store also supplied the three construction companies.
The focus of the construction business also began to slowly shift from remodeling homes to restoring old homes around the city. These homes were owned by very wealthy owners who were willing to pay the high costs of the restorations. David’s companies had one of the best reputations in all of Sydney for quality workmanship and for completing a job on time. Architects and potential clients sought David out to work on their projects. In fact, they wanted so badly for his companies to do the work that he no longer had to bid on the contracts. The customers were willing to pay whatever it cost to have his company do the work. It was a business owner’s dream.
Yet as time went on, David found himself becoming frustrated. He now employed one hundred workers, and rather than going out to job sites to work with his men, he was stuck in his office managing the operation. His days were an endless stream of telephone calls, client meetings, and paperwork. Before long he found that all this work was beginning to encroach on other areas of his life. It was getting harder for him to find the time to go jogging in Centennial Park, as he loved to do, or play on the church soccer team. It was also getting more difficult to keep up his involvement in various church activities. But most of all, work was encroaching on his time with his children. He loved to get down on the floor with the girls and play, as he had done with Rocky back at Sedgley. He and the girls would get blankets and drape them over the dining room chairs to make forts or would wrestle each other in the front room. For David these were wonderful times, the times that he’d never had with his parents when he was a child. He wanted the girls to grow up knowing that they were surrounded by loving parents who cared for them and watched out for them.
One evening in mid-1974, as David was bathing the girls, the telephone rang. He answered the call, and a voice on the other end of the line said, “Are you the builder who has been doing the work on my house?”
David recognized the voice immediately—it was that of Kerry Packer, media magnate and Australia’s richest man. One of David’s construction companies had recently completed some renovations at Packer’s house in Bellevue Hill. “Yes, I’m the builder,” David replied.
“Well get over here as fast as you can,” Packer demanded. “I’m having a party tonight, and the latch on the cocktail cabinet you installed isn’t working properly. I want it fixed before the party starts.”
David took a deep breath. Couldn’t the man live with a nonfunctioning latch on his cocktail cabinet for one night? David didn’t want to go. He was in the midst of spending time with his children. But what choice did he have? Kerry Packer still owed him a lot of money for the job. “All right. I’ll be over as quickly as I can,” David replied.
David drove to Packer’s luxurious home and in just a few minutes had fixed the latch. Although the whole affair had not been a huge inconvenience to David, somehow it touched something deep within him. When he left Sedgley and a life of growing up in a boys’ home behind him, David had determined that he would never again allow himself to be put in a situation where other people had power over him, where they could dictate when and where and how he would do things and then punish him if he failed to meet their expectations. But as David thought about the situation with Kerry Packer, he realized that Packer—along with everyone else who still owed him money for work his construction companies had done—had the power over him. If he wanted the money, he had very little choice but to meet their demands, even if that meant leaving the children at night to fix the latch on someone’s cocktail cabinet. This realization only raised the level of frustration David was feeling over his construction business.
Soon after the incident with Kerry Packer, David sat in his office pondering the report in front of him. He knew the recommendations were right, but he just couldn’t seem to find the enthusiasm to follow through on them. David had hired a business consultant to give him advice on the next move for his construction businesses. The consultant had laid out in his report a new formulation for the company, rolling the three separate companies into one single corporation and borrowing a million dollars to invest in new, bigger, and better equipment for the business. Such a move, the consultant pointed out, given David’s reputation for doing excellent work, would take his business to the next level, making it one of the major players in construction in Sydney. “But what was the point?” David asked himself. Sure, the business would make more money, yet an expanded company would only make him busier and take him further away from the things in his life he was already struggling to keep up with. And if he borrowed a million dollars as suggested, not only clients but also the bank would have power over him as they sought to protect their investment.
Over the next several months, David began to give a lot of thought to what might be the next step for his life. Yes, his company did good work, but there had to be more than just doing good work for clients. In fact, as he thought about it, he realized that what he enjoyed more than running a successful construction company was getting out into the community and helping people, as he had recently done with the Methodist church in Paddington. The church could barely bring in the money to pay the pastor’s salary. To help offset church finances, the members of the congregation ran a small market outside the church, renting stalls to people who wanted to sell handicrafts, used clothing, food, produce, and the like. Seeing the church’s situation, David had approached the pastor and suggested expanding the market. The pastor had agreed, and David and Sjaak Embrecht, a Dutch fitter and turner who rented one of the flats at the back of David’s house on Darley Road, got to work. Together they built a large veranda around the outside of the church to provide some shelter from the weather for those renting the stalls. Then they made two metal trolleys on which to stack the tables used for the stalls. Their work paid off. The market rapidly expanded, and soon they had to make more trolleys for the ever-increasing stack of tables that needed to be moved and set up to keep up with the demand to rent stalls. Now the church was making more money from renting stalls at the expanded market than it had ever dreamed possible.
That was what David liked to do most: find a problem and come up with a workable solution that benefited the greatest number of people. Instead, he was stuck running a company where he now realized that other people had power over him. Yes, his management skills were responsible for the success of the construction business. However, he felt trapped by that success, since he now spent most of his time stuck in an office doing the things he least liked about business.
Yes, the business had been lucrative for him, but David began to wonder just how much money a person needed. When was enough enough? Was letting others have power over him really a worthwhile trade-off, just so he could earn more money? By now he certainly had plenty of money. In fact, he had surpassed his goal. He’d told the other boys back at Sedgley as they fixed their bikes together and voiced their dreams for the future that he planned to be a millionaire by the time he was forty. He wasn’t yet thirty-five, and he had already done that. Wasn’t that enough? There had to be something different out there for him, something that wouldn’t leave him feeling the way he felt right now.
On Christmas Day 1974, David was still wrestling with his feelings and his future as he rose early to begin preparations for the Christmas dinner that would be served later in the afternoon. At Christmas, David and Carol often opened their home to those who had nowhere else to go. Usually a good number of people, including several people who worked for David, showed up at the house for Christmas dinner. People began to arrive at the house at one in the afternoon, at which time David left the kitchen and swung into host mode, greeting people warmly and wishing them a “Merry Christmas” as they arrived. Before long a crowd of people were milling around the house and in the backyard, where tables were set up on which to serve the food. By midafternoon, platters piled with food were spread on the tables, and people began helping themselves to Christmas dinner.
Inside after dinner, David flicked on the radio to catch the latest news of the day. “Dramatic news out of Darwin,” he heard the announcer say. “The entire city lies in ruins after being hit by Cyclone Tracy.”
David stood riveted to the spot. The radio report went on to say that the cyclone had struck Darwin, located in Australia’s Northern Territory, late on Christmas Eve, and that while details were still sketchy, it was believed many people had lost their lives and most of Darwin’s buildings had been leveled.
Soon others at the house were gathered around the radio listening to the news reports. Then later, the first television pictures of the disaster flickered across the TV screen in the living room. The devastation looked even worse than the radio reporter had described. The city of forty-eight thousand inhabitants was indeed in ruins.
As he watched, a strange idea struck David. Why not take a team of men to Darwin to help out with the massive cleanup and rebuilding effort that would be necessary? After all, it was summer vacation time in Australia, and the construction business would be closed down for the month of January.
David talked about the idea with Carol and several of his employees who were at the house, and they all thought it would be a good thing to do. In the days following, David called more of his employees, and a call for volunteers went out from the Waverly Methodist Mission. David offered to pay the men’s airfare to Darwin in return for their labor, and a local church in Darwin would find accommodations for them, such as they were. Before long a group of twenty men were in on the project. David was energized. Here was an opportunity to help people in desperate need. The frustration he had been feeling over his construction business had been replaced by an excitement for the challenge ahead.
Less than two weeks after Cyclone Tracy hit Darwin, the group was headed for the airport in Sydney. David was anxious to get to Darwin and get to work.
Chapter 9
Darwin
As the airplane circled the city and made its approach to land, David peered out the window, dumbstruck at the devastation Cyclone Tracy had wrought on Darwin. The city was damaged far worse than he could have imagined, worse than the images of the disaster on television had revealed. Barely a house was left standing in the city’s northern suburbs, and debris was scattered in all directions.
As he stepped off the plane at Darwin’s battered airport, David felt like he was stepping into a sauna. It was the wet season and the hot season in Darwin, and the resulting humidity was so thick and heavy it clung to his skin. By the time he had walked across the tarmac, beads of sweat were running down David’s face and back.
David and his team stayed at a nearby hostel run by the Uniting Church, which had miraculously survived the ravages of the cyclone fairly unscathed. After the team had made it to the hostel with their duffel bags and toolboxes, David sprang into action. He set out to survey the damage and come up with a plan to deploy the members of his team in the most effective way. He had seen the aftermath of the cyclone on television and from the air as they flew in, but now he was viewing it at close quarters. Most of the houses in Darwin were built atop steel or concrete pilings, with stairs leading up to the living area and the laundry situated under the house. Lots of steel and concrete pilings were sticking up everywhere, but few houses were left intact on top of them. David walked down street after street where the combined effects of Cyclone Tracy’s wind and flying debris had leveled everything. Cars, appliances, furniture, and personal belongings were strewn everywhere among the rubble. By the time David arrived in Darwin, nearly thirty thousand of the city’s forty-eight thousand inhabitants had been evacuated or had fled the place, and those who had stayed huddled for shelter under what remained of their homes.
