After four long years as an apprentice welder I swore I'd never work through another Bendigo winter.
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Not having my licence during that first winter meant getting a lift to my job in Kangaroo Flat on the back of my dad’s Kawasaki Z750 in the dark.
As we both started work at 7.30am, it also meant I got dropped off 15 minutes before the boss arrived to let me into the building, but it made little difference.
“Inside” basically consisted of a big tin shed, so the temperature indoors was roughly equal to the temperature outdoors – at about -45 degrees (I assume).
People often tell me cold weather is better than hot weather because you can always put more clothes on.
They’re wrong. For example, there are only so many pairs of socks a person can wear before one’s feet no longer fit inside one’s shoes. This is a real dilemma in a Bendigo winter.
The other thing that makes being a welder in winter particularly arduous is that you can’t wear any synthetics – which might actually keep you alive in the short term – lest you set yourself on fire (a relatively common occurrence) and melt the plastic fibres onto your body in a way that would necessitate surgical removal.
These days I work inside with the heater on, and no matter how much we journalists might grumble about having to write “another weather story”, I’m happier to be indoors writing about how cold it is than the alternative.
- JASON WALLS, journalist