Blog No. 342 - Beyond Exhaustion - Part 3: Fleeing Melbourne - 13 November 2025

Beyond Exhaustion – Part 3: Fleeing Melbourne

- Written 25 September 2025 - 

A photo of myself from around 1975. You might notice the bottle of liquor in the foreground. I remember drowning in booze and chainsmoking cigarettes.. I would often find myself drunk at home after work in Melbourne. It was once I escaped Melbourne that I decided it was no longer a good idea to continue excessively drinking and smoking. 

I no longer drink nor smoke anymore, I have left that far behind me now.

Another photo of me in 1975. I have shown this photo often in my blogs, but this is because there is very little left from those years as evidence of my existence. Much of it simply did not survive, and it really wasn't easy to keep and take photos as it is now. Countless moments from that time have vanished into what I can only call The Void. The brain itself can only hold so much. Each memory is a pulse of energy firing between neurons. At some point that pulse of energy will cease. Even if a moment was captured with a camera, the printed photos could have easily just vanished as well. Forgotten at the bottom of a box and left behind. In hindsight, this was for the better, those were hard days. 

****

I fled Melbourne in 1975.

There was nothing there for me.

By then, I had stopped trying to kill myself with booze.

I had stopped chain smoking cigarettes.

I was a mess

But I was surviving.

I knew no one in Adelaide.

I had no job.

I had nowhere to live.

I only knew I had to start again.

I spent two years mostly working while being unemployed.

In my mind, the work as a labourer and a cleaner did not count.

In 1977 I resumed work in the public service.

I worked as a claims’ assessor in the Department of Social Security.

Were these people entitled to get a handout for being unemployed?

In honour of the Ruler of Taiwan,

I called myself General Cash My Cheque.

General Chiang Kai Chek was still alive;

He still ruled Taiwan back then.

I was so good at assessing claims.

I was asked to detect welfare fraud.

I became a policeman of sorts.

I understood the irony of my new job.

Someone totally lost was being paid to chase people who were even more totally lost.

I was a policeman of sorts;

They were the hopeless welfare fraudsters.

We were all lost in the Shadow Lands.

We all groped our way through the murk.

I was a lawman.

Pretending to know my way through the Shadows.

Perhaps the welfare cheats were slightly more honest.

They had no map,

But they knew more about the Shadow Lands than me.

Strangely, the wandering through the Land of Shadows,

Helped me gain a little strength.

I had survived;

Survivors are always strong.

The weak never survive.

I began the slow climb out of the gutter.

I was no longer a Superhero,

But I was so very strong.

I was so strong,

I deluded myself;

I convinced myself I had left the Shadows behind.

I was of course so very wrong.

Strength only helps you endure the Shadow Lands.

It cannot point to the way out.

****

Being a claims assessor was, in many ways, the right fit for me. I’ve always looked straight at the facts and made judgements based on the evidence before me. In that line of work, you have to. You’re dealing either with people who genuinely need help or with those who try to take advantage of it. There is more nuance to it, like with all social matters, but the idea remains the same. 

There was a scandal in the Department of Social Security in April 1978 regarding welfare fraud. The Commonwealth Police (Abolished in 1979), which was essentially the old version of the Australian Federal Police, raided and arrested around 180 Greek migrants based in Sydney. Amongst those arrested were even doctors and insurance agents. The Department of Social Security would soon allege that those arrested had committed welfare fraud. The DSS insisted they had made false claims that brought them money. Essentially, they were supposedly stealing from the government, which is never something good.

The government didn't really have a lot of evidence to suggest that this was true or not, and they didn't bother presenting any of what they had to the courts by the time they started acting. But this didn't stop them from cutting off over 1000 Greek-Australians from their social security payments. 

It's hard to make connections, and correlations do not always equal causation, but it is interesting that this scandal presented itself only 3 years after the White Australia Policy was abolished. 

In the end, by 1982, all charges were dropped against all of those affected. An inquiry by the Hawke Government would discover that many of the persecutions were not done justly, and as a result the government paid out 10 million in compensation. 

I have no memory of the Greek welfare fraud and I did not start in Benefit Control as it was called then , until I think 1979.  My area in South Australia had nothing at all to do with it.

****

I do not remember this scandal. I had been a claims assessor from May 1977 until around early 1979. I would be the one to review claims for unemployment, sickness benefits and special benefits. This scandal mainly came from pension benefits. I remember that when Goff Whitlam was Prime Minister, he ordered that unemployment benefits be paid 2 weeks in advance. Malcolm Fraser became Prime Minister on the 11th of November 1975 and I started work at Social Security in May 1977. 

When I started work in 1977, unemployment benefits were still being paid in advance.  Under that system, once you had been approved for benefits, the system automatically kept paying benefits to you until the system was given a kick and told to stop payment.  This meant there were many, many overpayments.  You told the Department you had a job by giving it a form every 2 weeks (SU 17).  It was only when the form was actioned that anything could be done to stop the cheques from going out to you.

In early December 1977, the system was changed significantly.

All new claims for benefit were paid in arrears when the form was lodged – 2 weeks after you had been unemployed.

In addition, unless the form was able to be actioned by Social Security within 4 calendar days of the end of every fortnight (based on the start date from which benefit was first paid to you), your claim for unemployment benefit was automatically terminated by the computer system.

The start of the new system was a complete disaster.

None of us working in the Department knew about the 4 days and your claim was killed off completely rule.  This meant we worked our asses off trying to pay people but the cheques never went out.  The system had killed the claims so it refused to generate cheques.

Even if we had known, and even when we became aware of the new rule, there was nothing we could do because staff levels were too low.  Staffing was adequate for payment in advance but hopelessly inadequate for the far more labour intensive system of paying in arrears.

A newspaper stand on Pirie Street 1970. These were everywhere in Adelaide in those days. 

Because the system was started in early December 1977, people completely ran out of money at the time of the year when they needed it most – Christmas.  The only Social Security office in SA in 1977 was at 12 Pirie Street.  To try and process payments, we simply ignored the  phones and let them ring out.  Files were all paper files back then and hundreds of paper files were strewn all over the floors because we had no time to put them away again.  It was a nightmare.

A special section (Cell 13) was created to work on the street front in Pirie Street to interview people who physically came to the office and to give them manual checks to make sure they could survive.  It was such chaos.  I have no idea how we managed.  We felt very responsible to make sure that people could survive.  We were completely overwhelmed by the system change.  We were told it was being implemented and given a single session supposedly telling us how it would work.  We then had to resume work after having missed one hour during which we would normally have worked our asses off – we got stuck into the backlog from the time taken for the information session and could not take in the information about the system changes.  And their explanation was shit anyway.

In late January we were told by the State Manager we were moving to Hindmarsh Square.  He said literally “thanks and keep up the good work.”  We booed him and threw paper aeroplanes at him.

Things gradually got better at Hindmarsh Square.  We kept the special ground floor unit to process cheques manually.

Nearly everyone I worked with at Social Security drank vast quantities of alcohol.  We all went out on Friday after work  and got completely drunk.  It was a very hard place to work at.  Overworked, underpaid and vast responsibility.