On the Edge 3: The Simmonds Family

The effect on an entire society that is pushing the edges of the possible in order to get a competitive edge at the cutting edge is to force everyone inside it to push themselves to their own edges.  The evacuation of the psychological centre gives everyone a common consciousness.  They are all ‘edgy’.  However, the experienced effects can be very different.

The marginals on the edge grimly hang on, or gradually lose their grip .  Fear and despair make them clutch desperately, as long as their strength holds out.  Those likely to fall know they will not return from the valley of the shadow of marginalisation; the place of the fallen.  For the few, it is but a temporary purgatory.  For most, it is the damnation of disempowerment; a place haunted by broken dreams, lost opportunities and self loathing.

The long-term bottom feeders on the edge no longer have or never had any dreams, power or self-respect to lose.  These are the permanent low edge dwellers in the existential garbage dumps of thwarted, underdeveloped, trashed, broken and picaresque characters.  This is the place of the lumpen proletariat, of psychological inconsequentials, of the semi-criminalised underclass.  All they are able to share is their alienation, rancour, misery and destructiveness.  It is dark and foul there to the uninitiated, but the inhabitants hardly notice, judge or care.  These human waste dumps grow and threaten to overflow, just like their third world slum counterparts and their poisonous legacy threatens the very groundwater of our being.




Bob Simmonds, his wife Jenny and their two young children Wayne and Janine came to South Australia from England in 1963.  Bob started work on the assembly line of the Elizabeth GM-Holden car plant in South Australia.  He was conscientious and hard working and soon came to the notice of the floor supervisors.  He steadily worked his way up over the next twenty years to become one of the plant’s senior line managers.  Jenny remained at home, raising the family increasingly on her own as her husband’s responsibilities increased. 

Unfortunately, as the ‘70s progressed, the plant started to age and Japanese competition made steady inroads into the company’s market share. It started to cut costs and cut back on labour.  Bob was made redundant in 1983, at the age of fifty.  All the national carmakers were having the same problem, so getting a similar position in another plant was out of the question and besides, he was now considered too ‘old’ to be taken on as a new worker.  He drove a taxi for the next fifteen years and Jenny saw even less of him.

Quite a number of the parents whose children were at the local High School had suffered Bob’s fate some years earlier than him and had become long term unemployed.  Over time, this caused ‘problems’ at home and their children started to become ‘at risk’.  Unfortunately, Wayne fell in with this crowd.  At the critical point when he started to get himself into trouble with the school and police authorities and needed the firm hand of his father because his mum couldn’t control him anymore, his father was on twelve hour shifts, not there when she needed him, and too tired to be much use when he got home.

When Wayne eventually found his way into a youth training centre, he was lucky enough to meet a chaplain who took enough interest in him to gain his trust.  Under his mentorship, Wayne started to study and when he got out, was helped into a fitting and turning apprenticeship.  He really loved the work, but the forces that had driven his father out of the manufacturing industry caught up with him almost immediately.  Two employers went down underneath him while he was still doing his apprenticeship.  With the support of his chaplain friend and some government training assistance he was able to get his trade papers, but employment was patchy and insecure.

Wayne didn’t marry, but in his middle twenties had a daughter by a sixteen-year-old girl he had met at a party. Eighteen months later they had a second one.  The relationship didn’t last long.  His bouts of unemployment, increasing drinking and eventual violence became intolerable and she moved out into a refuge and eventually into a public housing complex.

Janine on the other hand was more academically inclined and eventually found her way to university and a teaching career.  She was a dedicated, conscientious and competent teacher who won the respect of both colleagues and her students.  However, this standard cost her very dear in terms of time, personal focus and stress. 

She found it very difficult to pace herself in a way that she could sustain in the long run.  Schools were going through a lot of ongoing curriculum change.  There was enormous academic competitive pressure at the senior levels and a lot of uncertainty about how to manage ‘problem’ children in the middle school.  Devolution of central bureaucratic control of government schools, increasing interactivity with surrounding communities and increasing committee work, documentation compliance and reporting, expanded and intensified her workload.  Since she was keen to gain seniority, she had to commit herself to ongoing post-graduate professional development, in her own time and at her own cost.

By the time Janine was thirty-something she started to hit the career versus reproductivity crunch.  Her social life had taken bad last in her priorities for years and it seemed that all the men who were any good at all had been ‘taken’.  Casual sex did nothing for her at all.  On the other hand, she was now a more senior teacher with middle management as well as onerous upper school teaching responsibilities.  They soaked up what little personal time she had ever had.

But the worst thing was the stress and exhaustion.  Even though she was very disciplined about staying fit and eating properly, she always felt tired, her skin was coarsening, she was getting severe flu every winter, her blood pressure was a bit high, she would suffer regularly from indigestion and her back kept her chiropractor in business.

By the late 1990s, her father was dead.  She was helping to pay for the nursing home that looked after her mother.  Her brother was an alcoholic who was forever ‘borrowing’ off her. 

She had also become an expert in the promotion game, because it was the only way she could manoeuvre herself into a position that would enable her to delegate enough workload to survive.  She was a deputy-principal, heading for the senior bureaucracy, where it was possible to work smarter instead of harder.

Even her emotional life picked up when she found a decent divorcee who had been superannuated out of teaching and his marriage because of the stress.  He cooked and kept the home fires burning.  There were no children of course.  She had aged prematurely, become peri-menapausal and was too set in her career path and ‘little ways’ to accommodate that kind of change.

However, her two nieces, Wayne’s children, all too tragically impinged on her middle age.  Their mother took up with a younger man who thought it might be nice to have the thirteen and fifteen year old girls as well as their mother.  She turned a blind eye.  When their horrified Aunt accidentally heard the girls talking about it and their mother’s complicity, she reported the matter to the police.  As the official investigations proceeded, the mother denied all knowledge, ditched her partner but lost the custody of her children.

Janine tried to take them on, but the eldest girl raged against her aunt for ‘interfering’, refused to co-operate or listen to reason, secretly took up with the ‘step-father’, who was now a heroine addict, as soon as she could, and moved in with him the day she turned eighteen.  The younger girl, who had already shown signs of being emotionally disturbed, spun out, became unmanageable and a serial runaway, acquired her sister's new drug habit, became homeless and was found hanging under a railway bridge two years later. 

Their aunt was forever left with the unpleasant and guilty sense that instead of minimising harm, she had only managed to exacerbate and accelerate it.  This contributed to an increasing reluctance to take tough decisions, which meant that she became adept at avoiding or glossing over them.  This proclivity smoothed her promotion path no end, not right to the top of her profession, but near it.