interviews

I get no response to my first job application—for an admin position I probably don’t want.

This morning I go for an interview to be a volunteer tutor at AMES, the Adult Multicultural Education Service. I’m amazed that it’s been going—AMES, not the interview—since 1951, the year of my birth, under a name minus multicultural.

Family Life Victoria started in 1926 with a different name—the League of Youth and Honour. Their address in Camberwell begins ‘Rear of’ which suggests limited funding. I waltz into their meagre HQ bang on seven o’clock for my second job-related event of the day, an information session for prospective sessional educators. Twenty-five of us will vie for six positions.

The AMES interview is not so much an interview as a briefing on what I’ll be doing. Training is five two-and-a-half-hour Wednesday night sessions. I ask about paid teaching of English to migrants and refugees. Eventually I want to teach groups and be paid. I’m told money is tight—it’s a bad time—but given the names of two people I might speak to at the local TAFE where classes run.

So the first component of constructing a new ‘working’ life slots into place.

As a 12 year-old I go with my father to a Father and Son night at a local church hall in Ormond. The one-hour session is literally about birds and bees, with a couple of chooks in the act too. As sex education it’s both primitive and enlightened.

Family Life, the former League of Youth and Honour, then the Father and Son movement, still run evening sessions in suburban halls. Now they’re for families, undefined, and are about sexuality not sex. The programs are no longer primitive, but remain enlightened, as they were in 1963, in being value-free—no morality, no bullshit. They celebrate human diversity.

Three women about my age run the session and the organisation. They’re fine people and utterly dedicated to their cause: facilitation of discussion between ‘family’ members about sexuality and human relations.

The evening family sessions are only one part of a sessional educator’s work; most sessions run in primary schools in class hours and are almost identical in structure and nature to the mental health promotion program I’ve presented to grade five and six kids irregularly over ten years.

The pay is unattractive, the hours spread across days and evenings. It’s work that chews up time but not the mortgage, and they want a cast-iron commitment to the cause for two years.

I come away enthused but wondering if I’d soon become bored.

  

Rock on.