Had my old sister in law and her husband visit us , him being of Greek decent they brought a bottle of ouzo with them which brought back memories of the last time I drank the stuff , along with whiskey, I learnt to leave them alone years back after having that one too many, but ouzo was a one off .
Was way back in the early 1960s when I was working on the wharf at Pt Augusta and a regular the Chuie Maru was in port loading copper . It was on a pallet of 24bags which we had to stow a certain way to prevent fire .
This event was a night when i was working the 10 pm till 7 am shift lumping the bags as they were lowered from a platform onto my shoulder , the gang consisted of ten men 8 lumping the bags and the other 2 putting them on our shoulders and placing them , we would take it in turn lumping then an hour on the stage.
This particular night Tony Amato who was getting married the following Saturday was working with the gang was getting a lot of flack about his nuptials , this shift had an hours break between 3 and 4 am and usually a few of us gathered around Mc Kenzies ute drinking beer from his esky supply , Tony only lived a short walk from his home and would go there for eats during the break,
Well the whistle blew at 3 so we all retuned and climbed back down the hold to commence work again , I might say here we had a system of how many pallets of bags we would load in 2 hrs which kept the stevedore happy , forget just how many that was , but anyhow we found that Tony had brought back 4 bottles of ouzo to have a drink with him . We very quickly decided we would slow the loading of the pallets and enjoy the ouzo .
5 am was another break and back to Mc kenzies ute , had to empty the esky lol, then back to the hold till 7 am , climbing back down 2 decks was a bit hard but we all made it and carried on working and drinking the ouzo, I reckon the work was done automatically towards the end of shift till the knock off whistle blew when I knew the ladder climb out wasn't for me , and a couple of the others as well , the hatchman got the winch drivers to lower an empty pallet down the hold and we were winched out , certainly a night to remember and ouzo and I have been enemies ever since