CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
At 5 ft 3 and 52 kilos, local art teacher Dolly Bennett (62) looks like the last person in Betoota who would be looking to get initiated into an outlaw motorcycle club.
She volunteers at the local refugee centre. She has two adult daughters who are now beginning their own journeys into motherhood. She goes walking every afternoon and very rarely drinks more than a couple glasses of a moderately priced buttery chardonnay.
On top of all of this, she’s paid off 62% of the mortgage on the family home – that she fought to keep after her accountant husband took off with the hairdresser.
But with interest rates rising and the local public school expecting her to cover extra supplies out of her own salary, she’s basically losing money by holding off retirement.
Dolly wants to work.
Mostly because she knows that there’s fuck all young people coming through the university pipeline to begin lifelong careers as primary school teachers.
Why would they want to? She wonders. This career can no longer provide them with even a deposit, let alone a home of their own. They’d much sooner take jobs as real estate agents or insurance auditors – and they are doing just that.
With class sizes now edging well beyond thirty kids to a room, and each day presenting new challenges with the smorgasboard of behavioural problems that have emerged in the children that were forced to stay home for two years during a global pandemic – Dolly’s job has changed drastically.
But her wages haven’t.
That’s why she’s spent what little savings she has and on a Harley Davidson motorbike and started hanging around the local clubhouse of Betoota’s most prominent bikie gang, Satan’s Jesters.
“I saw that 60 Minutes reports on the CFMEU’s bikie links” she says.
“I thought, what a wonderful idea! Maybe my union could use a bit of support from these tattooed young gentlemen”
As Dolly points out, in the midst of all the disruption and cost-of-living expenses currently faced by teachers, her union wasn’t even able to negotiate a pay rise that matches inflation.
“I think I might have the answer to improving negotiations with the department” she says.
“Next time, I won’t be just sending in my union to carve up a new EBA. I’ll be sending in my new mates Sione and Kayden with a couple cricket bats and sawn-off in the Subaru”
“Let’s ride!”
