It was 1970, and we had been in our Machinery Business two years, and it was uphill going with sales. The Government had previously announced, that due to huge surpluses of wheat in Australia, the amount of wheat that a farmer could sell was regulated by “wheat quotas”, mostly this was about half the amount he would normally sell, so times were particularly hard for sales of farm equipment.
However, most days Pam packed my lunch and off I went canvassing farmers for possible sales, this day I wasn’t sure where to go. I left home heading south then went north, then I spotted an array of vehicles etc. on the edge of town, lots of trucks and caravans etc., it was a circus coming into town. I thought maybe they would need some service etc. on those trucks so I headed to the activity. A lad pointed me to the boss’s caravan, a beautiful big one. It was Bullen Bros. circus. I knocked on the door of the big caravan. A rather round man with flared pants came to the door, “what do you want sonny” he said. I explained my mission rather sheepishly, he thought for a minute then said he was looking for something better than the Dodge truck carrying the Lions cage, what did I have? I had one truck in my yard, a new I.H. model. I explained the truck to him. He said he wouldn’t mind looking at it. We arranged a time for him to look over the truck, which he did, and he showed interest. He asked me for a deal trading his Dodge, which I had seen earlier. I gave him a written quote. He looked over the deal for some time then said to give him an hour or so, he would let me know. I went back to him an hour or so later, he said he would like to take me up on the deal as long as we could swap the Lions cage over. I agreed, so it was a deal. I then asked re payment, it was approximate $20,000 change over. He put his hand into his rear trouser pocket, pulled out a bundle of notes, started counting. He got to $2,000 leaving $18,000. He said to me, “book the rest up to Esanda”. Luckily, we had the ANZ Bank, Esanda’s Agent, in town, so I went down to the bank to fix up the finance, the Manager said he couldn’t help without authority from head office in Melbourne. The day was moving on, we rang Melbourne office, the Manager had left for home, we got his home number and rang. His wife answered and said he was in the bath! I pleaded with her to take the phone to the bath and she did. I spoke to him who said he would vouch for anything Mr Bullen wanted; he was a very good client. What a relief!
We then had to start proceedings to swap the Lions and cage onto the new truck.
I had two workers in the workshop, it was near knockoff time, they agreed to work on to get the job done. They started immediately. The Lions were a problem as they had to be removed from the cage, so we helped the circus staff to tag them and tied them up in the caravan park while the switch of the cage was done. This took till late in the evening while the circus was performing to the towns people, this included Pam and I. We took our two little boys along with free tickets provided by Mr Bullen. Pam wasn’t keen about going but the boys were all for it, although when we went into the tent we were confronted by a big pet Python snake. Pam was worried he would get one of the boys, but he didn’t!!!
The workers got the cage onto the new truck with three Lions inside, so the circus left at dawn the next day to the next town, the money came through from Esanda. We repaired the traded Dodge and sold it, so we lived to survive another day.
