All photos: David Hill
SITTING above his peers in a seat of power Jim’s white silk and cotton blend shirt with the monogrammed initials discretely embroidered on the breast pocket glows under the neon lights. The folds of the red robe fall elegantly around his body. His rimless spectacles always polished spotless, catch the light as he turns his head. The gold discs of the long chain around his neck clank gently as he moves.
Jim is the number one citizen in his adopted city.
But not everyone is happy.
There are those who don’t like which political fence he sits on. Others have taken offence at his honest opinions and criticism. Some envy his wealth.
Then there are those who will never let him forget he is a newcomer. They show him in so many ways: a glance, a shrug, a power playing downward handshake, an apologetic declining to attend a function. They think he is a pretender and new money living above his station.
But in this egalitarian land of second chances, Jim knows he has earned this right.
1947
Jim enters the world prematurely, his father’s joy. Life is wholesome on the farm as Little Jimmy toddles around after his dad, mimicking his swagger, lisping out the names of animals and copying their calls, perching proudly on his dad’s lap as his idol manoeuvres the tractor around the paddock. There is love in the home.
A bout of polio at the age of three hints to his subconscious that this happiness is a fading illusion - he would have to work hard to achieve.
Little Jimmy is six. Dad’s gone away again. Jimmy is hungry. There was only cabbage for tea. Mum broods over paperwork at the kitchen table. Jimmy creeps off to bed.
There’s a distant rumbling sound as a ute bounces up the long dusty driveway. Stones flick against the side of the fibro house as the jalopy skids to a halt. Jimmy sneaks down the hallway and peaks through the kitchen door quivering with excitement. Dad’s home.
The front door bangs shut. Dad’s hungry. Where’s his dinner? There is none. How was Mum supposed to know he would come home tonight? There’s no food in the house anyway. Dad didn’t send any money like he promised.
Smack.
How dare she speak to him like that.
Thump.
He’s been away earning money and this is all the gratitude he gets.
Crash.
He’ll give her something to complain about.
Jimmy is paralysed with terror as Dad’s face distorts in rage and spit flies from his mouth as he roars curses at Mum.
It is morning. Dad calls Jimmy to him and ruffles his hair. Mum and Dad were just having a talk last night. Everything’s fine. They will camp out in the long paddock tonight, just the two of them. There will be a campfire, the dogs and the stars. Jimmy is a good boy, a real little man. 98 Jimmy swells with pride at Dad’s love.
``I had this lovely sheep dog I had raised as a pup. It was this magnificent dog and he used to work with me when I put the sheep out onto the fire chain. One day my father met a drover going by and sold him. He told me he’d lent it to him, but he’d sold him. He later told me the dog had died.’’
Jimmy’s trust is crushed for the first time.
Dad’s gone again. He promised it would only be for a few days. It’s been weeks.
Little Jimmy is now the man of the house helping Mum tend the sheep and feed the pigs and the chooks. He’s doing everything Dad is supposed to do.
There’s no money. In town they talk in whispers behind their hands and give knowing looks at Mum’s back. Jimmy sees them, but Mum keeps walking, back straight as an arrow.
The old ute pulls up at the house. Jimmy and his three sisters are in bed before the battered flyscreen door swings shut. They cower together trying not to hear, hoping the frayed grey blanket will block out the noise.
Jimmy can’t stand it anymore. Dad is whaling into Mum again. She’d stirred him up of course with her questions. Where had he been? Who was he with? Why didn’t he send any money? He’d been drinking again, hadn’t he?
Jimmy doesn’t care much who is at fault. He just wants peace. He wants Mum and Dad to love each other again. He wants it back like it used to be.
He runs into the kitchen and tells them to stop. Neither of them hears. He tugs at Dad’s arm. He pulls at Mum’s dress. They don’t even know he’s there.
Riled with fury and frustration, Jimmy grabs a saucepan and hits Dad in the head. Dad doesn’t feel a thing.
Jimmy slinks off to bed. The screen door slams. Pebbles flick up at the house. Silence. Dad’s gone but the fear and vulnerability remains. What if he didn’t come back? What would become of them? If Dad stayed off the grog he would love Mum again. He wouldn’t hit her. He wouldn’t hit the kids.
``When he wasn’t drunk he was a great father. There’s no doubt that he loved us. I wanted to see it worked out because I just wanted to see my Mum and Dad happy.’'
Jimmy is nine years old. Dad hasn’t come back this time. He’s taken off with a younger woman, wasting the good money he earned as a successful trotting horse breeder – wine, women and song, as they say.
Money is short. Things start disappearing from the farm, sold to put food on the table.
The teenage farm labourer who helps on the farm becomes a father-figure to Jimmy.
``We’d take four or five hundred sheep down to the long paddock which backed onto our farm. It was really a track which drovers would go into and camp at night as they were moving sheep from one farm to the next for the free feed that was on the sides of the roads. We’d go out there on weekends and you’d be camping of a night-time with your dogs on each side of the flock of sheep.
``One of the local Aboriginal boys used to come out sometimes with us. He was my friend – we went to the same school. He was taken away after his father murdered his mother.’’
The young bloke leaves Jimmy too. He goes on holiday one day, meets a girl, gets married and becomes an opal miner.
It’s been two years now, scraping by on the goodwill of others. The baker gives them bread, the butcher gives them meat sometimes. They never ask for money.
Eventually the family is tossed off the farm. Bedraggled and worn out, in 1959 they move in with Jimmy’s grandparents at another NSW central west town for six months.
Jimmy learns a lot about perserverence and courage from Grandfather. The old man lost his legs at eighteen when he was a shunter on the railways. He gets around on wooden legs now and works at the railways parcels office with Ben Chifley who later becomes the Prime Minister. Grandfather will even work on one of Chifley’s election campaigns.
Life is miserable.
``I couldn’t read or write very well. They’d say I was just a dummy. I didn’t have many social skills. It was a very unhappy time. In some ways I was dumb because I was uneducated and didn’t understand things and just followed along. I didn’t think far enough ahead. It wasn’t that I didn’t have the opportunity to learn, I just couldn’t grasp some of the things they were saying at school. Some people would say I was dyslexic. It might be true, I don’t know.’’
Grandfather dies and the family follows his widow to western Sydney later in 1959. At first they squash into a caravan in Grandmother’s driveway
Then comes the constant moving from one rental property to another. Sometimes they are forced to carry their meagre belongings down the street, their miserable poverty laid bare for all to see.
School is the ultimate torture again for Little Jimmy. Again he is the country dummy. Again he is picked on.
``I was always in trouble but never actually caused it, so I was sent to the principal’s office and got the cane every day for the first five or six months I was at school.’’
One teacher, a father-of-six himself, does notice what is going on. For the first time, someone takes time to talk to Little Jimmy, to find out what his problems are and offer help. Jimmy responds well to the extra lessons and soon his reading, writing and spelling pick up.
But Jimmy doesn’t leave his fate in the hands of others. At age eleven, he crawls out of bed in the dark to start his newspaper delivery run at 4.30am each day before school and picks it up again each afternoon. He sells papers at the railway station along with cigarettes, matches and lollies. By age seventeen he is driving himself round in the old newspaper delivery ute.
By his Intermediate year, he is working at the newsagency, washing cars and vacuuming a mortuary. He tows a lawnmower behind his bike to three or four mowing jobs. He has no designs on wealth and status. Little Jimmy is just desperate to put money on his mother’s table.
``I don’t feel sorry about that, having to get up early and work. I actually enjoyed it. I think my mother felt guilty that I was earning money and bringing it home. She never asked for it, I’d just put it on the table. If the girls wanted something, the money was there. It was a need. You just have to do it.’’
Now known as Jim or Jimbo, he shows business nous early, finding ways around obstacles, organising others to sell papers for him, forming solid relationships in the hotels, always remaining honest in his dealings.
His standards do not go unnoticed and he is offered an apprenticeship at several butcher shops in the main street.
``I figured I wasn’t going to be a brain surgeon. I didn’t have any great ambitions of what I was going to do in life. Education-wise, I just wasn’t interested. I didn’t understand it and I thought it was always better to run away from things you didn’t understand and just concentrate on the things you could do. And that was talking to people, dealing with people, keeping to my work.
``I had wagged a lot of school. I never used to write books at school because I couldn’t read my own writing, so I used to borrow books from the best kids in the class and pay my sisters to write the pages up (tuppence a page). I had lovely books. To pass the exams I used to just read them over and over and over the night before and I got through the exams on short-term memory.
``When I was about six months into the Intermediate year the deputy headmaster started picking on me for missing so much school and he spoke to my mother. He had a talk to me and the fact that I laughed at him irritated him and he punched me in the stomach and winded me. It doesn’t mean much these days but it is all part of making you who you are. I keeled over winded and I walked out of school and didn’t go back for a week. I would have been fifteen or sixteen. I eventually went back to the school and the deputy headmaster spoke to me and apologised and he said: `I wanted to do so much for you, but you didn’t let me’.’’
Jim has no respect for people in authority. Not since he saw what the police did in town. He would watch as they investigated yet another break-in at a shop near the newsagency and reward themselves with items from the shelves.
``If you come from the background I did, you’ve got no faith in anything. Who do you trust? You haven’t got a balance to it. You start to make your own sense of justice and your own ideas and you start to go within.’’
Jim’s distrust makes him determined to be different, to work hard and be honest in his dealings with others. It pays off.
A local butcher notices how hard he works mowing the steep riverbank; how he drags the heavy mower up the embankment with a rope then lets it down slowly so that every patch of grass is neatly trimmed no matter how blisteringly hot or freezing cold the weather. Young Jim wrestles with that mower while other blokes his age play in the water below, reminding him of the childhood he is missing.
``The butcher who’d I’d sold papers to for years came over and said: `Want another job? I’ve been watching you work here, and the blokes up the shop tell me you’re a good bloke. Are you interested in being a butcher?’ and I said: `Yeah, alright’.
``Every butcher I saw was happy, they were working in the cool and it wasn’t dirty and dusty. I didn’t like the heat. I wanted to be happy, and they also owned a car and a house. They had everything I wanted.’’
Jim is 16. He meets a fella who works at the railway station where Jim sells papers. This bloke also does up second-hand washing machines for a department store. Jimbo helps him on weekends and the two became lifelong friends.
In the early 1960s Jim also works for another mate installing television antennas.
Butchering is going pretty well too. The drop in pay at the start of his butchering career teaches him a lesson: short-term pain equals long-term gain.
In his quest to get ahead, Jim also knows that nothing beats sheer hard work.
``I’d just have my lunch and get back to work. I was still driving the paper truck and some days I’d get to work fifteen minutes late so I’d have to compensate. The funny thing is, the other staff started having half-hour lunches too. You didn’t get overtime in those days, you just had to do the work. You were lucky to have a job.’’
About eighteen months into his apprenticeship, he is asked to manage the owner’s other shop for a few weeks while the manager there is away.
``I rang all the people I knew and said: `You’d better come and buy all your meat from me’. And they did. Business went up. About three weeks later the real boss came back and I got sent back. Business went back down again and the boss said: `I think you should go there permanently’.’’
Jim is just 19.
``By that time, I was getting a bit of a boost out of building up a business so I went back to the leagues club which I had sold newspapers to and told them: `You need a new butcher’.’’ The catering manager agrees.
But butchers aren’t highly thought of socially, even though their relationship with customers is as trusting as a hairdresser or beautician and Jim remains on the social fringes.
He doesn’t go out much. He doesn’t fit in at church youth groups filled with middle-class kids with girlfriends and boyfriends, good clothes and everything else Jim doesn’t have. So he climbs into his Morris Minor car and heads west to Parkes in the NSW central west a lot on weekends.
There, he is a city slicker and all his awestruck mates pepper him with questions about life in the big smoke. Jim is having a ball: here he is, a farmer’s son making good money, in control of his life with his mates looking up to him.
Jim’s mother is very ill. She’s pining the love who abandoned her so many years ago. She’s never gone out with another man. She has kept her marriage vows.
Jim tracks him down in Melbourne, flies him up to Sydney and takes him to see Mum. Jim and Dad stay in touch, but the relationship remains strained.
Back home in western Sydney, aged twenty, Jim joins the local fire brigade as an on-call firefighter getting paid by the hour and call-out fees. It’s quite normal for firefighters to congregate at the pub, have a few drinks and watch the races. The other blokes give Jim a good-natured ribbing because he doesn’t drink.
One Saturday afternoon they get into the fire tender and end up putting it on its side. The boss knows Jim doesn’t drink and makes him the driver. It’s also his job to run the pumps and make sure none of the equipment is lost.
Jim is at work in the butcher shop. He glances out the window into the street and spots a perky girl walking down the street. It takes him a long time to work up the courage to ask out the ``new little hairdresser’’ from the top of the street. She’s fifteen, he’s twenty.
His pockets well lined after striking a deal with his boss (he gets ten per cent of the gross profit on top of his wage), in 1969 Jim buys two blocks of land, putting a $10 deposit on each and paying them off at $2 a week.
``I went home and told my mother what I’d done and she said: `You’ve got to have a life, Jim. That’s silly’. I told her I’d already done it. I paid that land off for a number of years and then I was taking my future wife out with some friends and they were looking at exhibition houses and I thought: `I like this house’ and so did she.
``I was probably trying to impress her, so I went in and signed up for one. I was twenty one. In those days you could buy a Jack Redden house in South Penrith in Sydney’s western suburbs for $10,500 in fibro and $11,500 in brick.’’
The house Jim chooses costs $12,500.
Life is good. Money is plentiful. People start looking at him with a new respect in the street.
The formerly sleepy country town of Penrith is also changing and Jim is asked to play a small part in its gradual emergence as a bustling city. In 1971, the first full-blown shopping plaza is about to open and Jim is offered the job of managing the Spanish-themed butcher shop in the glitzy shopping palace, complete with a large staff including women shop assistants, a novelty.
``I was only twenty or twenty-one, still bluffing my way through life in many ways.’’
Jim is in his twenties when his father dies.
``I was only about seventy kilometres from where he was. I was in Melbourne. But I just didn’t want to see him. I didn’t want to put myself through the rubbish for a few hours, so I didn’t. After I returned home, the phone call came through that he had died. He’d been asked to leave the home he was living in. His birthday was on December 9 and he moved into a single-roomed home for pensioners on the fourteenth and it was just too much for him and he decided to take his life.’’
Jim drives Mum and his sisters down to the funeral. He is asked to give the eulogy, but what can he say? Should he spill out his pain and his anger to these people who don’t know? Should he tell Dad’s new family the truth?
``I said he lived two significant lives. I told some of his shortcomings and that he was a likeable guy, and that fact was evidenced by the number of people who went to his funeral service. He’d lived at the top of society and at the bottom of society and seemed to have been able to live comfortably in each of them.
``It damages you in some ways: looking at father/son movies I get a bit teary. There were times when I thought I needed a father: it gives you a history; it gives you a place; its support if you’re going through a rough time. I guess it’s something I’ve never come to terms with, as much as I’ve tried. It’s probably not important anymore.’’
Jim buries Dad deep in his mind and forges ahead with plans of success. In 1972, he buys two shops for $13,000 each.
``People thought I was mad. My mother said again: `Why have you got yourself into all that debt?’ She was the opposite because she had given her whole life to us and just worked, so she wanted us to live a different life. But that wasn’t going to supply what I wanted to do in life.’’
The loan doesn’t give Jim any spare money, but he knows it will be worth it in the long-run. His plan is to have the shops paid off while he and his wife are young. Once they are paid off, rent and other income from the shops will be like his wife working for the rest of her life. It is a black mark against a man if your wife works and Jim is desperate for acceptance, to be as good as other respectable men.
``When we’d paid them off I thought: `I’ve never had a flash car’, so I said to my wife: `Those two shops are going to pay for our cars for the rest of our lives’. They still do.
``I tell people the secret to becoming wealthy is to buy when young and live long enough and to buy something that’s going to give you an income every week.’’
The couple marry in 1970. Jim is twenty-three. Their first child is born in 1973 and their second in 1976, a severely autistic daughter who doctors warn will never walk or talk. A son arrives in 1979.
They reach out to friends for support. Most of them turn away fearful their children will contract the condition.
Jim goes to church. He prays. He tries to make a deal with God: ``Lord, make her normal and we’ll honour you for the rest of our lives’’. God has other plans.
``There were times when we’d think: `One of us will take her and the other one can stay here and raise the other two and give them a fair go, a chance of being successful in this world. She has been our biggest challenge and our biggest blessing.
``For the first seven years of her life we didn’t get a good full night’s sleep together – one of us would have to sleep beside her on the floor.’’
Jim knows he has to make sacrifices, to change, to save his family. He gives up butchering and buys a taxi. He soon discovers that being his own boss and running the cab twenty-two hours straight three days a week offers him more flexible hours for much the same money. He also services and repairs them, and has a sideline business fixing gearboxes. Jim buys a second cab and employs drivers to run them twenty-four hours a day.
The family is back on track.
About 1980, Jim buys a block of land. Then he moves a house onto it, sets it on piers and connects it to services. Before long, another business venture takes off.
``I decided then that I wanted to make a fair bit of money to give my daughter a life and not hold the other two back. But there was no great plan to become a millionaire. That was never the goal. The goal was to get over the day’s problems, short-term issues, to have my eyes firmly fixed on the next ten years.’’
The couple sells their suburban home. They know their autistic daughter will be better off on land with some chooks and other animals to care for, somewhere she can learn and grow to accommodate her special needs.
The sale of the house pays for a five acre block on the other side of town. It doesn’t cover the cost of building a house.
But Jim has not turned from the faith he had as farm boy traipsing through the scrub and the dirt to Scouts alone at night, praying that God would deliver him from snakes and spiders.
He asks God to again provide for his family. God hears his prayer. Bank interest rates plummet below inflation. Jim’s shops become more valuable and his income from their rent rises. He builds a house.
1991
Jim’s eldest daughter is studying for her HSC. She will be the highest educated person in the family. Jim can’t have that. He enrols in a university degree course and learns how to buy and sell property, basic law and economics.
``When I was finished I was brain dead.’’ But he has a real estate agent’s license. And he is the highest educated person in the family.
Always on the lookout for another business opportunity, Jim starts a skip bin hire service. He begins by delivering his forty bins to friends and people he knows around town and taking their rubbish away for free. Before long, he is inundated with paying clients. He never has one bad day.
1994
Jim is knocked for six.
He is asked to run for the Liberal Party in the State seat of Penrith. Despite being totally unprepared and with no previous political aspirations Jim soon begins to believe he can make a difference to the area for its people.
He is so sure of winning he sells the skip bin business to his employees.
He loses to the long-time Labor incumbent by seven hundred and fifty votes.
``I was very well known in church circles, by the man on the street and the people I did business with, but not in what I call the cocktail set. They’d say: `Here comes another try-hard’. I definitely learnt a lot of lessons.’’
Jim decides to put his real estate license to use.
``I walked into a shopping centre and saw one empty shop there and went and spoke to the centre manager, but he didn’t think real estate belonged in a shopping centre. I then went and spoke to other tenants in the centre and they all said I would bring more business in, so centre management let me have the shop.’’
Jim, his eldest daughter and his bank manager’s son buy a franchise in a major real estate agency and gather industry experience before setting up their own real estate agency chain under Jim’s name. In 2010 there are eight offices employing more than one hundred people. But the business isn’t just about real estate: it also includes cafes, printing, gift shops and an art gallery.
A percentage of the business’ gross profit goes into the community to support other people to ``give them a better life and opportunities to develop the natural talents every person has’’.
Today, Jim is well respected by many in his community, has been a Penrith Councillor for fourteen years and mayor for a term. He has many successful business ventures and positions and is a director and shareholder of a local newspaper.
``I remember looking at everything I’ve started to do and thinking: `Why are you doing this? What are you doing this for?’ but you just keep going and it all works out.’’
Jim is equally renowned for his opinions and is no stranger to controversy because of his often unpopular views. ``I don’t worry about the consequences. I say what I believe needs to be said. I do think about what I say in business, though, because I know my kids have to take it over.’’
In his private spaces the reminders of the past are there: of his fears, his loss, his pain. The small dog he dotes on; the figurine of a businessman, briefcase in one hand, scales of justice in the other; the painting of his mother; toys – aeroplanes and cars – set up on his desk. They all mean something. There’s a painting of an Aboriginal boy grinning cheekily from the frame and a copy of the book I Am Not My Father on the bookshelf in his study which he gives away to other damaged men.
His Achievements
``I was born into a farming family where all around me were problems. If it didn’t rain there were no crops and no food. No crops, unhappy house. I can remember being hungry lots of times. Something goes wrong, Dad goes to the pub and gets drunk and comes home and gives us a bit of a bashing. And so it became a life of seeing obstacles and getting through the day. You learn to make choices and to solve problems.
``The only goal I ever had was to be happy. I’m proudest of my family, my kids and my wife. I’m not embarrassed about those sorts of things, just emotional.’’
While Jim was cheated out of a relationship with his own father, he tried very hard to be a good father himself. ``After all, not everyone has a father anyway. It’s `Our father who art in Heaven’.’’
In 1989 he was awarded an Order of Australia Medal for Service to the Community of the Penrith District, especially through youth welfare and service organisations and local government. In 2007 at the Champion of the West Awards, he received an award for Outstanding Contribution to Western Sydney.
He is a fellow of the Australian Institute of Management. Jim is involved in a plethora of community, church and charitable organisations.
He is renowned for his generosity. Whether it is refusing payment from a guest for a cup of coffee at one of his cafes, referring work to a mate’s young bloke starting out or setting up family, Jim revels in sharing his success. It goes along with one of his mantras: ``A man of words and not of deeds is like a garden full of weeds. You don’t love money, you love what money can do.’’
His words to you
``Everybody’s got a hang-up. I thought I had a hard life, but then I learned there were people out there much worse off than us. We’ve all got different challenges and fears and you’ve got to learn how to overcome them.
``As a human being you have an obligation to put hope into everything that comes past your door. You’ve got to realise there is light at the end of the tunnel.
``Everything goes back to those first few years in your life: you remember the way you were treated, and you say to yourself `I’m not going to treat my kids like that, I’m not going to treat anybody like that’.
``You see people with a bit of wealth and they measure themselves on their worth, and that’s the worst thing you can measure yourself on. Those people, when they lose it, they lose everything.
``I’d start again. It wouldn’t matter to us at all. If I lost all my wealth I’d have lost nothing. I’ve enjoyed this sort of life, I enjoyed life when I had nothing, I enjoyed selling papers and everything I’ve ever done.
``I look at people when I first meet them as made in the image of God. You don’t look at the baggage that surrounds them, you look at their soul because that’s what they revert back to in hard times.’’
Jim Aitken passed away in September 2024, aged 76.
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