Rod Jackson has just reopened his menswear store Woodhouse in new premises on Keen Street. He took some time to talk to Sara Browne about football, fashion and family and how life has woven them together for him over the decades that led him Lismore.

My father was in local government administration and that field of endeavour requires moving around for promotions. You might be at a given level in one place and there’s a job at a higher grade in another place so you apply for it, get it and so that’s the way you progress until you get to the top of local government. He did the necessary study and was able to be a town clerk and a shire clerk. What that meant was we moved around.

I was born in North Sydney at the Mater and his first job was at Campbelltown council, back in the days when Campbelltown was a separate town. From there to Inverell, from Inverell to Narrabri – where I started school. I did primary school there with the Sisters of Mercy. I still communicate with the nun that taught me sixth class. She’s 94, she lives in Tamworth now, I went to see her last year.

I finished primary school there and was starting to become a bit objectionable around the house. My father thought I should probably go somewhere where there was superior education so he applied for a position in Goulburn.

We moved to Goulburn and I was placed in the hands of the Christian Brothers. They strapped me into line, it was pretty rugged. I did my secondary schooling there. I have two sisters – one two years older and the other a year younger.

My mum never worked. She in fact died when I was 14. She wasn’t terribly unwell, she suffered with angina which today they give you a tablet for. Back then it was a complication and she ended up having a heart attack and died at 40. Way too young. It was just me and my dad and sisters and I basically ran my own race from then.

I was heavily involved in sport, my love was athletics from a very young age. If you can run, that shows, so I competed in athletics at a state level through the age groups. My family was supportive of that. It probably represented sacrifice for my sisters which may have brought a level of resentment. That’s the way life went. I played all sports reasonably well enough. Rugby union was played at school. I played and made it into the college’s first 15 in year 9 which was a bit unusual. So, I did that and continued with my athletics, didn’t do much school work.

I guess the dream was to continue to improve to the point that I could be as good as I could be. My main event was long jump. I jumped a little over 7.3 metres as a 16-year-old which is pretty damn good. As a sprinter, I was fast but for a short distance. I’m not a big bloke so the 16-year-olds that I could lead for half of a 100-metre race finished over the top of me every time. I would make finals but I wasn’t the best.

They used to have a three-way competition between Victoria, NSW and QLD. That was considered the Australian Championships for under-17s because there was no Australia-wide competition. Any kid that was any good that lived in Perth or South Australia, their family got them to one of the eastern states so they could compete.

It ended quite abruptly because I finished school in 1969 and actually went to Canberra to go to university part-time.

The Commonwealth public service in those days gave you time off to study so I joined the Department of Interior I think it was called. I had already started at university when the Canterbury Bankstown Football Club proposed that I come down and try out. So, I got six weeks' leave without pay from the public service and went down and they signed me to an education scholarship.

They were the first rugby league club in Sydney to go down that path and I was the second boy they put in that position. I had to study and train at the same time. I studied accounting but in that first year of football I had a couple of injuries that meant that I didn’t play a lot. My deal with them was quite dependent on playing. Match payments in those days in first-grade football, for most people, were $200 if you won, $50 if you lost, nothing if you didn’t play.

That wasn’t the only income, you had another income stream but $200 in 1970 was a lot of money. I probably missed half the season with injury and I wasn’t applying myself to my studies very well. It was a lot of pressure, particularly because the bargain was coming to Sydney.

My options were to live with my old school mates and that was always a bun fight, constant partying and carrying on and I was trying to do things that didn’t really allow for that. I didn’t mind visiting them but to live with them and eat crap food and all that, it wasn’t really for me. So I took the option of trying to live on my own and that was too lonely. I boarded briefly with a couple of different old ladies and then you felt you had to consider what suited them all the time so none of it was much good.

At the end of that year, I confronted the officialdom of the club and said I wanted to go off the education scholarship and have a real football contract with a decent amount of money, so they obliged. They proposed that they send me to England to play the off-season with an English club for experience because I’d never played rugby league.

My first game of rugby league was playing in first grade in Sydney. They chose me because I could run fast. These clubs, even back then, had scouts about, and when I played union at school, I also played for the Goulburn first grade union side and in those days that was a part of the Canberra competition which was very strong. I was noticed in that because I was so young.

I went to England for the season. I enjoyed it …too much. I played for Hull Kingston Rovers, a strong club. They still compete in the major league over there. Their coach at the time was the England coach, their club captain was the captain of England so it was good experience.

Miserably cold to play football. I played football on Christmas Eve in the snow. I was the only Australian in the team. It was a good experience in many ways, in other ways it was as slightly wasted experience. I was a young bloke that probably could have taken the opportunity to see a lot more than I did. In fact, it was like I was in a town that might have been down the road from Goulburn. I just slotted in. I stayed at a pub owned by the club manager, I stayed with him and his family, in Hull, a fishing port on the northeast coast of England.

When I came back I played first-grade football for most of the next season for Canterbury so I effectively had three seasons in one year. The injury that plagued me in the first season was a hamstring. I kept going back too soon and I’d tear it again. I won’t bore you with the treatment methods but they managed to get me right so I was pretty good from there. I had injuries but nothing that any other footballer doesn’t get from time to time. You end up out for a week or two.

I played for Canterbury for three years. I wouldn’t say I loved it. When I was doing it, it’s like you’re in a bubble. You’re attached to a football club, you do what they tell you to do, you turn up and do your training, you do your extra training. It’s something to belong to and you’re in that circle and you’re important in that circle so you think you’re important to everybody but in fact, you’re only important in that bubble.

When I went across to Manly and played the next six years there, I couldn’t go to the Lismore Square equivalent – Warringah Mall – without talking to people because I was recognised. A lot of people are interested in rugby league and people on the peninsula automatically support Manly. I put them in the bubble so you live your life thinking you’re important and you get a false sense of what the world is all about I guess. I realised this later.

I started so young, even by todays standards, I was as young as anybody that ever plays. There’s a young bloke who played for the Roosters last year who was still at school, I think he was 18. He had to get a special clearance to play because they don’t let kids do it easily. They were a bit more lenient back in my day. If you were good enough, you were old enough.

My first daughter was born in February and I had just turned 20 in the November before. In my adolescence in Goulburn, there were a lot of schools and boarding schools. Ours being the main boy’s college in town, had associations with all the different girls’ schools in town and you ended up with a girlfriend at every port, including a local girl.

My local girlfriend was a couple of years older than me and she finished school and went to America while I was still at school. She was there for a couple of years, her mother died and she came back to Australia. By then I was already in Sydney, I’d just come back from England. She moved from Goulburn to Sydney to be with me, whether I liked it or not.

It took me five months to step up to the plate and marry her but I did so in October before I turned 20. It was a tumultuous few years. She divorced me when my daughter was 4 and went back to America and took our child with her. It was difficult indeed.

She was away for a couple of years and eventually, she came back and I was foolish enough to give it another go. I say foolish enough because my reasons were not sound. I thought I could sacrifice myself to be with my daughter which was unrealistic. We had another child, we have two daughters together.

After a total of 10 years, I had to go. That created a lot of ill feeling. I didn’t get to see my daughters anywhere near as much as I wanted to. My daughters both still live in Sydney. I have a strong relationship with both of them.

I had already gotten into the clothing industry before I finished football. I followed in my father’s footsteps and got into local government when I came across to Manly. There’s a famous man in rugby league that ran the Manly football club for many years called Ken Arthurson. He was the head honcho at the Australian Rugby League as well. He’s probably considered the best administrator that the game has had.

When he signed me up he said ‘what do you do for a living?’ and I said ‘I’m a half-baked accountant. I’ve done some study but I haven’t finished it. I’ve been working in a clerical capacity.’ I told him my father was in local government and he said his brother-in-law was the mayor of Manly and I said my old man knows Cecil Menzies the town clerk – he said he could get me a job there.

I worked at Manly council while I was playing. Back then it wasn’t fully professional. We trained as a team three times a week and you did extra sneaky training if you wanted to be as good as you could be. I probably earned as much out of football annually as I did in the job I was in. That let you progress financially quite rapidly. It was a sizeable income for a young bloke.

What I found in local government was that everybody wants to know a footballer, especially down there. I worked there for a couple of years and I applied for a position that was six grades above the level I was at, at Waverley Council over in the eastern suburbs. I went to the interview and all they wanted to do was talk about football and then employed me.

Crossing the Harbour Bridge every day and getting out to Waverley was a nightmare. I lived at Harbord at the time which is just above Manly. I wasn’t ever going to be there for long. I applied for a grade 12 position, it was as high as you could go in that structure back at Warringah Shire, and was given that job.

For five of the six years I played with Manly I was in local government. Towards the end of my time there, they signed on a couple of footballers from the Roosters. One of them was a front rower named Ian Baker. He and I got on quite well. I was quiet and reserved and he was the life of everything and half mad. He got injured, he did the medial ligaments in one of his knees and had to have surgery and while he was in hospital, the old lady that babysat his kids bought him a lottery ticket and he won the lottery.

What I didn’t mention is that he was working as a sales rep for a shirt company in Sydney and so he bought the company. Then he tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to run it for him. I was keen to get a foot into the clothing industry but I had no idea how I would ever do that though I was very keen on clothes. Much to my father’s horror, I left local government to work for a shirt manufacturing company.

Within a year, they realised I had some flair for what it was all about. I was making trips to America to buy fabrics and running production. Back in those days, there was still clothing manufacture in Australia so they used a variety of factories, Sydney based mostly. I got to know all those connections and basically did the best I could for this bloke.

In the time that I was involved with him, we’d opened a shop in Oxford Street, Bondi Junction. So when I wanted out – It was his business so it was pretty serious for him – I said you find somebody, I’ll teach them the ropes if I can have that shop. So that’s what I did. That was the start of a business called Oxford Shop which still exists. They have at least 20 stores Australia-wide, they’re in Westfield centres.

In 1976 I was an integral part of the team, we won the competition. I had another injury, a groin issue, and I couldn’t get over it. By the end of that season, I was having five pain-killing injections before a game, along my stomach and down into my leg, just to get out there on the field. When you’re main asset is your speed, it's pretty limiting to have an injury like that.

Anyway, in '77 I was determined to only play when I was fit to do so and that meant that I only played half the year. Back then, the rules of the game were that each club could only have 11 imported players on their books and anybody else would be a local junior. It was a way to force to foster junior league and foster the game. I’d never played any local junior league – I had only played union – so to have one of the very valuable 11 import player positions occupied by someone who could only offer half a season – they canned me, so that’s how I finished that.

From there, my father’s brother – quite a successful businessman – purchased the Camden Inn Hotel – which was an iconic hotel in the middle of Camden. It wasn’t a drinking hole for the rugby league fraternity and he contacted me and said ‘they’re looking for me a captain/coach out here, what do you think? It would do my pub the world of good because you’d drag that mob down there.’

You might remember John Fahey the premier. He was the admin man at Camden, he actually played a bit of rugby league for Canterbury when he was younger. Anyway, I went to see him and asked for a lot more money than I expected to get and got it so I captained/coached them for that season. We won the competition. It was the first time they’d won since the year I was born. It was known as group six and it took in Campbelltown, Mossvale, Bowral and places like that.

You haven’t played rugby league til you’ve played in the bush because all they want is an excuse for a fight. You come from Sydney back to the country and they want to show you you’re not as good as you think you are. They want to belt the shit out of you.

I did find a way to have a positive impact. I played my football on the wing, you don’t learn a lot out there – give me the ball and let me run. The licensee of my uncle’s pub had been a selector at Canterbury and knew his football well. It was almost comical, I’d come off the field at halftime and he’d rush up and tell me to do this, this and this. I wasn’t completely ignorant but he helped me a lot.

Anyway, we won the competition and it was a torrid game. The score was 5-2. So that’s one try and two kicks for the whole game. I scored the try in the first seven minutes so for the next 70-something minutes we just belted each other and no more score. Remarkable. That doesn’t happen very often.

My company was incorporated in 1978 and I’ve only been up here for six years so I had 38 years of retailing in Sydney.

Retail has changed enormously in that time. Back when I started and for a long time, small, independent operators were considered exclusive and people loved to shop at boutique-type places and that’s what my business always represented. I did get side-tracked with what I learnt in production and I was able to put into place what they call cut, make and trim. I would buy fabric and I had my own labels, different labels for casual wear and dressier stuff.

I would get my product produced for the manufactured cost and I bought the fabric direct. You put that together and its not a wholesale price, there is no wholesale margin as when you buy a known brand. Because it was my label, I was able to put my own price on it. In addition to that, I was one of half a dozen blokes who were probably the first in this country to venture in a serious way to Europe and seek out up-and-coming brands and buy stock at the end of their season which is the beginning of our season.

I married a second time and had a son. He’s now 35, he lives in Maclean. When I separated from his mother, I met someone else who worked for the government in corrections. Our sons had gone to the same school. She was in a fairly high-pressure job in the city in Sydney. She had to trek in and out of town every day on public transport and she wanted out of the city so she applied for a job in Lismore. She came up here around 2010.

I think I had four shops at the time she came north and I diminished that and got it down to one big shop in Mosman. I finally started to change the balance and spent more time up here than down there. Eventually, I just got sick of having to get on the plane and go back so I decided to open up here and do a bit of a trial and see what it was like. I opened on Molesworth Street near the corner of Woodlark Street, a neat little shop, in about 2015. I took that shop for six months to give Lismore a test. I knew nothing about floods. I thought I could go bigger. I took the shop on Woodlark next to the bra shop and that’s where I experienced the 2017 flood.

I wound it up in Sydney and we traded well there til the flood hit and then we traded well again after the flood. In that 2017 flood we had less than a metre in the shop, I had lifted everything up. It was still horrific but I didn’t have a choice but to keep trading.

Last year, that property changed hands and the lady that bought it had plans for it so I put the work into moving across the road (Keen Street), a reduction in size which I thought would force me to wind it all up. Within a month, the flood came so here I am in a big shop again. This is my last round. I’ve signed a lease here for 18 months with an option to extend. I’m going to put quite a deal of time into running it myself. This will be it before I retire.

I might build some furniture between golf games. It’s a tough game. There is a mental toughness required. I’ve figured out what a good golf swing is but in my physical state as a 70-year-old, I can’t exactly implement it as well as I’d like. So, you’ve got the physical struggle and the mental side of it is something else again. The best golfers in the world still have bogeys, which is one over par, but they get into trouble and they have a one over par. Blokes like me get into trouble and I can have a two or three over par because I’m trying the miracle shot to make up for it.

It is a social thing as well. I can do without it a lot of the time but there’s blokes at the club who love their football and they know I’m an ex so I cop some comments. What’s that saying…it’s better to be looked over than overlooked?

I’m happy enough here. It’s a long way from going to Europe three times a year for many years, going to the biggest clothing fairs in the world. The highlight of my week is two games of golf but I’m getting old and that’s the way it goes. I think Lismore is a bit of a hidden treasure.