From Scotland to Fiji via Canberra and Lismore, North Coast Community Housing (NCCH) CEO John McKenna tells his tale of work, housing and love to Sara Browne.

I was born in a suburb called Maryhill in Glasgow, Scotland. We lived on the third floor of a tenement - Mum, Dad, two brothers and a sister, I’m second in line of the four. In 1962 we moved from inner Glasgow to a new housing estate on the outskirts called Castlemilk which bordered the country, we had farms at the end of the road which was great but it then became the largest housing estate in Europe. It was an area of concentrated disadvantaged.

We emigrated in 1964, our family and my Mum’s mum, her sister had emigrated to Australia in 62. We joined them and lived in Balmain, Sydney, for four years and then moved out to Mt Druitt in Western Sydney to a housing estate there. My Mum and Dad had pretty much lived all their lives in public housing. My Dad never drove. We had this offer of a brand new family home on the estate so we had family friends drive us out the old western highway to get there.

The only thing my Mum was worried about was the toilet. Back in those days, in the 60s in Sydney, they still had dry toilets. So, you still had the dunny man come to clear the bins. And the only thing my Mum was concerned about was, does it have an inside toilet? We identified that it did so she said that’s it, we’re taking it, no arguments. We had an outside toilet at Balmain but it was sewered. My cousins in Fairfield had a dry toilet.

When we moved into that house there was nothing on the floor, nothing on the windows, the hot water service was in the bathroom so there was no hot water other than over the bath. When we did the washing up, we had to get a bucket and carry hot water from the bathroom to the kitchen.

archive image of Castlemilk Estate, Glasgow, 1958 

When we house someone now – North Coast Community Housing – there’s floor coverings, flyscreens, sometimes window covers, not always. There's just a different expectation. Mum and Dad lived in that house for 30 years.

In Scotland, my Dad worked as a radial driller at the Rolls Royce Engine Factory. It was pretty specialized. When we came here to Sydney there was a job at the Qantas workshops and he would have shoed it in, he had all the skills because Qantas planes used Rolls Royce engines. He got lost and by the time he got there, the guy he was supposed to meet had left for the day. Another guy there said mate, this job is yours, just come back tomorrow. Dad came home and said to my Mum, it’s too far, I’m not going back. Then he worked less than two kilometres away from the Qantas workshop in Mascot in Sydney for nine years. He could have been working at Qantas, we could have been going back overseas with $90 flights.

Dad worked in engineering all his life. My Mum was a cleaner. The last job she had was at Parramatta Hospital and a little while at Mt Druitt Hospital. They were semi-skilled. That was the difference in public housing back in the 60s. It was for working families as well as disadvantaged families. That was why it was a different mix. When I see what’s happening now, public housing is really residualised. It’s really people that are seriously disadvantaged that are the only ones that qualify for it.

My Mum and Dad were working poor. I remember saying to my sister a number of years later, we never realised we were poor because everybody around us was the same, there was no point of reference. When everyone you know is in the same socio-economic place, you don’t know any different. I didn’t get my first bike until I was 15 and I worked a part-time job to get that, stuff like that. We just accepted it.

We went to school at St Mary’s High School. I left school in what is now year 10, fourth form, and became an apprentice electrician with Otis Elevators. I started in January 1971 and I was working part-time at Woolworths at St Mary’s.

I did a Mandy Nolan stand-up comedy thing once a number of years ago and I used this experience as one of my stories. I was just working as a general hand in the Woolworths store, if something happened you got on the mic and made an announcement. Somebody dropped a jar of something at one of the checkouts so I jumped on the microphone and what I meant to say was ‘can we get a mop and bucket to checkout number three’. But what I actually said was, ‘can we get a bop and mucket’. So, I was known as the bop and mucket boy until I left there.

My uncle was working at Firestone Tyres in Auburn as a mechanical fitter. He said they were looking for an electrical apprentice and asked me to come down and apply. I went for an interview and they said yeah, the jobs yours, phone back on Monday and we’ll confirm it. I phoned back on the Monday and he wouldn’t take my phone call. They had given the job to someone else who had a better education than me. My uncle called me on the Thursday and said that kid didn’t like the dirt. You can imagine working in a tyre factory, it’s a very dirty place. I started the next day and that’s where I served my apprenticeship. I was ok with the dirt.

My sister was two years ahead of me. I was kind of the rebel in the family. She was the vice-captain and I was the cheeky little brother. She was the first in the family that went to HSC level. I don’t remember what her plans were but she never went to university. She worked in admin. My younger brother went to teacher’s college. He was in the last intake of teachers that got that really good pension scheme so the bugger retired at 60. My youngest brother got an apprenticeship as a chef and then nearly cut his hand off lifting shelves. Nearly lost his thumb, cut the tendons. He’s worked a number of different roles in sales in his life.

It was kind of my choice to leave school. I wanted to be an electrician but I went to the career advisor. On my report it said, if he applied himself - and that was always the problem - he could do engineering. I said to Mum and Dad, look I could do engineering. They said no, you said you were leaving school so you’re leaving school. No ifs, buts or maybes.

If you got an apprenticeship, you left school. The only people that went on to sixth form were those that wanted to go to university, whereas now that’s a requirement for a trade. One of my teachers put on a report – Mr McKenna reminds me of the world’s fear, he never shuts up. I stayed living at home while I was doing my apprenticeship. I look back at that and think about the wages now. When I started, I was earning 48 cents an hour and within a couple of weeks of starting my wages went up to 52 cents an hour. I think my take-home pay was something like $17 a week. Out of that, I had to pay $2.50 for my apprentice train ticket. I paid Mum and Dad $5 for board and then I got to spend the rest. It was a different world.

I met my wife in 1972. She was the daughter of the president of the local soccer team that I played for. We married in 1976. We bought our first house, paid our first mortgage payment, a month before we got married and moved in. It was a three bedroom, nine and half square brick bungalow in Werrington in Sydney on about an 800 metre square block. It was $26,500. I worked 12 hours a day, 7 days a week for a few months to save the deposit up. We borrowed $20,000. It sounds ridiculous today. I went back and did the numbers a few years ago. As an electrician I was earning about $8500 a year so that cost of the house was three times my salary. You look at it now and it’s ten times the average salary to buy a house so the relativity has gone out of the market.

We lived there for eight years and had our first two kids there. I left Firestone in 78 because I had started my electronic engineering certificate and then worked for the testing laboratories with the Sydney County Council. I got encephalitis over Christmas New Year of 1980. Around the same time, we had a niece that got it, she was very young and suffered with it for 27 years. Another guy in his 50s that was seeing the same doctor, went for his annual checkup, he got it and died seven days later. I was very, very lucky. Somebody up there is looking after John McKenna.

I left the council. I always said that if I became councilised, I’d leave. You get into the rut of just doing the same thing day after day after and you slow down and stop trying to achieve. An opportunity came up with an American construction company called Druveaux . They were looking for a quality assurance inspector. I didn’t really know what a quality assurance inspector did but you had to know the Australian standards and I did so I got that job. I almost doubled my salary.

I did that for a couple of years and then a job came up for an offsite Quality Assurance Inspector for the new Parliament House in Canberra. Applied for that, didn’t get it. But because I’d impressed them, they actually offered me the onsite job. That was life-changing for me and my family. The plan was to go for two years and then go back to Sydney as I had a job there but we decided to stay. We sold our house in Sydney, bought a house in Canberra and even back then, within 18 months, we couldn’t afford to move back to Sydney.

All our families were still in Sydney. My ex-wife was one of 10 kids. When we first moved to Canberra, we’d be up and down the highway every second week or somebody would be coming down to visit us. Back then it was a six to seven-hour drive.

I worked on Parliament House as the electrical inspector. We were in Canberra for 25 years. My name is signed in all different parts of Parliament House, in the Prime Minister’s office, inside the wall. I was one of two people that I know of that actually crawled down inside the southeast leg of the flag mast. They had three conduits running up there to take the power up so I had to climb down to make sure they were all connected. I then switched over to the commissioning team for electrical installation. It was a terrific job.

I had gone as far as I could electrically without going on to do engineering so I thought, do I go to uni to do engineering or management? So, I chose management because I really didn’t want to go back and do the maths. I applied as a mature aged student to the Canberra College of Advanced Education as it was known back then. I don’t know how but I got accepted and enrolled in the Bachelor of Business Administration. I did that for six years. I worked on a number of jobs after the parliament house work ended. I worked on the asbestos removal project as I was doing my degree. We removed asbestos from about 700 houses. I looked after logistics.

When I look at my business career, I’ve managed lots of different businesses, none of which I knew anything about before I went into them. I managed a commercial laundry, turned it around from a $70,000 loss to $110,000 profit in a couple of years. I was unemployed for nine months, couldn’t get a job anywhere. My wife and I had bought the rights to the world’s first coin-operated internet terminals for southern NSW. This was our little entrepreneurial thing. We were involved with the internet back in 1996. We lost an awful lot of money. It started off really well but then it fell over.

I worked for the Spotless organization, managing the ACT housing facility management contract. That was my first taste of working in social housing. We were responsible for the maintenance of 11,500 social housing properties in the ACT. They had a change of contract and I started looking for other work, there was nothing in Canberra. I saw the job for the General Manager here at NCCH. I applied and heard nothing. So, I phoned up and spoke to the recruiter and she said we shortlisted and you weren’t on it. So, I said fine. Went on the job search again. About three weeks later she phoned me back and asked if I was still interested. I was one of three people on the second cut and they offered me the job and I’ve been here ever since. That was 2009.

We had 15 staff and we were managing about 500 properties. We were just at the start of getting the whole of area transfer for the Byron Shire Public Housing portfolio. The fear that the public housing tenants had in being transferred to community housing was that they felt that their tenancies were not as secure. That’s not fact, they’re actually just as secure. One lady in Byron said, “if they try to throw me out, I’ll chain myself to the dunny.” I had been in the job for two hours, but I said that is not where we are heading.

We look after all of our tenants well. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have tenancies that go off the rails. And we make mistakes. Every business makes mistakes.

Now we have 40 staff and almost 1000 properties. I’m in my last year now, I’ve flagged with the board that I’m leaving next year. I’ll be 67 and it’s time to transition out.

I live at Ocean Shores and most people know, that’s part of paradise. We’re very fortunate on the Far North Coast. I’ve not regretted moving here. Unfortunately, my marriage ended. I moved up here as part of retirement planning. Our children started having children in Canberra, my wife was not going to leave.

NCCH Chair Robyn Hordern, Bundjalung Elder Mick Roberts & John at the recent opening of new social housing community on Laurel Avenue, Lismore

My plans are actually to move to Fiji. My ex-wife’s sister married a Fijian guy that she had met on a holiday. He lived with us in Canberra. We got connected to his family in the village in Fiji. His brother worked in logging and I had this idea that we could set up a mobile sawmilling business there, take the logs that he was selling and mill them ourselves and provide more income for the village and the family.

Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. I went back in 2017 to try set that up. My family here were against that. Ironically, I went to set that up as abundance in one part of my life but while I was there I met my current partner and found abundance in another part of my life. We’ve been together for over four years. We’ve been apart for two years now. I’m flying to Fiji for Christmas. It will be 23 months since we’ve seen each other.

I’m thankful for the technology that we can see each other when we talk online. I can only imagine what it would have been like when couples were apart and the only communication you had was a letter every month. We’re currently putting a verandah on the house, we’ve engaged her family to help. I get to see pictures of that every day and I get to talk to her every day so modern communication has made it easier to maintain a long-distance relationship.

I believe in the law of attraction. I believe that, to a certain extent, you manifest what you think about. I went to Fiji looking for abundance in a business sense. I did not go there looking for love. The universe gave me the abundance that I was really looking for. I thought it was money that I was looking for and it wasn’t. What I needed was the culture and the love. She was the activities supervisor at the resort that I was staying at. They had a kava ceremony on a Friday night and afterwards, we were talking and I said I’m leaving on Sunday but I’ll be back in September, would you like to have dinner with me then? And she said that would be nice.

I went off to bed and dreamt about this woman, I’d never done that before. The next day I did something else I’d never done before - I’d been out of the market for 40 odd years - and wrote her a note and left it at reception. I went off into the bush to look at the site where we were going to put the sawmill. Came back for afternoon tea and she came over and I said, did you get the note? She said oh yes I have it in my pocket.

That night we had a chat. I said I feel, straight away, a connection to you. When I went back in September, it was her birthday and we spent some time together. She took me to meet her family. She was living in her cousin’s house in a small room. She had a half-built house. I decided that if the relationship goes somewhere, I would commit to finishing the house for her so she had somewhere safe to live. She’d never been out of Fiji, she came here in December 2017. We went to all the theme parks on the Gold Coast, we went to Sydney and I introduced her to my Mum and my brothers and my sister.

We built the house. It’s a typical Fijian house. It’s cyclone proof. The typical house in the village has two 20 watt fluorescent light fittings and one double power point. I said, that’s not happening in my house. So, we’ve got four power circuits, 16 double power points inside and outside. We’ve got a pressure pump on our water tank, there’s only two or three houses in the village that have that. We’re the only house with a proper instantaneous gas hot water system.

We’re on the reef so I’m taking my kayaks. We can fish octopus and shellfish in the different seasons. Kalessi lost her job during COVID because the resort closed down so she and the family went up into the bush, carved out a farm in the jungle grass and she now has a couple of thousand cassava plants. There are people in the village with no income, it really is subsistence living. There’s no jobkeeper or jobseeker in Fiji.

I’ve embraced the Fijian culture. I’ve been very mindful of not imposing wealthy, European attitude. While we were building our house in the village, I did the electrics for the sisters, aunties and mothers’ houses. I wired up the church extension and got the fans working. I fixed the power up in the infirmary. I’ve got a set of skills that I can use and try to become part of the community. I will one day learn Fijian. The only thing that I asked for is a table and chairs because I can’t sit on the floor like they do. My old legs don’t allow me to sit on the floor for any length of time.

I join in the kava ceremony. It relaxes you. You know you’ve got a good mix of kava if, on the first bowl, your lips and your tongue go numb. I limit the amount I drink because if you drink too much you just don’t function the next day.

One of the things I love about Fiji is the no hurry no worry. You work in the morning, if you feel like a nanna nap in the afternoon, nobody complains. Kalessi will have lunch with the family then they all lie on the floor and tell stories and one by one drop off and wake up a couple of hours later. I think I fit in. And because of the job that I do here, I make sure I switch off when I go there.

I want to try to look for opportunities in Fiji, to take the skills that I’ve learnt in my 51 years of working, and try transfer that by mentoring people, particularly around what I’ve learned around housing. They don’t have a very effective public housing system. I’d like to offer my services free. It’s not about making money. I’ve got a pretty good life coming. I’m pretty happy with where I am. That’s what I’ve found in life. I’ve planned to move forward and succeed but not really worried about where it was going to lead me. I’ve always felt, even when I was unemployed for nine months which was the worst time financially and professionally in my life, that things are going to work out ok.

For me to have grown up in public housing and now managing a community housing organization, I can take that experience of feeling like a second class citizen. That’s what a lot of public housing tenants feel like. They are marginalized. I always try to set an aspiration for our business – the one place I’d like for our tenants not to feel like second-class citizens is when they walk through our doors.