[Tim]

THE SECRET OF SUCCESS IN AUSTRALIA

John Sintome is 48. He has been 21 years in Australia. And has worked as a laborer, steel-furnace loader, bread deliveryman, rigger, sheetmetal worker and pie-maker.

He ran a catamaran hire business (without ever sailing before); worked as a gold assayer (a mate from the golf club gave him the job), carpenter (yet had never seriously hammered a nail), owned a cafe (had no idea how a cappuccino was created). And now hangs plasterboard for a living in the tropics where he and his family live in a home across from the beach worth $180,000. [He bought the land after rescuing a real estate salesman who had overturned one of his catamarans].

Lucky? "Nah," says the rangy, Birmingham-born John.

"The secret of getting on in Australia is listen to people. And tell them what they want to hear. It's a bit like sheilas, really," (he has been an Aussie for a long time). "Tell 'em what they want to hear and you're in.

"Brits who come over here and think they know everything, and say they know everything, get up the Aussies' nose."

The Sintomes' story begins on the production-line at Cadbury's in Birmingham with 16-year-old John eagerly running wrappers to the girls on the machines. "Twelve thousand people worked there. My first job in Australia was in Whyalla, and there were only 8,000 people in the whole town!"

His baker dad and his mother had sailed off as migrants, so newly-married, John and Jeanette paid their 10 pounds and headed for the sun.

"I'd been skilled at nothing more than running around in a factory making sixpenny chocolate bars. So in 1969 I went to BHP and got a job as a laborer, loading scrap metal into furnaces and pouring moulten steel with big ladles. I said it was the same as in the chocolate factory, only bigger ladles."

The message he received from the other Brits, Yugoslavs, Germans and Italians: "Keep your head down, apply yourself to the job and you'll get on."

And fib a little...

He stuck it out in the steel making plant for three years, with Jeanette working as a nurse. Then homesickness set in. "I missed soccer more than anything. So we paid out all we had for fares and we went back."

"It was a terrible mistake. We were picked up at Heathrow, and even as we drove through the narrow streets of Oxford, with all those houses leaning against each other I knew we'd made the wrong decision. I went into a pub at home in Henley in Arden and there was a fella sat on the same seat as when I'd last left. He said: 'Haven't seen you for a while. Been on holidays?'

"So we worked our butts off saving, living in a little council house in Redditch. I had a job as a works policeman with British Leyland, stuck in this little box in the middle of winter, a freezing bum and six inches of snow on my cap." Son Jason had been born in Whyalla and now another son, Robert, arrived.

Getting back to the sunshine took 18 months of scraping money together. They kept it from Jeanette's parents that they were going back, right until the last minute. "We'd already done it to them once. Now we were doing it again."

Back to square one. With $A25 and two suitcases as they stepped off the boat.

And the fibbing began again...

But no worries. At Whyalla, where they gave him his old job back, John went to night school to learn rigging. "So I was able to bull---- my way into a job as a leading hand, moving heavy machinery. But we still hadn't seen Australia, and they were looking for people to go to Alice Springs to help put up a radar centre. They wanted an experienced rigger...

"We stayed a while at The Alice, then headed for Darwin to do sheet-metal work at a power station. Never done it before in my life. Somebody showed me and I was appointed a second-class sheet-metal worker. They ease you into jobs here. You see how they do it. Copy them. Keep your head down and you're OK."

The bright lights of Sydney beckoned. "I got a good job as a pastrycook, said I knew a fair bit about it. Closest I'd ever been to dough was delivering bread as a sideline in Whyalla. They said: 'Just throw in the flour here, pull that lever there, practise it a few times and you're right.' And I was."

Itchy feet again took the Sintomes and their sons to tropical Cairns. "I saw those islands just south of Cairns, and the blue mountains and the palm trees and said to Jeanette: 'This is it. This is where they can bury me.'"

John rigged once more. Until they went to the beach one day and saw a sunbronzed Australian operating a catamaran-hire business. "I said: 'This would be great!' Bought the business and six catamarans for $6,000 from the guy and was set up. Only thing was I'd never sailed anything in my life before. Weekends were magic for business."

During the week he helped weld metal sheets into Navy patrol-boats, and when that ran out got a job as a carpenter building a huge new resort. "They said could I hang a door and of course I said yes and I hung most of the doors in the hotel."

That job ran out and a mate he played golf with said would he like to assay gold in an outback gold mine? Sure. Why not?

"We had a bit of money saved after selling the catamarans and my sister worked in a beachside cafe which was for sale. The lady wanted $A25,000 and I said what about $5,000 and she took it. So it was cappuccinos - we made the best in Cairns with New Guinea coffee - until the lease ran out.

"I'm back gyprocking. Our house is a stone's-throw from the beach. Jason works in television, Robert's a lifeguard making sure topless sunbathers don't get into trouble."

A great life?

Well... as the Aussies say, somebody's got to do it!