By Greg
NOTE: This post does contain some reference to an alleged sexual assault.
OK, so I confess. I don’t have absolutely all the details of this, but I know a fair bit. I always imagined that in due course, in our many long rambling conversations that more details would emerge.
Some did, some didn’t. And as a result I have been working through a bit of a mystery.
If you have read either the Kitchen Tapes series or The 1973 Diary series you will know that after Trenna left school she went to business college, and that a short while later she got a job at Girlock in East Perth.
Work was just a 15 minute walk (10 minutes if it was really cold) from where she lived at Girls’ Friendly Society (GFS).
A big gripe she initially had was that she didn’t get to use many of the skills she had learnt at business college, especially shorthand which she loved and wanted to develop.
Trenna started there in April 1973 and she was given a duties like typing, filing and coffee making. She tells me that it wasn’t too long before they realised she was capable of a lot more.
Although, she tells me, they were a bit reluctant to pay her more.
Eventually she was given the title of Accounts Payable Clerk and all proceeded well for a while. Then she started to notice things that just didn’t seem right. She asked the in-house accountant about these and he either shrugged her off or gave explanations that just didn’t seem to ring true.
There was embezzlement happening at the firm, though Trenna had never heard that term and she told me that at that time her innocence and naivety meant she just couldn’t comprehend that someone would do something like that.
Trenna says this went on for months and it slowly dawned on her that yes, that sort of thing does happen. Not all adults are pillars of society.
A Concurrent Event
Trenna had told me a few times over the years that one of the men in the office was, as she put it “a sleaze bag”.
I’m going to just pause here to say that in the 1973 Diary she mentions a man from work who gives her a lift home. That gentleman is definitely NOT who I am referring to here.
She didn’t really elaborate on the sleaze, but when in more recent years cases of what the media call “historical sexual abuse” were reported Trenna was quite interested in them.
Trenna mentioned a few times about how it was important to take into account social mores of the day and the entrenched inequality of women in the workforce when she started work in the 1970s.
She wasn’t diminishing the seriousness of anyone’s claims, or making excuses for perpetrators. I think what she was trying to do was internally process things.
After Trenna passed away and I started doing this website I was reading through one of her iPad documents that summarised parts of her history.
And there, in a document entitled “1970s” it was….
"Sent for job interview, got it, basically opened envelopes and made coffees and lost all my skills for a pay of $20.41, I paid exactly $1 tax! 3/4/73 - 6/3/75 employed eventually as Accounts Clerk GIRLOCK SALES PTY LTD Office moved from Moore St East Perth to fancy new building and warehouse in Newcastle St North Perth. Full eclipse, sexually assaulted, underaged drinking, embezzlement discovered by me but not understood..."
“Sexually assaulted”!
There is another document too where she does name the alleged perpetrator (someone at Girlock) but doesn’t give any more details.
This was a bit of a kick in the guts to me (obviously I’m not diminishing what it was to Trenna). She had never talked to me in terms of sexual assault and we talked about everything. In this last 18 months of rummaging through Trenna’s life I have found nothing that has surprised me – plenty of things that have enchanted me, made me love her more (if that is even possible), or made me laugh or cry, but nothing other than this that have shocked me.
I have been thinking about this for several months now. Did Trenna think she couldn’t talk to me about sexual assault? No. I’m absolutely sure she would have been able to.
What I’m assuming happened is that Trenna was sexually assaulted in some way. I think as a 15 or 16 year old in 1973, 1974 or early 1975 she thought that behaviour was just the sort of thing that happened in the workplace, and women had to put up with it.
That is appalling I know. And again I’m not trying to diminish in any way the seriousness of this or to give any excuses to the sleaze bag who did it.
I’m just acknowledging that society has progressed a long, long way since the 1970s – thank God!
Matters Coming to a Head
So Trenna was experiencing an untenable situation with a work colleague. She also wasn’t being taken seriously about the embezzlement.
It was also the case that the organisation was expanding rapidly, but the management appear to have struggled with the growth. Trenna’s job application letter to the Hospital Benefit Fund (HBF) (below) gives some more details.
The sleaze bag, the huge workload for crumby pay, and finally not being believed about the embezzlement all contributed to Trenna eventually telling them she wouldn’t be staying.
She didn’t have a job to go to but she was pretty sure that she would be able to live on the dole. And that is exactly what she did.