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The house I was living in, typical of most older suburban houses in Australia, had no screens. Air conditioning was not common in residences, so the neighbors merely lifted their windows and let the winged creatures fly in and out. There were no mosquitoes, but we did have a daily battle with flying cockroaches. I went to bed alone but often awakened to find my pillow shared by several two-inch, black, hard-shelled insects. I felt the screen would be a shield against their encroachment.
    The group agreed screens were a good item to launch the business. I knew a specific couple in the United States to contact for help. He was a design engineer at a large corporation, and she was an artist. If I could explain what I needed in a letter, I knew they could create a blueprint. It arrived two weeks later. My dear elderly Aunt Nola back in Iowa offered to lend financial support to buy the initial supplies and get us rolling. We required a place to work. Garages are rare, but carports are plentiful, so we acquired one and worked in the open air.
    Each young Aborigine seemed to slip naturally into their most talented position. We had a bookkeeper, someone to shop for supplies, another who took pride in perfect calculations of our running inventory. We had specialists on each segment of production, even several natural-born sales representatives. I stood back and observed the company structure forming. It was apparent that, without my input on how to do it, they mutually agreed that the person who liked to do the cleaning up, the janitoral duties, was as valuable to the overall success of the project as the people who made the final sale. Our approach was to offer the screens free for a few days on a trial basis. When we returned, if the screens had been satisfactory, the party paid us. We usually got an order for the rest of the windows on the property. I also taught them the good old American concept of asking for referrals.
    Time slipped by. My days were spent working, writing training material, traveling, teaching, and lecturing. Most evenings were spent enjoying the company of the young black people. The original group remained intact. Their bank account grew steadily, and we established trust funds for each one.
    On a weekend date with Geoff, I explained our project and my desire to help the young people become financially independent. Maybe they wouldn’t be hired to work for companies, but they couldn’t be stopped from buying one if they accumulated enough wealth. I suppose I was boasting a little about my input into their budding sense of self-worth. Geoff said, “Goodonyou, Yank.” But the next time we met he brought along some history books. Sitting on his patio overlooking the world’s most beautiful harbor, I spent one Saturday afternoon reading.
    History quoted Rev. George King in the Australian Sunday Times, on December 16, 1923, as saying, “The Aborigines of Australia constitute, no doubt, a low type in the scale of humanity. They possess no reliable traditional history of themselves, their doings, or origin; nor, if swept from the earth at the present time, would they leave behind them a single work of art as a memorial of their existence as a people; but they appear to have roamed over the vast plains of Australia at a very early period of the world’s history.”
    There was another more current quote from John Burless regarding the attitude of white Australia: “I’ll give you something, but you haven’t anything that I would want.”
    Excerpts from ethnology and anthropology of the Fourteenth Congress of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science said:
    The sense of smell is undeveloped.
    Memory is only slightly developed.
    Children are without any great willpower.
    They are inclined to be untruthful and cowardly.
    They do not suffer pain as acutely as do the higher races.
    Next came the history books that say an Australian Aboriginal boy