Crookwell’s Charli Croker doing what she loves best – working outside, with heavy machinery. Photo: Upper Lachlan Shire Council.
There was an inspiring tale this week about a young woman from Crookwell who won an award for her “non-traditional” apprenticeship. She helps make dirt roads into tar roads and was, understandably, mighty proud of her achievements.
She can drive all manner of large trucks, can’t bear to be cooped up in an office and wore a bright pink ensemble to the award ceremony – and not just because she liked the colour.
She reckoned she was lucky to get paid for doing work she loved and not having to pretend to be someone she wasn’t. But, she admitted, working on a local council construction gang, in a country town, was still “a thing” when you’re a woman.
These days, we shouldn’t be surprised about women being front-end-loader drivers, world leaders or working jobs where fluro is the uniform.
For the first two, absolutely. But when it comes to fluro. No. Not. Ever. Wearing fluro just shows that fashion is completely lost on you. Also, when it comes to visibility, it doesn’t get much lower.
(Also, here’s a handy hint. Never Google “fluro shirt”. Someone who shall not ever be named did, only to be informed that there was way too much information, including a site devoted to “what colours go best with a yellow fluro shirt”. Seriously? (The right answer is: none. Google’s answer: brown or dark blue “these colours will bring out the beauty of the yellow”. I can think of something else they’re likely to bring up, sorry, out.)
Being a woman and doing a job men historically did shouldn’t be a thing, this young woman reckoned. She got stroppy when blokes on the gang told her not to lift the heavy stuff – mainly because she was not only capable of lifting said heavy stuff, but the blokes as well. She just wanted to get on with it. Do what she had been trained to do, safely and properly. Her sex, or anyone else’s, didn’t come into it.
Hearing her story makes you wonder how long it’s going to take for words like “non-traditional” to get bulldozed from our vocab.
Women, like men, have brains, eyes, arms, feet and can, if they must, read instructions in a manual about how to do stuff they’ve not done before. OK, maybe not the bit about reading the manual, we all can find something better to do than read a manual. Like pulling teeth.
But seriously, young women have enough to deal with these days, what with young men, ever-multiplying Kardashians, scalping their last hair extensions to pay for Taylor Swift tickets, parents, and more young men.
So give ’em a break. If playing with heavy machinery is your thing, go for it. But for high visibility, lose the fluro. These women might be non-traditional, but they’re not yellow.
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