Andy Blunden
Andy Blunden on what he’s been doing since 1962
I went on to study Civil Engineering, but I think everyone else at the Engineering School knew long before I did that I was not and never would be an engineer. The Holt government concentrated my mind by introducing conscription and sending kids off to war in Vietnam. It was a mystery to me how people could watch the newsreel footage of Vietnamese people being herded at gunpoint into stockades, with a voice-over telling us that the soldiers were protecting them from their own army – and believe it!
I burnt my draft card, and by good luck I already had a passport and left the country for Europe a few days before the 1966 election. I spent the next 20 years mostly in Britain, where I completed a PhD in Engineering, worked as a part-time maths teacher and then as an electronics technician, had several cohabitations, but no marriages or pregnancies eventuated. I was involved in the insane and fruitless activity of left-wing politics from 1974 till I returned in 1986, before returning home for rehabilitation.
In 1989, I met my current partner, Vonney, while playing pool at the Punters in Brunswick Street. Vonney had a retro clothing shop in Brunswick Street, and played a mean game of pool. I worked at Melbourne University, in the Building and Grounds section, and ended up doing an interesting job managing the teaching spaces and associated equipment.
I retired in 2002, and since then have devoted my energies to reading and writing, broadly in what could be called ‘social philosophy’. Having exhausted myself trying to fight capitalism by pounding the pavements, I now fight capitalism in the philosophical domain, pounding my keyboard.
In 2006, Vonney had a stroke, and is partially disabled, and needs constant care. So we are both pretty much confined indoors these days. After a life-time of chasing after causes and letting my personal life go to hell, I am now a househusband and carer.
One thing I’ve learnt: it takes a lifetime to get to know yourself and figure out why you were put on Earth. Eventually, I figured it out, and I’m very happy with the life of the mind I have ended up in. I have published three books and a fourth is on the way. Why on Earth I ever thought I wanted to be an engineer amazes me. I have few memories of friends among the Engineering students I studied with, but if the 25th BHS reunion is anything to go by, the people I went to school with are still people I would want to know. I think one’s school friends are sort of archetypes of personalities and you take them with you wherever you go afterwards in your life.
There is more on my website: http://home.mira.net/~andy
I went on to study Civil Engineering, but I think everyone else at the Engineering School knew long before I did that I was not and never would be an engineer. The Holt government concentrated my mind by introducing conscription and sending kids off to war in Vietnam. It was a mystery to me how people could watch the newsreel footage of Vietnamese people being herded at gunpoint into stockades, with a voice-over telling us that the soldiers were protecting them from their own army – and believe it!
I burnt my draft card, and by good luck I already had a passport and left the country for Europe a few days before the 1966 election. I spent the next 20 years mostly in Britain, where I completed a PhD in Engineering, worked as a part-time maths teacher and then as an electronics technician, had several cohabitations, but no marriages or pregnancies eventuated. I was involved in the insane and fruitless activity of left-wing politics from 1974 till I returned in 1986, before returning home for rehabilitation.
In 1989, I met my current partner, Vonney, while playing pool at the Punters in Brunswick Street. Vonney had a retro clothing shop in Brunswick Street, and played a mean game of pool. I worked at Melbourne University, in the Building and Grounds section, and ended up doing an interesting job managing the teaching spaces and associated equipment.
I retired in 2002, and since then have devoted my energies to reading and writing, broadly in what could be called ‘social philosophy’. Having exhausted myself trying to fight capitalism by pounding the pavements, I now fight capitalism in the philosophical domain, pounding my keyboard.
In 2006, Vonney had a stroke, and is partially disabled, and needs constant care. So we are both pretty much confined indoors these days. After a life-time of chasing after causes and letting my personal life go to hell, I am now a househusband and carer.
One thing I’ve learnt: it takes a lifetime to get to know yourself and figure out why you were put on Earth. Eventually, I figured it out, and I’m very happy with the life of the mind I have ended up in. I have published three books and a fourth is on the way. Why on Earth I ever thought I wanted to be an engineer amazes me. I have few memories of friends among the Engineering students I studied with, but if the 25th BHS reunion is anything to go by, the people I went to school with are still people I would want to know. I think one’s school friends are sort of archetypes of personalities and you take them with you wherever you go afterwards in your life.
There is more on my website: http://home.mira.net/~andy
