Clive Jacobsen

I am the second eldest of 7 children of parents who met and married in the war years, after my dad had completed his first tour of duty in New Guinea as wireless/airgunner in the RAAF. And it was in 1954 that our family were impacted by involvement with a small, local Protestant church in Bankstown, NSW. Our parents were baptised, and eventually involved in the various ministries in that church, with us children being taught about the things of God. Then in 1959, during our church's participation in the Billy Graham Crusade at the Sydney Showground, I had my first realisation of a commitment to Jesus Christ. And I did walk forward with thousands of others to express that commitment. However, during my mid-teens I rebelled against parents and church, so at age 17 I no longer attended church. By this time I also had become a smoker and beer-drinker. So to relieve myself of my home situation, I left to hitch-hike to Melbourne in 1965 at the age of 18, where I worked as a clerk in a city firm for 3 months. Then hitching back to Sydney, I signed on as a roustabout in Sid Flaherty's travelling carnival. That night we drove down in convoy to Canberra, where we set up in O'Connor and in Civic for some weeks. Next stop with the carnival was in a park in the centre of Cooma---for a month. By this time another young guy Fred had joined up, and we soon decided to hitch-hike to his parents place in Warilla---and there we got a job at the Cringilla steel works near Port Kembla. Soon Fred had bought an old bomb Standard 10 car, and we agreed to go up to Brisbane, which we had not been to before. But running out of money on the way up, we diverted to Dorrigo to earn some money potato picking. With us sleeping in the car on the farmers property, we earned $7 for our 3 days work. On our way out to the coast our car packed it in-we then hitched a ride to Brisbane. Of course by this time we were broke, and despite one days work washing cars at the Kangaroo Pt. car wash, we found it difficult to gain employment seeing as we were sleeping rough. In fact, we were sleeping in the grassy backyard of an abandoned churchyard at the top of Creek St. And we were reduced to stealing milk and bread.....continuing.....