This morning is delightfully sunny. “Mum” bought us a medium-sized Westinghouse refrigerator at a cost to her of four hundred and twenty-five dollars.
Tiki’s parents are trying to ease our initial costs, associated with the purchase of a home, as much as they possibly can. It had been our desire to use the money, that we had assiduously saved, to travel around the world before settling down. Her father had always regarded our decision to firstly travel and then think about investing in a home of our own, to be an imprudent one.
Nevertheless, our more immediate future had been determined not by us nor Tiki’s father, but by the present government of Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, when, after three years of disastrous government under Labor’s Gough Whitlam, it chose to devalue the Australian dollar by seventeen and a half per cent. Thereby, effectively devaluing our savings by this same amount, were we to have followed our dream and travelled overseas.